The product manager is the leader of a product, and the experience and philosophy of the product manager determine what the product “grows” into. Including the product design bibliography “Sprint” written by Jake Knapp, who works in venture capital at Google, and a series of design methods and design principles advocated by the Stanford School of Design, they have inspired many product creators today.
The “zoom in” and “zoom out” (ZIZO) methodology introduced here also further borrows these methods, and allows entrepreneurs, product managers, and designers to use effective dialogue and structured design processes to stimulate creativity and focus on User needs.
You can design products from two levels: strategy and details.
Product ideation is a hasty and “chaotic” process-it’s like an artistic creativity. You will find that you have other innovative ideas in the conception process, which will disrupt your previous planning.
However, when making an idea, you need to switch modes-through strategic thinking and established guiding principles, to optimize and sequence your ideas and finally discuss a conclusion. Especially for team leaders, it is necessary to balance the energy of the team and find the priority options from clues. The product owner should have the ability to zoom in and out of the macro strategy, and constantly and frequently in-depth study the details of the user experience-this task is not easy, but through practice you will gradually master it better.
What exactly is ZIZO’s product conception methodology for zooming in and out?
ZIZO’s product conception method is like a framework that allows you to zoom in and zoom out product design to different levels at the same time.
You can design in three different layers:
1. Process design (Flow)
2. Interface design (Interface)
3. Operation design (Action)
Designers need to switch and iterate between these three different levels of user experience.
Usually start from the process design, that is, the process of the user using the product. This is the highest level view of product design. You can in-depth study and design the detailed information of the user interface, and understand the actions taken by each user on each screen/interface. However, like any design process, there is no absolutely correct starting point or ending point. The overall beauty of product design lies in the ability of leaders and their teams to switch between their favorite modes.
Before you start thinking, ask yourself: What needs to be clear to the team?
Before you start building features and details, you need to clarify two key things:
- Who is the target user?
- What is the problem to be solved?
You need to have a clear understanding of these two issues. Try to make this process simple and clear when designing. You can write your design on three drawings-process, interface and operation three levels.
The first step is to “shrink”: design the user process
This step is the highest level design in the ZIZO framework. It doesn’t require any artistic skills—all you need to do is ask yourself to think about the steps they will take when using the product or service from the user’s perspective. You can ask some questions, such as where the user starts the journey after opening the App, where the journey may end, and what kind of retention mechanism allows users to reuse the product.
Two strategies can be adopted to design the user process: a list or a flowchart. For engineers or programmers, this is the natural choice to solve any problem, in other words, this is the step of building an algorithm.
Take Uber as an example. The user process design example of the application is as follows.
Note: This is just a simplified process design, you can expand to more steps as the application grows.
Now let’s use the “zoom in” method: design your user interface and screen
After sketching the initial user flow, you can zoom in and delve into the details. Each step should be explained using one or more user interfaces. If you are designing a mobile application, then it is a screen. If you want to produce a physical product, you need a product display in the current position or state (such as open position or folded position).
It’s worth mentioning that you don’t need to complete all screen designs at a specific time. Put the three layers in front, you can zoom in or zoom out at any time-return to continuous addition, modification or removal of these functions.
Because the product idea is not a linear task, but an iterative task.
Sometimes investing too much detail on a particular screen may trigger changes in other higher-level strategic concepts. As a product owner, your job is not to invest too much in details but to maintain a big picture throughout the process.
Continue to use Uber as an example. The following is an example of the “zoom in” interface:
Interface design-user registration
Interface design-user experience process
Continue to “zoom in”: design the operation interface
As a product designer, you can design the user process with the same operating mentality as playing a game.
The goal here is to make users attracted like playing a game, and continue to operate the product you build step by step. In order to pass the customs, the user must take action-click a button, enter text, select an item from a list, etc. You need to motivate users to take this action by designing value and benefits. If you want to study the user experience in depth, you need to think about it at the operational level.
The following sketch lists the operations that the user will perform, and the total number of operations for each screen. This can help track whether there are too many operation buttons added to each screen of the product, and these experiences will affect the product run-in degree, thereby increasing the possibility of user loss.
Operational design-registration
Operational design-user experience process
The operation interface should use very simple vocabulary, such as “input user name” or “press the submit button”. Not every product design is the case, but you need to minimize the steps that users have to perform. For example, in the registration process, do users really need to operate separately for the last name and first name? Whether your product can combine the last name and first name together, and then the system background will automatically separate, thus making users easier.
One question I ask the team every time I develop a product idea is, what do you think of each successful interface? If the user spends a few minutes on a certain interface, is it successful? Do you want users to switch to another interface, share content, or press the “Like” button? In order to concentrate and simplify the initial product design, I like to start with a hypothetical operation of a single user on each screen.
This is not only directly related to product goals and various indicators, but also helps the team carefully consider whether the built product really solves the problem that it wanted to solve in the first place.
Conclusion:
No matter what stage of the product, product managers often design at three levels: process, interface, and operation. Which part of the three levels of work goes well or not will affect the work of the entire team and cause delays. At the beginning, with this kind of “Zoom-In-Zoom-Out (ZIZO)” thinking, product development is carried out, and problems are confronted directly, and different problems are solved more actively. Only by reaping the growth of the entire team and creating more for the company Great value.
