Interview with Li Ou, director of UED of Weilai Automobile in blue lagoon Cafe.

Leo, the digital product of Weilai automobile users? Director of UED；, former director of Easy Car;

Engaged in user experience industry 12 and a half years, senior user experience designer and design manager.

From engineers to interactive experience designers, from interactive experience designers to managers. Regarding the transformation, Li Ou, director of UED of Weilai Automobile, who has more than ten years of industry experience, what experience he has is worth sharing with you. ?

"Designers' right to speak" is a topic that has been mentioned a lot in China Internet design circle in recent two years. The weak right to speak is a problem for some designers. Under the big wave of the Internet, various Internet products have developed rapidly and iteratively. What do designers need to do to become an indispensable member of the team? Leo said that he had never encountered this problem. What's he thinking?

Blue lagoon interviewed Leo, a Beijinger, at lunch time on a working day. He returned to Beijing from Shanghai on business. ?

Ordinary people's career changes since employment are usually divided into two types: the first is the change of functions. From one functional department to another, doing completely different work requires re-learning and thinking; The second is the upgrading of functions, which is also similar work, but the role from the executive level to the management level still needs to be re-studied and rethought. Leo has experienced both.

Leo has been engaged in user experience design for more than 12 years, and it is an important turning point in his career to switch from an engineer to an experience designer. The thinking mode of its engineers deeply influenced the designers. Based on extraordinary logical thinking and high awareness of products, plus eight years of experience as director of UED, he joined the "future" that he is proud of so far and became the UED leader of Weilai User Digital Products Team.

Leo is not a professional designer, but his logical thinking ability is his absolute advantage. Because of this, he will not only look at the problem from the perspective of design, but put forward the optimal solution in a way similar to statistical science. Leo said: "Design sometimes makes a series of decisions in a scientific way. Take the design of characters as an example. Font, color, font size, kerning, line spacing and paragraph spacing are all design variables. Different combinations of these variables will lead to different reading experiences. What we do is to design a series of experiments to get an optimal combination of variables. We may consider reading time, eye movement trajectory, saccade, information recognition rate and so on when designing experiments. We will get a set of optimal solutions and several suboptimal solutions, and then decide the final plan from the perspective of design aesthetics. "

The design of Internet products is an independent discipline that integrates aesthetics, economics, sociology, marketing and other sciences. Design is not art, but the core of art is beauty and the artist's personal expression, which is the content for viewers to find their own answers. The core of design is to convey valuable information so that the audience can see it at a glance. No matter how good the design is, it may not be perceived by users, because designs that are easy to perceive are generally special. If you are unconscious, you can use it fluently. It must be an excellent design that has been scientifically verified.

Making design in a scientific way will make it easier for us to make the best judgment rationally.

The change from designer to design manager is another turning point in his career. Leo has his own views on design management. He believes that design management is different from design execution, and management needs to think about team values, team structure, team members and everyone. Design output. What is the development potential of the team? Depends on the former? Second, team execution? Ability depends on the latter two items, while the first two items are often ignored.

The team needs values, and "value management" can be further understood as "the underlying cognition of team goals and design functions is consistent". What if managers can set it at this stage of recruitment? A targeted question, in order to know which side of the candidate? Does your opinion meet your and the team's expectations? Only in this way can we get a team with "consistent values" with great probability. Teams with the same values will show a strong internal driving force, so the management cost will be greatly reduced.

What is "team structure"? Affect the development of the team. The UED team has two management lines: horizontal function and vertical business. Therefore, UED naturally has the characteristics of matrix management. Based on this feature, the UED team that has developed to a certain scale will definitely encounter the problem of matrix management. If the framework of future matrix management can be built at the early stage of team building, the future management will be much easier and smoother.

Leo said: "Design and design management are two completely different things. An excellent design manager must be an excellent designer, but conversely, an excellent designer may not be able to do design management. Design management is responsible for the design output of the whole team, the rise and fall of the whole team, and the growth of every designer in the team. No such thing? Also be conscious not to switch from design execution to design management. ? "

In recent years, the right to speak of designers is often discussed. When asked about the designer's right to speak, Leo was surprisingly confident that he basically didn't realize the weakness of the right to speak because of his early awakening to the concept of "design empowerment", and he had some suggestions and ideas about it.

Leo believes that although China's design industry has accumulated later than the West, and the experienced Internet designers and managers have only more than ten years' experience, the gap between China and foreign countries is gradually narrowing in terms of Internet product experience design. Look at the APP we use every day, and then look at similar products overseas. In fact, the experience is not much worse or even better. It can be seen that many domestic designers are actually excellent in design skills. In fact, any role in the team is essential. If you think your team has a "weak voice", you have to analyze the reasons and prescribe the right medicine.

Leo thinks that "the designer's voice is weak" in most cases means that a designer feels that his voice is weak, his design is always not recognized, and his ideas are always unable to advance. When this happens, designers need to think about the following two issues, the design itself and the core issues that the design solves.

If you are affected by your lack of professional ability, then there is only one solution-to improve your professional ability. There are many ways to improve your design ability. The first is practice. From a certain point of view, the designer's work belongs to "craft work" in the Internet industry. Seeing more excellent designs and practicing more will definitely improve your ability. Here I have a small method to recommend to you: copy the UI of excellent products, or redraw the UI of excellent products into a wireframe. These two methods will make you realize other people's design ideas and discover many other people's design details in the process of doing it. You can try. In addition, designers should spend more time focusing on the design itself, and don't be influenced by things like scribing and cutting pictures. At this point, tools such as blue lagoon can be used to mark and cut the drawing.

Always remember that excellent design professional ability is the basis for a designer's career to be respected.

In most cases, the criterion for judging the quality of design is whether the design has solved the "core problem at this stage". ?

Then the designer first needs to figure out "nuclear at this stage?" What is the "problem"? Before starting to design, the designer should make clear the problems and goals that need to be solved in this design. In other words, the designer made a particularly professional and beautiful design, but this design did not solve the core problem of any product experience, so this design may not be recognized and adopted. If for a long time, the designer always fails to recognize the problem itself and make adjustments in time, then his design is likely to be returned again and again. Gradually, it is logical to lose the right to speak in the team. ?

Designers should have the ability to judge the goal behind product requirements and achieve this goal through design means. If you add excellent professional ability, then this designer is likely to become a respected designer with the right to speak.

Give a chestnut. The product manager needs to enlarge and highlight a function key to increase the number of clicks. Some designers said that your request would make the product page very uncoordinated, and I refused. Another designer may choose to weaken other keys to highlight this function key, which not only meets the business needs (increasing clicks), but also ensures the beauty (reasonable proportion). Who will have more say in the future?

Mobile Internet now? The product environment has changed a lot compared with before, and many designers have a sense of crisis.

Leo said: Some interaction designers have begun to transform to UXD, can they basically take it? UI design; But what about the other one? On the other hand, the current Internet products, especially mature mobile Internet products, have improved in design specifications. Many products can be simply mass-produced through standardization. Under these two trends, the designer's space is also affected. Squeeze hard In this environment, designers don't seem to have many choices, and the most direct and effective direction is to cultivate their own product design and interactive design thinking. At least you should know what product you are making and what is the core of this product. What is the standard, what does this product make money from, and what problems need me to solve. With this in mind, designers have the ability to gradually take over the "layoutdesign" work that originally belonged to interactive design. Really? Set up the ability to communicate directly with products and the right to speak. Such a designer is a "full link designer".

As we all know, the mainstream UED team used to consist of three functions: interactive design, visual design and user research. Let's talk about interaction design first. Is interaction design boundary-relative? A vague position. Upward to undertake products, want to? Try to translate the functional requirements of the product into pages; We should undertake visual design downwards, consider the layout and weight of page elements, and deal with interactive feedback at the same time, which is why interaction designers are called interaction designers. It is precisely because of the characteristics of interaction designers that interaction is closely related to products and vision, which can help both sides solve problems and is an angel between products and designers.

But now it's a little different. Now, the mobile Internet? The product has matured. Almost all the time? Should it be? The scene has a mature solution. On the premise that the product information structure is basically stable, excellent product managers are fully capable of interaction, designer's original page structure design and interactive feedback design. Therefore, in the near future, the development space of interaction designers will be greatly reduced.

So, where should the profession of interaction design go? What should this profession do? To develop? It's time to think about these issues.

Leo thinks: "The UED in the next era should include three functions: product design, core design and service design. ? Interaction designers should have two skill trees. Can you go forward? Step by step, break through the boundary between interaction and products, evolve into product designers and become the driving force of products; Or later? Step, complete basic UI design skills and become a full link designer. "

Since joining Weilai Automobile and taking office, the words of this full link designer are full of pride and yearning for personally building Weilai.

Leo said that Weilai is not a car company. Weilai Automobile is an Internet company with an international vision. In the near future, Weilai Automobile will bring brand-new travel scenes to China and even the world. Therefore, the team is constantly optimizing the product experience with "car" as the carrier. As a design collaboration tool of Weilai Automobile, Blue Lagoon is a great honor.

Blue Lagoon also believes that in the near future, Weilai Automobile will bring us more surprises through more black technology and more amazing interactive experience, and at the same time create a miracle with a market value of 7 billion US dollars in three years. Let's wait and see.