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Showing posts from February, 2017

How to Distinguish Design Sketch and Prototype?

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Product design is a relatively broad concept which contains a lot of content. Especially for beginners, the division of labor in the product design really gives them headaches. Some designers often do not even know what they are designing in the end. Boss told you to make a certain design, but when you gave your design to him, he might be like:"OH MY GOD! What is this?" Here, I will introduce you the best couple that often lead us to the confusion—rendering and prototype. First, we need to have general understandings of them: Design sketch, are the images with visualization. This type of images is often already been processed by the UI designers. They are some models which exhibit the real product. Product design sketch is one way of designers to express their creativity. Meanwhile, a good design sketch can objectly upgrade your score from your users, and show the value of this product. According to wikipedia, a prototype is an incomplete version of sof

Designers’ Dilemma: To Compromise or Not? That’s a Question

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As a UI / UX designer, a job falling in between technical worker and artist, you must’ve ever been in such a Dilemma: The client doesn’t like your design, which you’ve spent a couple of days and nights to complete. He even thinks you were blindly feeling good about yourself. The design, which is full of your originality and ingenious details, can’t be understood by them at all. You start to complain about the twisting values of the day, where the clients see nothing but public demands and efficiency curve. Say, you finally made a design they like, but you feel ashamed to share it on social network, since it’ll win no respect for you from fraternity. Therefore, in this article, I want to discuss this with you: as UI / UX designers , whether we should compromise to satisfy our clients? It’s Necessary to Follow Your Own Heart in UI/UX Design “An artist, whose work cannot even touch him himself, will never influence others.” This might be a little old-fashioned these da

How Designing Tools Charge Us?

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The age of information has changed our way of living and work. We give more and more credits to a variety of tools and complete our work relies on them. Hence, it is reasonable that we have paid tools now. And, of course, they have different payment strategy. In this article, let's talk about how they charge us. At present, there are three commonest kinds of payment strategy in the market, no matter desktop tools or web apps: volume, subscription, and perpetual license. What's more, we have another example: unlimited perpetual license. Volume: Many web client tools may choose this way to charge us. The volume here is not just refers to the number, it also represent the room and flow. This strategy has a clear strength, it gives users enough space to control thier cost. By the volume they use, the users will be divided into different levels, and they will be charged according to the level. On the other hand, this strategy also has short comings. One of them would be lacking

What Makes A Good Wireframe Tool?

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Many product managers and UI designers I know believe that, paper prototyping is free and unrestricted. Since every component can be represented by shapes, even those complicated  interactions can also be easily showed with arrows and other connections. Thus, compared with using wireframe software, paper prototyping is faster and easier. This is, in fact, an underestimation  to our learning ability. Just like driving is, objectively, more difficult than riding a horse, we still can ’ t say it ’ s freer  to ride. T o dig deeply, we find an important concept missing in this thought --- user experience. A draft, which may be able to show interactions, cannot demonstrate  the process because the only way to know user experience is to experience, without a single step left. Even  in speed, paper Prototyping isn ’ t better than wireframe software, since it takes more time to communicate with developers once there ’ s only a draft available. Frankly there’ve  been more and more PM   &

How to Make Design More Efficient with "Reuse"?

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Webs, apps and desktops are the main force to push the wheels of this information industry. There are countless products poping up every second. This leads to huge pressure to the programmers, and of course, to the designers too. With facing this challenge, how can designer make their working time more efficient? Reuse, it means to use something repeatedly, it is one of the best ways to improve your efficiency. In programing and coding, reuse is an essential part. This method is also useful in prototyping. First of all, why we need to reuse? Code reuse aims to save time and resources and reduce redundancy by taking advantage of assets that have already been created in some forms within the software product development process. The key idea in reuse is that parts of a computer program written at earlier time can be or should be used in the construction of other programs written at a later time. There is the similar situation in prototyping. Reusing the same

Hi, my competitors! - How to Make A Successful Competitive Analysis?

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While the development of Internet industry, the bounces that come with a large population is reducing sharply and even close to disappearing. Every minute, in all areas, there are so many products have been launched. Even though the new-born, like sharing bikes app, once people know you, there will be a hundred same products in no time. This industry is developing so fast, product should not be updating with your eyes closed. You need to open your eyes, and look what others do. This is all about Competitive Analysis. First of all, let wikipedia tell you what is Competitive Analysis. Competitor analysis in marketing and strategic management is an assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of current and potential competitors. This analysis provides both an offensive and defensive strategic context to identify opportunities and threats. Profiling coalesces all of the relevant sources of competitor analysis into one framework in the support of efficient and effective