How can a UI designer who has been working for one or two years and is still standing still advance in his studies?

As you all know, for a long time we have been insisting on sharing some basic and practical content, those knowledge points that are difficult to understand systematically by reading books or watching sharing. This is closely related to my personal obsession with basic skills.

But now, more and more students are leaving messages in the background, wanting to see some more advanced and in-depth knowledge points to cope with the increasingly high professional requirements after entering the industry.

Therefore, I still plan to start a new series to organize and output advanced concepts and knowledge points in the field of UI design.

Analysis of the difference between elementary and advanced

Many UI designers who have just entered the industry have been working in relatively poor or boring and monotonous working environments. After one or two years of practice, they feel that they are still standing still and have made no progress.

Moreover, not only does it feel like we can’t accumulate past experience, but this situation is likely to continue in the foreseeable future. Will our youth just be wasted? This is causing our anxiety to continue to ferment.

At this time, we need to examine where the future lies, how we should improve ourselves, how to master advanced methods, and enter a better platform.

This is where the biggest problem arises. Most people have a vague concept of advancement and simply regard all knowledge that can improve your current skill level as advanced content. This will have a very negative impact on subsequent learning paths and plans.

Therefore, we need to be more specific to understand what the so-called advanced knowledge is.

After gaining a certain amount of work experience and interview experience, you will find that the people who can make the final decision on your design are increasingly concerned about one question, which is - "Why did you design it that way?"

The answer to this question determines the level of the designer. Junior designers will focus on visual concepts and subjective preferences. Advanced designers will answer through more methodologies, objective analysis, and experience summaries.

For advanced design, the proportion of visual design performance in career development has declined. From being a tool person who outputs design according to requirements, one has to transform into a mature designer with independent thinking and execution capabilities.

In summary, in addition to basic design skills, advanced designers need to have:

• Ability to understand and analyze main business and needs
• Able to master the correct method of understanding users to influence product decisions
• Can seamlessly connect with other team members to complete work

I will talk about the details later. Why are these things important? In layman's terms - you need to be able to bring more benefits to the company, and these benefits include improving the product experience through your work and bringing data growth to the product!

As a junior designer, your problem is how to meet the requirements given by your superiors. Your superiors have already given instructions on what to design and how to make it (or you already have the instructions in your heart but can't express it clearly). You just need to focus on how to make a design that satisfies them.

But when entering a higher level, the designer's work will not be so simple. Design is part of the experience and plays a key role in the growth of the product. A mature team will carefully consider this aspect. So the ball will be kicked to the designer: What should be done for this requirement A to ensure the maximum benefit of the product?

At this time, no one tells the designer what to do. If you force it based on your own preferences, it will be very amateurish. UI design is also a business behavior. You need to be professional, objective, and logical. You need to use some convincing methods to develop solutions to the problem.

Therefore, teams in large companies are happy to invent various professional theories and design processes in order to make the designs they produce more reliable and more valuable.

And this is the current criterion for judging advanced UI designers and junior designers in the industry...

Knowledge points of advanced UI design

What knowledge points should be mastered for advanced learning? It is not enough to find a bunch of secret knowledge maps or charts on the Internet. Don't worry about what concepts they have, but pay attention to what they have done.

In a professional design team of a large company, a complete project process that a designer has to go through can be roughly broken down into three stages: preliminary preparation, execution output, and post-processing review:

Different sharing and internal company organization will make this process appear very complicated, for fear that others will think you are not professional enough and do not know enough, which will always give newcomers a headache after reading it. Therefore, we will introduce what to do in these three stages and what knowledge points are roughly included.

Step 1: Preliminary Preparation

At the beginning of each project, designers should not rush to start designing, but should prepare a "design plan" first.

The first step in designing a plan is to understand the project requirements. Although the product manager will explain it once at the requirements meeting, it is not enough to just listen to it. We need to "translate" these requirements into content that we can understand and can be incorporated into the design work.

At this time, we may use various demand analysis methods such as 5WH, Porter's Five Forces, KANO, etc. to help us deepen our understanding of the needs.

After that, you need to make further preparation plans based on the content of the needs. You can create user portraits, emotional boards, empathy maps, or you can use qualitative or quantitative research plans to obtain more effective information to help us establish a global perspective.

Then, based on the information obtained, we develop ideas for subsequent designs to match the pros and cons of the information obtained previously.

Simplified into a sentence structure of a definite question, it is roughly:

• Today I need to do a requirement X
• Considering the survey results A
• It is also related to the analysis result B
• It also involves statistical results C

So I'm going to do this...

In MBA logic, this type of definite sentence structure is the embodiment of the "deductive method". Our job is to obtain materials that can advance logical deduction.

This step is also the most important manifestation of the value of advanced designers. There are thousands of research and analysis methods. Although each one is not difficult to master, choosing which ones to apply in a real project and how to make plans and implement them all require experience and sufficient thinking.

Step 2: Execute output

At this point, I believe I don’t need to give too much introduction. The output of prototype, specification, visual and animation is completed.

In some special projects, the finalization of the design may not necessarily be determined by internal decision-making. It may also be evaluated through certain usability tests, or grayscale tests or AB tests may be established.

What needs to be paid attention to is that the completed design content should not only meet the user's experience requirements, but also be able to conform to the plan formulated in the previous step.

If you analyze one set and design another, and they don't correspond, then the previous work has lost its value, or you have made some mistakes in the process that need to be checked.

Step 3: Post-processing

This step is to start collaborating with other project members to promote the implementation of the design. In addition to the basic art of marking and cutting, what needs to be done is to start reviewing the gains and losses of the project process to facilitate future improvements.

Furthermore, for teams that care more about data and KPI assessments, designers must also develop ways to quantify the effects of design solutions by collecting data or user feedback to test the effectiveness of the solutions.

The collected information, accumulated in each project iteration, can help the team enter a more efficient and better operating state, and help the product achieve steady iteration and growth in a scientific design process.

The skills required for advanced UI are the work that needs to be performed in different links of this process. The more you understand the professional design process, the clearer it will be for you to learn what you need to learn.

Closing Thoughts

I wonder how much of the above analysis you can absorb. Although there have been voices emphasizing experience and advancement in the past two years, there is a sequence in learning anyway.

You need to master the basic skills and norms before you start pursuing advanced concepts and knowledge. You need to learn how to write before you start learning how to write articles.

The last thought is that from the perspective of someone who has experienced it, the industry is beginning to place more and more emphasis on theory. One important reason is that the upper and lower limits of the hard skills (visual performance) of UI design itself are too low, and cannot be compared with the visual and 3D fields.

It is not only UI that requires analysis. Any business activity requires analysis. For brand, creative, interior, and industrial designs, the amount of analytical and conceptual content required is only a lot.

However, the visual aspects of these design industries are very high, and top designers often possess stunning design expressions that make us ignore the ideas and thoughts behind them.

The UI industry has benefited from the dividends of the Internet and has gained more lucrative profits on the basis of lower difficulty. Practitioners need to rationalize this status quo. The increasing number of theories, frameworks, models, and English abbreviations every year are all efforts to improve their own status.

As for how much of this effort actually brings growth and how much is used to arm upward management in the workplace, it will depend on everyone to make their own judgment in the future...