如何做出产品设计决策 (How Product Design Decisions are Made)

Recently in a Facebook group dedicated to designers, known as Designers Guild, a young design student named Marina Candela asked why many modern designs tend to feel so terrible or “backwards” looking, like digressions. Specifically designs from large tech companies like Uber, Apple, or Facebook.

最近，在一个名为Designers Guild的致力于设计师的Facebook组织中，一位名叫Marina Candela的年轻设计专业学生问为什么许多现代设计趋向于看起来如此可怕或“向后”，像题外话。特别是来自Uber，Apple或Facebook等大型科技公司的设计。

You don’t have to read all the latest headlines or browse the countless unsolicited redesigns on Dribbble to understand what this question entails. For many people, both designers and not, the gut reaction to seeing a new design is typically: that is stupid.

您不必阅读所有最新的头条新闻，也不必浏览Dribbble上无数不请自来的重新设计即可了解此问题的含义。对于许多人(包括设计师和非设计师)而言，看到新设计的直觉通常是： 愚蠢的 。

The problem with this is that design is not a process of beautifying things. Designers don’t get paid to make things necessarily look nice. Yes craft is certainly part of the job, but it’s not the job.

问题在于设计不是美化事物的过程。设计师没有得到报酬以使事物看起来一定不错。是的手艺肯定是工作的一部分，但它不是工作。

There’s a lot of work going on behind the scenes when design decisions are made. More than you might imagine.

做出设计决策时，幕后有很多工作要做。超出您的想象。

This is particularly true for companies like Uber and Facebook, or really any large company today. Design at these companies entails everything from research, experimentation, iteration, lab or small group testing, and real-world testing. Each of these steps can take anywhere from a few weeks to months, with the time invested in researching, conceptualizing, and testing, reflecting the potential impact of the design decision. The larger the design task, the longer it takes to move on it.

对于Uber和Facebook之类的公司，或者今天的任何大型公司，尤其如此。这些公司的设计涉及从研究，实验，迭代，实验室或小组测试到实际测试的所有内容。这些步骤中的每一个步骤都可能花费数周到数月的时间，并且花费了时间进行研究，概念化和测试，从而反映出设计决策的潜在影响。设计任务越大，进行该任务所需的时间越长。

It’s common for amateur designers and the average Jane or Joe to look at design projects like Uber’s logo or a new design for Instagram or Facebook, and respond solely with their gut. “This looks worse than before! How can anyone understand this?! What were they thinking? This is terribly designed.”

对于业余设计师和普通的Jane或Joe来说，查看Uber徽标之类的设计项目或Instagram或Facebook的新设计是很常见的，并且仅凭直觉来回应。 “这看起来比以前更糟！谁能理解？他们在想什么？这是经过精心设计的。”

In reality, these are vastly more surface level responses then what design intends to deal with.

实际上，这些响应比设计要处理的响应要多得多。

The purpose of the design isn’t always to make something look good, or even better than before. What these design processes are about is solving a problem.

设计的目的并不总是使外观看起来更好，甚至比以前更好。这些设计过程所要解决的是问题 。

Good design solves problems.

好的设计可以解决问题。

Sometimes the problem is that customers view your brand as a lower-scale version than what they are paying for, which dilutes the value of the company. Other times the problem is that the platform you’ve created is itself outweighing the content it produces or hosts. Or that a primary feature has become hidden, or an influx of new features has crowded the interface, or what you and your team thought made reasonable sense is immensely confusing for people who use the product out in the real world.

有时问题在于，客户将您的品牌视为比其付费版本低的版本，这削弱了公司的价值。其他时候，问题在于您创建的平台本身超过了它产生或托管的内容。或者主要功能已被隐藏，或者新功能的涌入使界面拥挤不堪，或者您和您的团队认为合理的想法对于在现实世界中使用该产品的人们造成极大的困扰。

Other times still there are issues the common designer may never be aware of: scaling a website to suit the needs of almost everyone on the earth, for example. That’s a really hard problem to solve, and an equally hard problem for most people to wrap their heads around.

在其他时候，仍然存在一些普通设计师可能从未意识到的问题：例如，扩展网站以适应地球上几乎所有人的需求。这确实是一个很难解决的问题，对于大多数人来说，同样难以解决。

My own experience at Facebook is a good example of this. Most designers will say that Facebook is extremely ugly (and as a designer myself, I tend to agree). Yet Facebook doesn’t have to look phenomenal to work well. And this is what I’m most proud of being a Facebook product designer: the problem of scaling a product for the entire world to use is really, really hard, and yet Facebook is doing it fairly well.

我在Facebook上的经验就是一个很好的例子。大多数设计师会说Facebook非常丑陋(作为设计师，我倾向于同意)。但是，Facebook不必看起来出色就可以正常工作 。这就是我成为一名Facebook产品设计师时最引以为傲的问题：确实很难扩展整个产品以供全世界使用的问题，而Facebook却做得很好。

Consider a few of the problems a designer working on Facebook may encounter: Every word, every button, needs to be translated to hundreds of languages, which creates issues with layout spacing among other major hurdles. Content reverses sides of the screen depending on which part of the world you’re in (left-to-right text VS right-to-left text). In some parts of the world certain types of content are simply outlawed, and placeholder or legalese must be put in its place dynamically. Some people use Facebook on their $700 iPhone with unlimited data plans while others use it on a $5 flip phone and only 1mb of data to spare each month. Some people have an internet connection that is 1,000 times slower than others, which means things like images and app size really matter

考虑一下在Facebook上工作的设计师可能遇到的一些问题：每个单词，每个按钮都需要翻译成数百种语言，这在其他主要障碍中造成了布局间距问题。内容会根据您所处的世界区域(从左到右的文本与从右到左的文本)而在屏幕的两边反转。在世界某些地区，某些类型的内容被简单地取缔了，并且占位符或法文必须动态地放置在其位置。有些人在700美元的iPhone上使用Facebook并提供无限制的数据套餐，而另一些人则在5美元的翻盖手机上使用Facebook，每月仅保留1mb的数据。有些人的互联网连接速度比其他人慢1000倍，这意味着诸如图片和应用大小之类的东西确实很重要

The best designers consider not only the objective of a project (like the ability to live stream from the app) but also the constraints they must work within and the issues they must work around. Not only that, but much of the design process we encounter day-to-day should be about determining whether or not the problem being solved is the right problem to solve to begin with. And if it’s not: how do we go about identifying the real problems?

最好的设计师不仅考虑项目的目标(例如从应用程序实时流式播放的能力 )，还考虑他们必须在其中工作的约束以及必须解决的问题。不仅如此，我们每天遇到的许多设计过程都应该与确定要解决的问题是否是一开始要解决的正确问题有关。 如果不是，那么：我们如何确定真正的问题？

So while it’s easy to look at a design and think it’s ugly, or lame, or a digression, the reality is that there are many, many, many, many decisions being made and considerations taking place behind the scenes which have led to the latest design.

因此，虽然很容易看清设计并认为它丑陋，la脚或离题，但现实是，有很多很多决定在做，并且考虑到幕后的原因导致了最新的设计。设计。

And if the team behind the design has done their work well, they’ve tested and experimented and validated their work enough to push it to the place where people like you or other designers can finally get a look at it.

如果设计背后的团队做得很好，那么他们已经对自己的工作进行了测试，试验和验证，足以将其推向可以像您这样的人或其他设计师的视野的地方。

That doesn’t mean the design is done, but it does mean that it’s “done enough” to satisfy any major concerns.

这并不意味着设计已经完成，而是意味着它“足够完善”，可以满足任何主要问题。

One thing you can do to better equip yourself to evaluate design work is to step back and think of all the scenarios the person(s) responsible are attempting to address. I outlined a few we encounter at Facebook above, but I’m sure you can come up with many more of your own.

为了使自己更好地评估设计工作，您可以做的一件事是退后一步，考虑一下负责人员试图解决的所有方案。我概述了上面我们在Facebook上遇到的一些问题，但是我敢肯定，您可以提出更多自己的想法。

Before judging a design you should ask questions like:

在评审设计之前，您应该提出以下问题：

What problem is this attempting to solve?
试图解决什么问题？
Who is it solving it for? If not me, then who?
它是为谁解决的？如果不是我，那又是谁？
What problems or scenarios might those people encounter that this design is considering?
这些人正在考虑的设计可能会遇到哪些问题或场景？
What are the limitations being designed for?
设计的局限性是什么？
What about constraints?
约束呢？

Lastly, as additional food for thought, consider the fact that people simply don’t like change. Change presents challenges we mostly want to do without. But change is inevitable, and while new designs can feel strange or unfriendly at first, we inevitably grow into them because… well, time works that way.

最后，作为思考的补充，考虑一下人们根本不喜欢变化的事实。变革提出了我们最想做的挑战。但是改变是不可避免的，尽管新设计乍一看会让人感到陌生或不友好，但我们不可避免地会融入其中，因为……好吧，时间就是这样。