Former Interaction Designer: There used to be some articles that were popular on the Internet, and interaction design will eventually die out.
There is such a sentence: "Product Manager, UI Design, Interaction Design" If you want to be eliminated from the team, then who should be eliminated?
Most of the choices are interaction design, and the reason is very simple: if the interaction designer draws the prototype diagram, the prototype diagram can be drawn casually to show the meaning. Products can be drawn, and UI can also be drawn. Originally, in most small companies, products are also doing interactive work. It is enough to eliminate interaction and let products draw.
In the face of the development of interaction designers, there were mainly three voices in the past (in 2015-2016):
Interaction designers will eventually be eliminated, and products or UIs will replace interactions;
Interaction designers will develop with the development of AR/VR/IoT;
Interaction designers will become more and more important as the user experience extends and develops.
Interaction design now:
And now, in 2018, instead of dying, interaction design has become even more important. In recent years, with full-link design, service design, and most recently UGD design, design has been endowed with greater capabilities in the Internet field.
Now the era of the Internet of Things has gradually entered people's lives, and more and more interactive devices have begun to appear (such as: smart speakers, rings), connecting online and offline things (new retail, unmanned supermarkets), connecting people and machines. Interaction expands to more scenarios.
Artificial intelligence is becoming more and more powerful, and AI such as Luban can replace the work of low-level artists. The development of a large number of design specifications and UI design languages makes ordinary UI design easy to complete, and some UIs will be at risk of being replaced...
In the face of these developments, interaction design stands at the forefront:
Interaction design jobs began to increase in 2018;
Foreign interaction design is developing well;
More and more companies will require interaction skills when recruiting UI designers, and more and more UI designers are beginning to learn interaction;
Interaction designer training courses and related lectures began to increase.
So how can interaction designers develop further, and how can they empower themselves?
Let's start with some situations that are easy to encounter in the work of interaction designers:
The problem of output
The main output of interaction design is the prototype. How detailed the prototype is has always been a question asked by many interaction designers.
Some people think that the prototype should be simple and clear, it doesn't matter if it is rough, as long as it shows the meaning, it is enough for everyone to understand.
Another voice is that the interaction designer should draw the prototype as finely as possible with enough time. But the delicate prototype of the painting will interfere with the vision. The subtext is - you have finished what the vision needs to do, and the vision only needs to use a color. It is equivalent to the visual work being robbed by you, and the vision may need to be in your On the basis, make a better design to prove its value, paranoid design may also change the interaction prototype that has been set, affecting the progress of the entire project.
Interaction design should ensure the fineness of the prototype at the right time, while leaving the visual where it should play.
Appropriate time: In principle, the sooner the better, the interaction design can build its own prototype control library in the early stage, which can save a lot of drawing time.
Leave the visual blank: The interactive design output is best to be an interactive draft of black, white and gray. Pay attention to the choice of black, white and gray, which indicates the degree of emphasis of different content. The more important it is, the darker it is. You can use different colors on the interactive draft Callouts remind the design where to pay attention, focusing on the need for visual expression.
It is best for interaction design to have a certain UI visual ability. When designing a prototype, you can roughly know what kind of content the visual draft will present. You can use annotations to mark those that need to be visually displayed, so that the design can focus on own domain.
When the project is urgent, the more refined interactive draft (including detailed process and function descriptions) can be given priority to R&D to develop some less visually designed functions to improve team efficiency.
This is the first kind of empowerment: make yourself a junior UI designer, and the completed design draft is exquisite and beautiful, and can help R&D and UI to distinguish their specific work. It does not take too much time for a refined interactive draft after componentization, but it can help the interaction to clarify more details and improve the control over the prototype.
2. Problems with unclear or too abstract requirements
The product does not know what the user needs, and the interaction does not know what the product needs.
Sometimes interaction designers will receive some unreasonable or incomplete requirements for products, for example: the requirements of products b2b data are the requirements put forward by the relay operation - "a coupon module needs to be designed to cooperate with activities", and the interaction directly receives this requirement After that, it is not appropriate to start directly following the competition.
If there is no more detailed documentation, the interaction design can start user research, study the user's attribute distribution, payment situation, etc., and find the rules through some past activity data, and speculate whether the optimized coupon logic of competing products meets the needs of the coupon logic .
For example: Is it appropriate to issue several coupons to users for a certain behavior? How long is the discount valid for? How strong is the coupon to be the most profitable?