Visibility and Priority in Product Design

— Weizhi’s Reading Notes

Tonight I have read two articles regarding product design. The first one is from Julie Zhuo, one of my favorite designers or mentors in Product World. Her article was about “What You See is What You Use” From roof deck versus patio dynamic at play to discussion UI design, such as hamburger menu versus tab bar.

Which remind me another discussion about different country users’ preference, Asian people get used to viewing everything on one page or one screen, but European or Americans they would rather see the clean design in website or app. Which is kindly opposite to Julie’s point, but actually I totally agree with the same feeling regarding visibility issue. When I start to hanging out in the mobile app, I preferred to tap with the obvious app icon when I open my cell, but ignoring with the group inside games (Hidden inside the square corner in iPhone).

She also mentioned that four points about UI design: On entry points/On menus/On contextual actions/On leveraging existing channels, especially for entry points, I think which will be the most important stage, since it’s the first step into this app and introduce all different features at first glance, we should start to thinking “How will people discover this feature?” Then creating the mocks to show how it will work later.

Overall, People always choose what they seeing in front of them, just like Julie mentioned:

“If you want something to be seen and used, don’t make people look for it. Put it where they’re already looking.”

Another article is from ZHIHU (A version of Chinese Quora), the man called Li Ma, who is the CEO of “The best app”, he wrote a set of articles about Product Design and Thinking. The first one is discussing of Product Design Priority, which I think there are some similar points in “What You See is What You Use”. He mentioned the iPhone home button design, which related with product priority. How to manage different pieces of features in one app, how to manipulate very well and efficiency. These are all question marks in product design process. Trying to figure it out which is the most priority function and unnecessary ones.

“We often say that to do subtraction, in fact, the core process is a priority. The design of the priority is to make sure we are able to place the important functions, content and interface elements in a prominent position, with the most resources libraries to demonstrate their interface while weakening the part of the minor, hidden elements, even cut off the unnecessary ones.”

So, when to jump into the depth of product in the first step, keep in mind that visibility or priority are really helpful for product design and thinking.