How do UI designers do interactive design when they first enter the workplace?

The big data department where I am located is a department with great technical and product innovation in Baidu's technical system.

\ tTherefore, as an interaction designer, I will design products from various industries. The industries I have contacted are website statistical analysis, tourism, finance, advertising marketing, medical care, real estate, retail O2O, lottery, sports, after-sales service of automobiles, voice, aviation, image recognition ... Similar to my situation, the design teams of most companies, as supporting departments, are public resources. What? If a proverb is adapted into "an iron design team, supported by flowing products", it should be able to present the working state of designers very vividly.

\ tIn the face of familiar industries, experience can really guide design, but we are not generalists and knowledgeable people, and we will always meet unfamiliar industries. The question naturally arises: how can interaction designers design well in the face of products from unfamiliar industries?

\ tThere is actually no magic shortcut to this situation, but there is a set of countermeasures that can greatly make up for the lack of industry experience. I spent two days sorting out some of my own methods in dealing with such problems, hoping to help designers who are experiencing or will experience this dilemma.

\t 1。 parsing problem

\ tAnalyze the original requirements and sort out the requirements of workflow PM through three questions. There are always places where consideration is not comprehensive (or practical), but it does not affect the starting point for understanding the problem. Regarding whether this entry point is correct, whether it is valuable, how to add icing on the cake or find another way on the basis of this entry point, and how to explore its incompleteness ... We don't have to care too much about these in our previous work, we just need to disassemble the original requirements from the perspectives of scenarios, users and processes.

\ta。 Scenario: What scenarios exist in the requirements? B. Users: What roles of users are involved in the scenario? C. Process: What behavior processes will users of various roles have in each scenario?

\ tNo matter what industry's products are, they always provide people with solutions to problems, so these three points can almost comprehensively state all the facts, that is, "under what circumstances, who did what". For your understanding, let me give you a simple example, such as making a medical product to meet the needs of diagnosis and communication between doctors and patients.

\t

\t2。

Understand the industry

\ tDifferentiate the industry domain knowledge through the results obtained by 1, and dig deep into the content obtained by scenarios, users and processes respectively. This learning process should be divergent and purposeful. Divergence is the information point you are looking for. In short, what content and keywords do you need to retrieve, from A to B or even C and D; The purpose means that any mining research should have a clear goal. As a designer, we should make our thinking sensitive, and what information is worth studying and what information only needs to be understood.

\ tGenerally speaking, at this stage, you can find all kinds of content you are concerned about in similar Q&A communities in Zhihu and Quora. You can get relevant industry data reports through platforms like iResearch, and you can also find some relevant big V and industry people on Weibo to understand their concerns. Take making a medical product as an example, and you will get the following contents.

\t

\t Different mining information

\t3。

analyse

\ tMake a purposeful analysis of competitive products according to the results obtained in 2. After in-depth study of this knowledge, interaction designers at this time are no longer "amateurs" as they were at the beginning. At this time, the new problems are: all kinds of complicated information are flooding our minds, what is worth continuing to study, what is valuable, what needs to be abandoned, and what should be kept in the future ... These problems are not easy to make decisions for the time being, so what we can do at this time is to analyze and check the competing products.

\t Analyze Internet products in the medical industry and medical products of similar businesses; In addition, we need to analyze products with similar functions in different industries and businesses, such as meeting the needs of doctor-patient communication, and the products may plan the function of voice chat, so we can also take products with similar functions such as WeChat, Apple siri and sogou Voice Assistant as the analysis objects. Through the analysis of competing products, it is helpful for us to check and fill the gaps, eliminate the false and keep the true, and improve our own needs and ideas. At this time, it is easier to answer those new questions just mentioned.

\t4。

improve

\ tImprove scenarios, users and processes comprehensively through the results obtained in 3. After the first three basic steps, we have obtained a lot of data. The focus of this step is to sort out and summarize these data and expand the original requirements: improve the scene, improve the users and improve the process. Sorting out what you think is right and necessary and whether you finally adopt it will tell you the next solution. There is also a small method: the expansion of scenes, users and processes should not be limited to itself, but should be extended to its upstream and downstream, which often leads to unexpected gains.

\t5。

connect

\ tCommunicate your research and learning results with the demander through the results obtained in the fourth step, and define the requirements. Through the further improvement and in-depth expansion of the requirements in the fourth step, the interaction designer has a deeper understanding of a requirement, and can go to PM for communication and discussion with our thoughts, questions, opinions and suggestions (if there is a preliminary design idea).

\ tDesigners at this time must have the right to speak, because we have done a lot of preparatory work, and the information we have can make the tearing process between us and PM more nutritious in depth and breadth.

\t Of course, the key purpose is not to "tear up", but to communicate our research results with the demanders, reach an agreement on issues of mutual concern, and ensure that both sides have the same idea in the early stage of giving the design scheme. Whether there are differences of opinion on the follow-up plan is another matter.

\t6。

Interactive design

\ tThe most difficult part of a bone has actually been solved, the thinking is clear, and the design scheme naturally comes naturally. Of course, I'm not saying that the design is not important. Design scheme is of course very important, but as interaction designers, our value is far from giving a design scheme, but the thinking behind the scheme and our thinking process.

\t After the introduction of the method, let me say one more digression: I took a detour. Facing the interaction design in unfamiliar fields, my first step is to understand the industry knowledge. This lack of clear understanding leads me to fail to grasp the core and key points. In this way, the learned knowledge can not guide the final design in depth. After adjustment, the above steps 1 and 2 were obtained. Judging from the results of the actual project, the speed and quality of design work have been improved to some extent through the change of methods.