Designers are a group of thinkers with artistic temperament. They exist in each team with unconstrained innovation and maverick style. What distinguishes it from other jobs is that this is an industry that pays more attention to “inspiration” and self-cultivation. Under the oriental cultural environment, it also advocates “insight”. Therefore, upstream and downstream students know that they are patient in the process of getting along with designers. It is to be sufficient.
Why to be agile?
Designers are a group of thinkers with artistic temperament. They exist in each team with unconstrained innovation and maverick style. What distinguishes it from other jobs is that this is an industry that pays more attention to “inspiration” and self-cultivation. Under the oriental cultural environment, it also advocates “insight”. Therefore, upstream and downstream students know that they are patient in the process of getting along with designers. It must be enough, and it seems to be necessary.
For enterprises, operational efficiency is a matter of life and death, and time is life. In the final analysis, designers living in the society cannot be immune to the influence of business laws and cannot go beyond the world to live artistically. In other words, like any work, efficiency and quality are also eternal problems that designers must face.
As a designer who has worked in an advertising creative company, overtime is always the theme. I once had the experience of not sleeping for three days and three nights, designing a book, and being carried on an airplane. After stepping into the field of the Internet, I discovered that the fate is fixed, and the humanized BTA companies also have so many overtime work. For groups like designers who are accustomed to innovation, they will naturally seek out whether there is a comfortable and smooth route full of flowers in the world? Companies will also think about whether projects with design participation can be as agile and efficient?
During the six months of working in Shenzhen, we tried a new way of working with our partners in technology and products. This way of working made it possible for us to complete within one month, which usually takes 3 months or even Work that requires more time, the same quality and quantity, and the same joy and liveliness. This way we temporarily call “agile design” method.
This kind of agile design method is to pick the project, because it needs to plan the project schedule earlier, and the team that cooperates needs to have a stable structure and reserve fixed resources. We can’t make every temporary project that is going to happen and disappear systematically agile.
And the people involved in agile design must have entrepreneurial spirit, not be entangled in the process and job level, and all take the promotion of the project as the criterion.
Agile method
Clear division of labor across disciplines
If you want the team to be agile, it is very urgent to clarify the division of responsibilities immediately. Some students may ask that the division of labor is very clear. Operations, products, design, technology, and testing are all very precise and professional divisions. Do you need a second division of labor? How to divide it?
To be agile, all collaborators must think across disciplines. For example, designers must understand the reasons for products, and the front-end must understand the general rules of design aesthetics. Only with full understanding can there be sincere cooperation. Therefore, inter-professional thinking is the first point to be solved.
In daily projects, the original communication of a project should be based on the prerequisites of mutual understanding, and responsibilities should be clearly divided across disciplines, such as integrating vision and interaction, capable designers can take all interactive vision, and the interaction is simple. Product work, the product undertakes simple research and analysis work, and the development undertakes part of the front-end work and so on. Clear division of labor across disciplines is a key first step in agile.
In addition, agile design needs to adjust the specific methods of collaboration with each other. Here are a few points:
Morning Meeting
Various kink off\review meetings\communication will take up a lot of time in the project, but these key meetings are reaching consensus, and most of them cannot be omitted. Therefore, shortening the meeting time and increasing the efficiency of the meeting is the only way to stay short and fixed. The morning meeting is a good way to solve this problem. The time for the standing morning meeting is controlled within 15 minutes, only discussing the solution and checking the progress, and not discussing. If there are differences, you can go back to private chat to reach an agreement, and the next morning meeting can be updated.
Parallel investment
In order to be agile, in addition to cross-professional thinking and understanding of the upstream and downstream methods of undertaking, you must also invest in parallel, which is the key and will produce a lot of difficult steps.
The so-called parallel investment, the initial communication requires that technology, design, and products must all participate in business communication at the same time. Products or operations can lead to promote early communication. In this step, not only the product understands the business, but also the subsequent technology and design. Understand the reasons why the product is designed in this way and what the business goals are. This will help follow-up collaboration students to intervene in the business earlier, think earlier, and help the product contribute innovative thinking from a technical and design perspective. Sometimes it can achieve the desired result with half the effort. business goal.
Parallel output
In the product planning stage, ued starts the preliminary user experience simulation design from the user’s perspective according to business needs, and provides timely reference to products and technologies. The technology generates technical basic solutions based on business needs. The premise of this solution is that it does not rely on interactive experience. Purely from a technical point of view, solve the problem according to the best technical path, and propose solutions for products and ued reference. At this time, both ued and technology do not need to be intensively farmed, but only need to provide a complete and general solution, which is expressed as a “low-fidelity interactive draft” in the design. Moreover, the role here is interactive. While providing solutions for products, ueds, and technologies, they also obtain each other’s initial solutions from the collaborators, and adjust their corresponding solutions in real time. This is a process of constant corrections back and forth, and the final The result is a product prd with interactive design, proven feasible in technical realization, and solution.
When this kind of prd is launched, neither the technology nor the progress of ued will be waiting on a 0% basis as in the past. Maybe everything is in place, and only the f-prd is owed.
Advanced degree, post-experience
A project to debut, of course, is the common goal of all participants, and it is also the best-case scenario. But in most Internet projects, because they want to be the first to release at a certain point in time, constant iteration and small steps are the norm. At this time, designers need to adjust their mentality and plan the time for experience reduction with partners. Table, so that the progress of the project is not affected by the degree of reduction in some small details, but it can ensure that the experience is basically consistent at a certain point in time.
For example, in the progress of a project, it can be required to achieve 60% experience reduction during grayscale testing, 80% before the official release, and 95% reduction after the first 1-2 iterations after the launch. This kind of progress is in line with the commercial speed, and it can also ensure the basic level of experience while taking into account the front-end and developing the affordability of the students. As for the 100% reduction degree, it may take a relatively long time, and even preparations will never be realized, because the life cycle of Internet projects is too short and the change is too fast to pursue eternal perfection.
Advancement and post-experience do not mean giving up part of the experience. Here, we must pay special attention to the strict planning of the early experience reduction timetable and the timely follow-up in the later period, otherwise it will become only progress and no experience.
Output
Generally speaking, coordinated operations are easy to accidentally hurt. If you don’t pay attention, you will dig a small hole for your partner if you are not careful. So when we collaborate, we must first agree on the final form of output, and then collaborate when the upstream and downstream can accept it.
First of all, the designer’s experience process should be produced together with the product manager’s business process, and checked in time. This step basically determines the approximate number of pages and interaction paths, and also determines the workload of the front-end engineer on the page. Therefore, the design work must be carried out only when both the experience flow chart and the business flow chart are available, and this process is confirmed by the business side.
Secondly, in addition to the “low-fidelity interactive drafts” and “visual drafts with prd” produced in parallel, the designer should reach a key “contract” with the front-end The parts, such as buttons, input boxes, pop-up boxes, etc., are all modularized and encapsulated like boxes. Not only does the front-end need to be re-developed, the designer does not need to re-design, and even allows the product manager to assemble it himself Page structure, the impact of this on the agility of the entire project will be revolutionary.
Of course, modular operations like building blocks will inevitably have some negative effects on the user experience index. Here, the designer is required to pay attention to the final verification of the final output. User testing, or AB-test research to verify the modular assembly of the page, and the designer will make subsequent design corrections.
Agile designer
Understand business and technology
There are often several different professional paths to achieve the commercial path. The designer understands the commercial requirements of the project, which is more conducive to finding the most suitable design path for the project.
Most designers are not interested in business rules and principles, and pay more attention to business design. Now it is a popular discourse to advocate designers to understand business. However, the term business is too big. What part of business do we designers need to understand? ? My proposition is to start with the current projects and first understand the business related to these specific projects, such as what are the project goals and future plans? How long is the life cycle? What are the business data that affect the project? Knowing this can basically ensure that the design direction will not be wrong.
Interprofessional work
Everyone’s majors have been established since their student days, and are often related to personal hobbies and abilities. After entering the company, you will generally promote compound talents. The more you know, the stronger your ability to solve problems. It is best to have a few different problems. You don’t need to go to several departments and you can solve them by yourself. However, this is a huge challenge for designers. Visual considerations must be given to part of the interaction. To solve the problems of logic and structured thinking ability, interaction and vision must be cultivated in aesthetics. However, these ability training is long-term, and inter-professional work does not require the training of generalists. It just hopes to extend the original knowledge framework to facilitate the connection between upstream and downstream. Of course, it is even more advocated in urgent and major projects. A competent designer shoulders the burden, which can speed up the project process and save a lot of communication costs and resource loss in transferring projects.
Communication and negotiation skills
Language expression in communication and negotiation skills is only one aspect. More importantly, it is a thorough understanding of the project background, upstream and downstream conditions, and business goals. People who have a deep understanding cannot stand at the negotiating table, let alone recommend their designs to the other party. Therefore, communication and negotiation skills are based on a deep understanding of the project, and designers should not make unprepared design reviews and discussions.
In addition, focus on learning about meeting management. Usually communication is a small meeting. Before communication, you must know what you want (meeting goal), what you can give up, and where the bottom line is, and be prepared for partial compromise.
Another situation in design communication is that designers need to use their own advantages to visually show their opinions in a graphical way, or to help the other party to sort out his opinions. Writing and drawing when necessary is better than a thousand words. And the advantage of this method is that designers can directly embed user needs into the discussion and the final result. The image of the discussion can also be used as an archive to resolve differences in understanding in the future for long-term inspection.
The agility of design is based on the rapid update speed of Internet products and the complex user experience scenarios of users in the new era. It is used to resolve the contradiction between the long time of design creativity and the urgent business needs of the project. Many senior designers have their own “unique cheats”, and you can have many professional discussions on this issue to facilitate the ultimate success of our design. The agile design mentioned here is just an introduction.
