2. Understand customer intentions
3. Understand the information of similar products
be pregnant
sketch
6. Practical operation
Deepen the details
8. Customer feedback
9. improvement
Here are some common problems in work. We often hear many complaints from designers after their works are filmed or reworked, such as the leader's disapproval of the style, color and details of the works, or the leader's opinions change too quickly. One idea a day makes designers puzzled. There are many reasons why works are rejected, but the result is always the same. Then we might as well review the common design processes now, find out the root causes of the problems and try to avoid them.
Briefly talk about a design process of my current company:
1. The product manager or director will first draw up a text planning scheme for the products to be designed, and then according to this scheme, our product manager will draw up a rough drawing board, which will indicate which sections are on the page and what will be put in those areas.
2. According to this draft text and drawing board, discuss with designers and technical support whether the function can be realized and in what way. (Mainly some functional requirements between design and technology. )
3. The person in charge of the product puts forward visual requirements for the designer (usually a simple description, such as fashion and gorgeous), and the designer starts to design and complete the first draft according to all the above information.
4. On the basis of the first draft, the product director and the leadership level put forward feedback on the revision, and integrated all opinions to revise and complete the first draft.
5. Slice the finalized design draft into HTML draft, and submit it to technical support, over.
I believe you can find many problems after reading this process. Let's break it down one by one.
Step 1: The person in charge of the product makes a written plan and a drawing board.
There are two opinions. Should the drawing board be produced by the product manager or the designer?
Before answering this question, let's take a look at what the so-called "drawing board" is. As I said just now, the "sketchpad" is actually a "drawing" version of the planning scheme, and it is also a wireframe model and prototype that we often say. It intuitively shows the big frame and layout of the page by drawing the situation, so that designers can have a very intuitive feeling about the page to be designed, know how many sections and columns there are on the page, and where to put those contents.
This involves a question, whether the frame and layout of the page should be decided by the product or by the design. Many people say that the frame and layout should be the designer's business, which is a misunderstanding of the "drawing board". In fact, an excellent drawing board is equivalent to a "first draft" of a page. What designers need to do is to beautify it, make the typesetting more reasonable and humanized, and will not limit the space for designers to play. On the contrary, when designers understand the product planning, the efficiency will be higher. At least in my actual work now, I advocate the practice of product drawing board.
But the main problem is not here, and when the product owner submits the sketchpad and planning scheme to the design, he mostly relies on "what others have done" from similar websites, rather than "whether users need it" and "how users feel". The misunderstanding here is that something similar to what a website "does" is often mistaken for the direction of authority and reference. This starting point is problematic at first. I think the fundamental difference between web design and graphic design is that the core of graphic design is to reflect the brand of products, while the core of web design lies in users, who should interact with them in behavior.
When product managers put forward their own requirements for design style and color typesetting, most of them are based on their own experience and reference to similar products, but have you ever thought about why similar products do this and whether the same things are suitable for our products today? Have designers studied the positioning of this product and which users are they facing?
Borrow a passage from EXDOOKY's article about the decision-making power of design:
"When we argued loudly about colors with non-design team members, we actually forgot our original intention. It is not the designer or the product manager who decides the design, but the user. When we lose our temper with each other loudly for our own opinions, we have forgotten the users. What a fucking process! Now we can see how important it is to start communication and research. If there is no common goal from the beginning, how can a designer and a product manager have the same design pattern? "