I have always believed that product design is a very subjective job. People have different opinions on the same product and the same function. There are no rules without rules. We will have some standards when we do a lot of things, even if these standards are judged from different perspectives. So after making products for so long, I have been looking for principles or standards in product design.
When I first started making products, my leader told me that compared to the front desk, a website doesn’t need to care too much about the user experience of the back-end management system, because the back-end management system itself is used by the operators, and the operators all have It must be Internet-based, so they all know some concepts or functions of Internet products.
And limited by the development cost, the back-end management system should pay more attention to functionality, and don’t need to care too much about the UI. Therefore, when designing the back-end management system, the functional design is also simple, not paying much attention to user experience and page aesthetics. The first project after work has been tried and tested based on this design principle.
Later, I changed to a second company. The company was larger and had more operating staff. I was also responsible for designing a management system. As before, I also designed the back-end to be very simple based on the back-end design idea of the previous company. . But the first version that came out this time was rejected at the product review meeting.
The reason is that the user experience is completely ignored. Although the functions can be realized, it is inconvenient to use.
For the same product, the product design concepts of the two are very different. The reason for this difference is that the two are in different situations or target users. The two approaches have their own reasons and cannot be defined. Which is right or wrong.
The reason why the former is designed like that lies in the maturity of the operators’ own capabilities, while the latter has too many operators and different qualities, so it is necessary to increase investment in user experience.
The different characteristics of the user group determine the different concepts of product design. There is another aspect of this because of the limitation of development cost. In the first version of the product, I will streamline the functions and only do the core.
However, in the actual situation, it is found that although the core functions are available and can meet the needs, it is difficult to use, because the operating staff must pay attention to some efficiency in the process of using the background.
When designing our products, we always divide the requirements into different levels and divide the products into versions. If the first version of the product is too simple, sometimes the meaning of the product will be greatly discounted, making our products unpredictable.
In the work process of the product, we will arrange the structure of the product before prototyping. When prototyping, you will arrange the level of modules in the product in terms of time and space. In theory, we will take the secondary menu design for granted. Under the overall framework, the UI also reflects the style of the page that is the same as the second-level module, but no matter if you click the tab of “Tmall Mall” on the homepage of Taobao or click the tab of “Renting” on SouFun (similar examples) Many more will not be listed) will jump to a brand new page.
We often say that the starting point of product design lies in user needs, but we often follow some rules that we take for granted in the design. These rules usually come from life. In fact, it does not mean that we cannot follow the rules of life. On the other hand, Talking about acting in accordance with the rules of life, after all, is conducive to the user’s understanding of the product. It’s just that sometimes we forget the user experience just because we follow some rules.
A few days ago, Bai Ya said on Weibo that the 4.5 version of WeChat has added a song called “Nothing” by Cui Jian, and this kind of song itself can be several trillion. According to common sense, this approach is not desirable, because We all want to make the software as small as possible with the same function (some companies even use the size of the installation package as a means of promoting the product).
But WeChat did this. As a result, everyone knew. Not only did WeChat remain unaffected, but this practice was praised by many people. Here I am not going to judge how effective this approach is. I just want to say that sometimes if we want to put some ideas in our products and convey some product ideas to users, we should not be limited by those so-called rules.
Of course, the premise is that the changes that you do not follow the common sense will not affect the critical death of the product.
Imagine that if you initially wanted to build an information publishing platform similar to Weibo, you would definitely not limit the amount of information users can publish, because it is illogical according to common sense. However, since the development of Weibo, 140 characters have become a standard. People did not abandon this product because of the limitation of the number of characters. On the contrary, 140 characters have become the advantage of the product because of lowering the barrier to use.
If you want to create a website that uses pictures to tell stories, lowering the threshold for users to upload pictures is definitely particularly important, because it helps to increase the richness of the website’s content. But conversely think that if you increase the minimum number of uploaded pictures, it may be more conducive to improving the quality of the story. From these two perspectives, the effects pursued by the product will be very different.
If from a product design point of view, there is no unchanging principle for a product to be based on, then from a hardware point of view, the product has its design standard, and this standard comes from the limitation of the hardware device. Especially in the era of mobile Internet, we have to control the font size, icon size, line spacing, etc., limited by mobile phone screens and various terminal devices, and we must follow these rigid regulations of each platform system when designing products.
In product design, we will follow the priority of the function and divide the important and secondary functions. If the function priority is the basic principle, then how to measure the priority of the function is the second principle, and the consideration behind this rule is based It is still user demand, but in this way, many things in the product will be full of uncertainty.
In a nutshell, the sources of principles in product design include hardware equipment standards, development costs, rules in life, product people’s own values, etc. The most fundamental of course is user needs. In product design, in addition to the limitations of the hardware platform to comply with some standards, there are actually not many principles to comply with, and those so-called principles can also be broken under the needs of users and the requirements of the product people.
If we say that technical development work depends more on hard capabilities, and product design requires more soft capabilities. Everyone who has been working on products for a long time will have their own set of thoughts. When facing the same product, this set of thoughts often determines the difference in product form. In actual work, we are more accustomed to calling this product idea a product idea.
Sometimes we lose in finding a job. The reason for the failure is not because our product capabilities are not good, but our product concept is inconsistent with the recruiting company.
