30 years old, now based in Beijing, has been designing since graduation. At present, I have been in the industry for more than five years, and I have no plans to leave the design industry. Even if one day I no longer engage in a full-time design position, I will still play the role of a "designer" in my life, or in some part-time jobs, because design has become a habit and way of thinking for me, constantly changing my life. better.
Back to the question itself, I had a similar question when I first entered the industry, what is the way out for UI (User Interface) designers? Or what is the time limit for having to transform? Many of the answers I got at that time were to change careers to be product managers, so many students simply chose to be product managers, but I still chose the design position ignorantly.
My realization a few years later is that if every new product or project is likened to a newborn baby, the roles of product managers and designers are more like parents and teachers. Product managers are responsible for their own products, and they must manage their health, plan their growth goals for this "child" at different stages, and shape their better IQ and IQ by integrating various "educational resources". Emotional intelligence makes it go farther successfully; for design "masters", many projects are not born from us, but we clearly know how to create a product with excellent user experience and how to make it popular , and efficiently generate value, how to establish norms and standards, and make it better integrated into the world. We can be a Chinese teacher, who can give it a copywriting expression with brand characteristics; or an art teacher, who can help it express the form of beauty "with its inner and outer face"; or a math teacher, who can help it build an iterative model based on experimental data. Optimize logic.
While designing products, we are constantly accumulating "teaching experience" and self-evolving. With the changes in the application industry and design trends, the role of the designer has been redefined. I am fortunate to have participated in this change from the perspective of a designer and have grown.
Looking at "UI Design" from "Five Years"
Five years is not a time period that is randomly proposed, and most people graduate from school in their fearless twenties. Five years will lead you to a social environment that completely bids farewell to the campus model of more than ten years, a mature image after getting rid of immaturity, and a 30-year-old standing in expectation and anxiety; whether in life or work, this is all. It is a process from vagueness to clarity. Facing the unknown, it is normal for us to feel doubts.
The same goes for design.
At the beginning of my career, my first project was to go to Party A's company to do interface adaptation. At that time, I didn't quite understand how the company defined user experience design and completed the interface adaptation of devices of various sizes within the specified time. Take on the responsibilities of this position in UI design. In order to have more exposure to product design, I applied for a transfer to do an interaction design project, and learned information architecture, interaction controls, process design, and the establishment of design specifications from the perspective of an interaction designer, so as to gain more and product, development Opportunities for communication and learning between upstream and downstream links. At the same time, he also tries his best to assume the responsibility of user research, learn the methodology of user research, and further enrich his knowledge system in the field of experience design. To make user-oriented products, we need to know more about how to understand users and how to express the product design that suits them. With these comprehensive accumulations, we can become real design "masters".
Don't limit yourself, and you'll have more room to grow. Five years will not make you look down or hate this job. What you see can be more opportunities for growth, and a clearer awareness of where you have shortcomings, and you are excited for new growth and challenges to come.
From accumulating simple design skills, to deepening the cognition of products and users, to establishing awareness of design norms, to learning the subtle relationship between data and design, to forming business thinking and full-process experience design ideas, gradually through data Drive toward design management and design decision-making, and ultimately drive business development from the experience level. Taking a closer look, there are many stages and dimensions in the small matter of designing to improve product competitiveness, and the road to design is still very long.
Looking at "Five Years" from "UI Design"
The understanding and definition of "UI design" largely determines how far we can go on this road.
From the basic definition, UI (User Interface) refers to the interface. This interface can be a generalized interface, that is, the connection between people, people and machines, and people and the environment. It can be physical or virtual. The design of UI requires the support of multiple interdisciplinary backgrounds such as design art, human-computer interaction, and computer.
No matter what angle you start to learn UI design from, understanding the knowledge system behind these, and correctly understanding UI and UI design can help you to reserve knowledge more correctly. When you find that UI design is not as simple as simulating a popular visual style or "typography" design for online products, you will see more room for improvement, and then time to learn and improve on this road. Could be more than five years.
Domestic companies have different definitions of UI design. For example, visual designers are called GUI (Graphical User Interface), and interaction designers are UI; or visual designers are UI, and interaction designers are interaction; if your product team It's not big, so UI designers are called "design" (a much better term than "artist", a popular term in the last century). But from the beginning of the definition, we will find that interaction and vision are often separated. Although the fine division of labor can form a certain degree of efficient cooperation, from another perspective, it is undoubtedly a limitation on the development of designers' abilities. . If you want to have the design and output capabilities of the whole case, and go deeper into the level of interaction and visual design, you can accumulate more than five years.
At Airbnb, we are Experience Designers. The common parts in the UI design of products on each platform are built through a highly standardized design language system (DLS). Designers can spend more energy thinking about how to create a better experience for the product, and can participate in the product construction and polishing process. middle. Therefore, designers have also gained more space for dimensional thinking. It is believed that this trend will gradually mature under the design system of domestic companies. At that time, in addition to the original scope of work, what is the additional added value of a designer? Maybe that's what we're going to keep making it clear and working towards.
Whether you are a new designer who wants to know the career development and planning route more clearly, or an old design friend who feels a bottleneck and a little confusion after a few years of work, I hope my sharing can help you more Provide some ideas and references.
Author: Airbnb Airbnb Design
Source: Zhihu