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As a new post, "interaction designer" mainly exists in the Internet industry in recent years, helping enterprises to solve product experience problems. During 211-217 in Baidu Index, the search volume of the word "interaction design" increased year by year, and "interaction designers" gradually appeared in various Internet companies. Although practitioners are generally optimistic about the value of this post, neither interactive practitioners nor other Internet practitioners can accurately define the category and value of the post. On the one hand, Internet companies recruit interactive designers and set up experience departments in the hope of improving product experience. On the other hand, there are doubts about the value output of interaction designers or design departments. When experience conflicts with benefits and costs, experience is often abandoned first.
what is it like from the perspective of interactive practitioners? With the prevalence of user experience, more and more recent graduates and practitioners in other positions hold high the concept of defending the road for users and turn to interactive design posts. As a result, a large number of "apprentices" were recruited in a short period of time, while "masters" were insufficient. In addition, the experience is subjective, and some enterprise PM and UI designers are involved in interaction design, which makes the new interaction designers feel overwhelmed and at a loss. What is hidden under the ideal plump body is the reality of calcium deficiency-some new designers have become PM assistants and prototype children.
amid the ambiguous entanglement of high industry expectations, poor enterprise design environment and unclear post cognition, many interaction designers have had problems such as unclear positioning, lost output value, no way to develop in the future and no way to improve their growth. In order to solve these problems, our professional group has done some thinking and discussion on its own, and finally hopes to help interaction designers inside and outside the team find the answers to the above questions by answering the philosophical three questions. However, it should be noted that the following contents are based on our current business and post cognition, which is bound to have certain limitations, but we still hope to provide correct cognitive clues for interaction designers who are concerned about their own development through our own thinking.
there are many theories about the origin of interaction designers. Mostly from a specific person, event, or the release of a product. Johannes Gensfleisch's printing, Alan Mathison Turing's Giant Machine, Apple's first graphical interface computer, Apple LISA[1], etc., have all become the beginning of interactive design of tags. But when it comes to "where do I come from", I don't want to know a historical event. It has no guiding role. The logic behind this problem is to find its historical background through its origin, and then explore the following three questions:
Therefore, in line with this idea, we have found a possibility that interaction designers come from "changes in the relationship between supply and demand". This view comes from Barry Katz's analysis of the reasons for the rise of design thinking in Silicon Valley when he shared "design thinking" in Qingteng University in August 217. I think it provides a way to answer this question.
the "change of supply and demand" mentioned here comes from three aspects: the transfer of competitiveness, the popularization of scientific and technological products and the trend of product platformization.
with the progress of science and technology, except for some high-tech technologies, most companies' products have no technical barriers-technology is no longer competitive. The functions provided by each family are similar. After meeting the pain points of demand, users pursue emotional experience. Experience becomes the new competitiveness. The improvement of product experience will inevitably come from user-centered design.
mobile devices, apps, OFO, VR/AR, artificial intelligence ... more and more scientific and technological products have entered the lives of ordinary people. Scientific and technological products are no longer something that can only be seen by individual institutions, companies and laboratories. With the technological breakthrough and the development of civilian trends, scientific and technological products have become a part of our daily necessities. People have a low threshold for the usability of daily necessities, and relatively, they have higher expectations for the experience of scientific and technological products. Experience, once again, needs design to achieve.
In a narrow sense, more and more companies and enterprises are not only exporting a single product, but also have obvious multi-product structure and platform trend, such as brands such as Apple and Xiaomi. Broadly speaking, whether it is iOS or Android, the design specifications of each system tend to be unified, ensuring that their own software maintains the same experience on different systems; Under the same system, the product experience is guaranteed to be above the horizontal line. This requires a unified design language to ensure.
Based on the market demand, experience-oriented and user-centered interactive design positions are gradually favored by practitioners. However, due to the lack of understanding of the post and the strong subjectivity of the experience, the natural sense of existence and achievement of this post are weak, and the position value of the post is vague-I can't say it clearly if I think about it. On the one hand, the concept of "only knowing" often means unclear understanding. On the other hand, hasty description is easy to create a magic word and become a thousand people. Only by accurate description and definition can we have a clear and unified cognition. We need a clear concept to find the answer to the above questions, and unify the post cognition within the current business scope.
interaction designers pay attention to the experience, and they are the spokesmen of users in the team. In many projects, this is precisely the cause of contradictions and conflicts. "Affectionate user spokesmen" are often torn with PM, development, operation and boss to achieve better user experience. On the one hand, this embarrassing situation makes it difficult for designers to advance their ideas and become a stumbling block to the progress of the project. On the other hand, designers often lament that "xxx doesn't understand users at all". What caused this problem? It is the designer's understanding of business. Jon Kolko discussed interaction designers and their activities in the business environment in his book Meditations on Interaction Design:
When it comes to business, it is inevitably full of copper smell. Like visual designers who have an artist's dream, interactive designers who pay attention to user experience seem to naturally reject business. However, most designers are born with business labels.
first of all, most designers work in enterprises, and enterprises are necessarily profit-seeking. Therefore, a designer works in a profit-seeking environment-the output of his work must be reflected in the profit (commercial value), which cannot be ignored (except designers in non-profit organizations);
Secondly, if people in the workplace in enterprises want to get happiness, they often need to unify their personal vision with corporate vision. A clear understanding of business is helpful for designers to find positioning and value evaluation criteria in the current business environment.
finally, the value of the design scheme should be recognized not only from the perspective of experience, but also from the commercial level-what is the "profit" brought by the scheme while satisfying the user experience.
At present, the whole industry, from bosses to front-line practitioners, is discussing user experience. One way of thinking is to give priority to what kind of functional experience and emotional experience the product can bring to users, and then see which part has commercial value. It can be seen that designers need to change their previous way of thinking and create an "experience-business" thinking mode. However, one thing is more important. Before thinking about the value of the scheme, the designer must have another crucial cognition and ability-the "first-line cognition" of perfect cooperation and quick response.
There is a famous saying in the university where I studied: the students who graduated from this university should be "high-minded and low-minded"-they can take a long-term view and do things in a down-to-earth manner. Practical work, quick response, and high-speed and high-quality teamwork are the most basic abilities that a designer (not only an interaction designer) needs. A well-known Internet company once had an interaction designer who paid great attention to business value and experiential thinking. When receiving the demand, he had to talk to the demander first to discuss the demand value, which led to the delay of the project many times, that is, he failed to fulfill his job responsibilities and the team satisfaction was poor. There is nothing wrong with thinking too much, but "thinking too much" is based on meeting business requirements quickly.
Design itself is not lofty, and we can't position ourselves as the defender of users and the fighter of product experience. First of all, we should have the consciousness of talking less and doing more, and doing the hardest and most tiring work at any time, which has nothing to do with working years and qualifications. It is the most basic professional accomplishment of a designer.
what interaction design? Jon Kolko said in Meditations on Interaction Design that "it refers to a series of dialogues created between people and products, services and systems". In order to guide the work, I think the interaction design is "the design guided by behavior and emotion". Behavior and emotion are two sides, and emotion will affect behavior, which in turn will affect emotion (Richard Wiseman). Therefore, guiding behavior will eventually lead to emotional changes, the former affects functional experience and the latter affects emotional experience. It is the professional pursuit of interaction designers to satisfy and create excellent user experience through interaction design methods.
To sum up, in the current business environment, we define interaction designers as follows:
The world is full of variables all the time. The Internet in China has developed for more than 2 years. With rapid changes and adaptation, the industry is constantly undergoing metabolism. Various posts under the Internet are also being subdivided. As this change continues, designer posts will inevitably produce more variables, which may include more expectations of the industry and transformation, and may also include changes that have to be made due to AI's dimensionality reduction attack.
artificial intelligence is very popular in 217, no matter what it will be like in the future, but it has to be said that its current energy has begun to have an impact on all walks of life. Part of the design work is being replaced by artificial intelligence, which is mainly reflected in "manual work" and businesses with higher functional requirements. Although optimistic, artificial intelligence is still impossible to replace the creative and emotional part of design, but this trend still sounds an alarm to us.
stepping out of the industry and looking at the workplace as a whole, the professionalization requirements have also changed in recent years. The earliest requirement of the industry for people in the workplace was to be "I-shaped professionals", that is, professional and profound; Later, the "T-shaped professional" appeared. On the basis of profound professionalism, it is necessary to have extensive knowledge and relevant knowledge. Today, there is a new requirement of "plus-shaped professionals". On the basis of T-shaped requirements, it is necessary to have more research and ability than others in a certain aspect.
based on the above points, on the basis of the professional ability, business scope and professional comprehensive requirements of interaction designers, and referring to the research of the industry optimization designer team, we conceive three transformation directions of interaction designers to cope with the changing future and higher professional requirements.
If an interaction designer is an interaction designer in a certain industry, then an interaction design expert is an interaction designer in many industries. The two basic abilities that interaction designers need are "analysis ability" and "design ability". The further amplification and deepening of these two abilities, the understanding of more industries and the skillful design thinking initially constitute the ability model of interaction design experts.
User experience designer is basically transformed from a senior interaction designer, and its capability model is interaction design capability (advanced interaction designer level)+part research capability+part UI design capability. This is a full-process designer who outputs all the contents related to user experience from a professional perspective. Is in the direction of the user experience dimension upward and backwards compatibility at the same time.
Like the user experience designer, the product designer is also transformed from a senior interaction designer, and its capability model is interaction design capability (advanced interaction designer level)+some product technologies+some project management technologies. It is a way of design thinking to promote the project. Product designers are compatible in the dimensions of project development and management.
It should be noted that "what you have is more important than what you become". The above three transformation directions are only for designers who are still confused, and they cannot be regarded as career pursuits. In order to cultivate comprehensive professional ability to apply future changes and design more empowerment projects, we summarized the "5F model" of interaction designer empowerment projects according to the actual workflow.
rapid demand is the first step. Designers are required to participate in the discussion and process of formulating requirements upstream. Discuss the objectives and background of the demand with the demander, and observe their understanding and thinking about the business. By intervening in business discussion in advance, we can get a more comprehensive understanding of business content and get business requirements in advance, so as to get more time for analysis and design. The success of this stage depends on the enthusiasm of designers and whether they can gain the trust of the upstream demand. The latter depends on whether the designer really cares about the project progress and product situation, and provides as much advice and support as possible.
using the related technology of requirement analysis and UDC as the visual solution, the requirements are disassembled and reconstructed, and the final requirements are defined and the preliminary scheme is designed. At this stage, research techniques and data analysis methods may also be used to obtain enough information related to users. Because only a short demand is produced in the "rapid demand" stage, it is necessary to further analyze the possibility of demand from the user's perspective at this stage. The specific method of this stage will be explained in detail in another article.
under the result of 2, the interactive design technology is used to design the scheme. This process requires a phased output plan and confirmation with the demander. While obtaining more information synchronously, it can also make the demander aware of the situation and progress of the scheme. In addition to rapid prototyping technology, the core is to master the knowledge of interaction design including information architecture, psychology, industrial design and engineering. At the same time, we should have a certain understanding of the business and be able to make a plan that meets the business requirements and user experience requirements.
at this stage, it is mainly to follow up the project development, quickly collect feedback from development, testing and other positions, quickly adjust the interaction scheme, and inform the development. Interaction designers should keep up with the progress of the project and test the products with testers to ensure the implementation of the interaction scheme. Here, interaction designers need to master certain project management knowledge and understand certain agile development processes and contents. Knowing how to cooperate will not affect and benefit the project.
after the project is launched, some methods are needed to verify the effectiveness of the interaction scheme and whether the design goal has been achieved. At this stage, we draw a conclusion by analyzing the user behavior data, and the conclusion is that the scheme is effective if it is consistent with the data verification indicators set in the previous scheme design. Otherwise, we need to further analyze the reasons and choose to optimize in [1] in the present or next iteration. At this stage, interaction designers are required to have a basic data analysis framework and master certain data analysis techniques.
that's what we think about interaction design and its practitioners at present. For a new designer, the most important thing is to lay a good foundation and cultivate the most basic professional quality-a fast and efficient collaborative team to complete the design. When you can do it