Is Internet design a job for young people? My thoughts after working for Huawei for five years

When I just graduated, I heard from my seniors that there is a small hurdle every three years and a big hurdle every five years. This year is my fifth year of work, and I have indeed encountered a big hurdle in my work. Whether I can cross it is still unknown. Last year's keywords were "new exploration", "half-understanding" and "confused about the future", and this year's keywords are "re-understanding myself", "new understanding" and "starting again".

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Re-understanding oneself

The advantage of being an interaction designer is that it is easy. As long as you have strong logic, fast drafting, and good communication skills, your work will not take up too much time. I chose the profession of interaction designer with this in mind. In the first four years of work, I had a lot of time to master new knowledge every day, so I don’t think my growth rate has slowed down. However, after switching to Huawei a while ago, my work and study balance has changed a lot.

Why did you switch to Huawei? Because Huawei had just established an HMI Lab in China. In January, Huawei asked me if I wanted to come for an interview. Because of my strong interest in human-computer interaction, I agreed without hesitation. After all, I am a designer who has written a book, and I think I am quite capable. After arriving at the HMI Lab, I found that except for three masters and one undergraduate (that is, me), the rest of the colleagues in this department are doctors or professors. The chief scientist of the department is the president of the World Chinese Human-Computer Interaction Association. In addition to the current employees, we also have interns from all over the world, who come from Cambridge, Tsinghua University, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beihang University, Communication University of China and other schools. Here I felt for the first time what an awesome interdisciplinary research team is. Our team has talents in engineering psychology, graphics, informatics, communication engineering, computer vision, industrial design, and interactive design.

In the short four-month work, my biggest feeling is that my growth rate has increased significantly, and secondly, the money at Huawei is not that easy to make. At present, my work mainly includes the following: first, planning the future human-computer interaction experience in the automotive field; second, conducting patent layout and writing in the automotive field; third, aligning the projects I plan with the goals of other teams; fourth, cooperating with other car manufacturers, including research and design; fifth, being responsible for the projects I plan, researching and designing them; sixth, cooperating with professors in universities to study related topics together; seventh, reading papers in the field of human-computer interaction. Except for some of the above tasks that I cooperated with a psychology doctor from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the rest were completed by myself. It is not easy to survive in this team, and it is impossible for the growth rate not to increase significantly...

Working as an interaction designer in an Internet company is very comfortable. Although I didn't waste my time and my growth rate was quite fast, why did I live so painfully after coming to Huawei? I asked myself this question for three months. I summarized the current answer. It may be that interaction design serves upstream products and user needs. Without product and user needs, interaction design doesn't know what to do. And my current job is to explore product needs and user needs from the perspective of human-computer interaction. This part of the work was not involved before, so what I am doing now is human-computer interaction, user needs analysis, and product design, rather than a single interaction design job. The current work is beyond the scope. But, what can I do? Who made me choose an extremely hard and difficult road? As Hong Kong movies often say, "If you go out, you will return sooner or later." Secondly, it doesn't mean that undergraduates are worse than PhDs, but undergraduates are indeed much worse in professional depth. This is my summary of the past three months. So in such a strong team, I have changed my ability from "very good" to "okay". Only when you see higher mountains will you know that there are people beyond people in this world, and there are heavens beyond heaven, and there is still room for improvement in your ability.

New understanding

After coming here, I can clearly feel that there are indeed big differences between the industry and academia. The Internet industry emphasizes speed and how, while the academic world emphasizes stability and why. In the early stage, it was really not difficult for me to understand why they kept asking why? Why can't we iterate and verify quickly? The answer to this question made me truly understand that "the Internet is really a bowl of youth rice", which I will talk about later.

Doing research is very different from doing design. "Why" is the word my supervisor asks me the most. Sometimes I am really annoyed and confused by it, but now I have adapted to this kind of communication. If I don't adapt, I may lose my job orz... If I am confused by this question, it means that I don't understand a lot of things in this field. It is impossible to do in-depth work in this field, so I must calm down and get to the bottom of these problems. I remember my supervisor told me that a lot of information you see on the Internet now is false or outdated. If you want to make progress, you must read the papers and patents published by others, so that you can know what is happening in the industry. Although I am skeptical about this sentence, it is undeniable that the most advanced technologies are in papers and patents. Only by reading and understanding them can we know how the industry thinks and solves these problems. I still remember that my supervisor's requirement for me was to know who wrote this paper, what other papers did he/she write? Which school did he/she come from? Who has published the most papers in this field? What I admire most about my supervisor is that I mentioned a technology, and after a few minutes he can send me an article to read by myself, and he can also tell where the main person in charge of this technology came from and what he has done. I have to say that I have never encountered such research and memory abilities in the first few years of my work, so it is very important to meet a good leader. Although it is very likely that life under him will be very painful, adapting to him means that I have grown.

Once, I discussed a project with a researcher for 8 hours but could not convince him. Finally, I learned from other colleagues that he did not find any corresponding papers and research in this field, so he did not approve of my project. "Why is your idea not seen in so many studies?" I have to admit that this is a good question. I have thought about this question for a long time. Finally, I figured it out. Many problems cannot be solved by looking at papers and patents, especially when doing innovative projects. You must know that papers and patents are already in the past tense or present tense. The most important thing for future-oriented projects is to rely on understanding and inspiration. When you have a sudden inspiration, the first thing should be to take a big step forward. Starting from the results, deduce whether the idea is reliable from the three perspectives of users, profession and competitiveness. If there are no logical loopholes in the deduction process, then please stick to your own ideas. Recently, relying on this project, I won the third prize in the institute competition with other researchers. It is a good start for a small undergraduate to win the third prize in an institute full of doctors.

I had this discussion with my partner before, "Should designers understand psychology?" From her perspective, it is very necessary for designers to understand psychology, but I don't think so. The help of psychology to design is unquestionable, but these helps will eventually form a series of design specifications and interaction principles, which can help designers avoid a series of design problems and risks. So the question is, it's good for designers to understand design specifications (How), why do they need to understand psychology (Why)? I remember we discussed this question for a long time. In the project, my supervisor asked me, why do you need to introduce psychology or human factors models into your design? Several excellent designers may be much better than your design with a slight change, so what is the significance of introducing your model? I have also thought about this question for a long time. If a designer can achieve 90 points, how to prove that introducing your psychology or human factors model can improve the design plan from 90 points to 95 points or even 99 points? If it is proved, this psychology/human factors model is likely to become a design specification or interaction principle, or even a practical design tool. For example, Fitts's law, mental model, Seev model, and cognitive model are one.

The focus of interactive design and human-computer interaction is different. Interactive design emphasizes "user-centered design", which mainly uses existing technology to serve users; while human-computer interaction is more of a technology-centered design, and the technology includes psychology, ergonomics, various computer technologies, and so on. Human-computer interaction is mainly about incubating the soon-to-be-mature technology into products, and this product is more of a technical verification. If you want to integrate "user-centered design" into human-computer interaction, believe me, it's a very painful thing. "User-centered design" I believe everyone will say, in addition to user research, data analysis, and market analysis, have you ever tried to do a user-centered deduction of your design or product? If you can do the deduction to the level of a paper, the entire deduction logic is only derived around the company's competitiveness, related usage technology, and user needs/pain points, and there are no logical loopholes in the entire deduction process, believe me, you have taken the first step towards success.

Why are Apple's products so good? Because Apple stands from the user's perspective to productize the latest technology and hand it over to the user, and every detail will be carefully polished. Recently at WWDC 2020, Apple designers talked about how more than a dozen people spent 1-2 years designing a mouse cursor for the iPad. In our eyes, it may seem that it's just adding a mouse cursor to the iPad, which is not difficult. But when you finish watching the video, you will find that this cursor contains a lot of human-computer interaction details. Apple is willing to pay for a better user experience.

Starting over

I mentioned earlier that "the Internet is really a bowl of rice for the young", and now I will talk about my feelings. In the past few years, the threshold of the Internet was really low, and people with all kinds of academic backgrounds could pour into this field. This was no problem, but now a large number of talents are pouring into the field of artificial intelligence, which is really hard to understand. Many companies may dare to call themselves artificial intelligence companies by picking up a few deep learning models on the Internet or even writing a few "if else". The Internet is too impetuous. The essence of this problem is that the surge in information has led to the rapid development of the Internet. If you don't change your weapons, you may die on the battlefield. In addition, when you find that everyone has changed their equipment, you will feel that you are outdated. But have you learned how to use this gun? It is very likely that you will be given an AK47 today and asked to learn how to use a sniper rifle tomorrow, but you have no time to go to the training ground to learn and understand the structure of this sniper, let alone how to use this sniper rifle. I remember a movie about a very good agent. The Secret Service spent millions of dollars on him to train him. How much time and money do you invest in yourself? This is a question worth pondering.

The rapid pace of Internet development has made the chance of survival of each company very small. These pressures are reflected in everyone's KPI, and everyone can only exchange time for KPI. When your work cannot bring you continuous professional growth, and your work can be replaced by the next iteration at any time, objectively speaking, if you have worked for 5 years without growth and no works, you are indeed likely to be eliminated at any time. Recently, I have read a batch of resumes and portfolios. Almost all the students who sent them to me are overseas graduate students. At the same time, I talked with friends in large companies in the industry and found that many of their new graduates are masters from famous brands. Really, the younger generation is eyeing you who are reading this article, of course, including me.

I mentioned earlier that "undergraduates are not necessarily less capable than PhD students." To achieve this, you need to be able to keep up with PhD students in terms of professional ability. Even if you are far behind, you should be prepared to catch up with them. Because in your fifth year of work, your classmates who graduated with your undergraduate degree and are taking PhD exams are likely to have already started looking for jobs. This is the best time to verify what you have learned in the past five years. If you don't want to be looked down upon by them in terms of professional ability, you need to think carefully about what your advantages are and what your competitiveness is.

Working and communicating with a group of PhD professors is a rare experience. I never thought about it before, but academic qualifications don’t mean anything. The most important thing is to keep working hard to narrow the gap. I had finished writing my second book at this time this year, but because I was too "happy" to work, my book has stagnated a bit. I hope I can finish writing the book this year and sell it next year. It is really rare to be able to work in a field that I am really interested in. I hope I can continue to grow in the field of human-computer interaction, and I can get through the "fifth year of work" and share more interesting content with everyone.