Designing interfaces with a design mindset

As a digital product designer, understanding my own position, expressing the human side, and having a contextual design perspective is already part of everyday life. Under the rapid development of science and technology, the interface type has evolved from hardware to software, and then from software to hardware with software. Hardware conditions had been combined with software services to achieve the subset of Jobs 🍎:

iPod is Software.

As you can imagine, designing interfaces is no longer the design of “UI”, web UI, mobile app UI, or generally called graphic UI. It means more impact on human benefits.

Designing Interfaces is a book that is worthy of learning interface foundation. It was only bought 10 years ago. The content had been updated to the second version with mobile devices mainstream and a preliminary study of the Internet of Things. For each terminal device, there is an indispensable meaningful interface design for digital navigation, attention, and communication.

However, I found that design architecture has not changed, which verifies the value of Bill Moggridge’s prototype design in Designing Interactions. Every designer can use a prototype to understand user behaviors through the most realistic design approach to make interface interaction tangible. In brief, the interface design is making sense of interaction.

Apple’s innovation has proven that the value of the interface not only represents a product or service but also has an influence on ecosystem design. From Macintosh, and iTunes, to iOS, it all verifies that Interface’s mindset is software.

The following article summarizes the design architecture of Designing Interfaces in three parts. Thanks to 19D Studio studying Material Design System, for their support to the convergence of this article. And also thanks to my experience growing with the design team and collaborating with designers from ChargeSmith ⚡️and Kika Tech 😂:

User Journey → Prototyping → Design Story → 🔁

1. User Journey

A good user journey has a clear core action and engagement. From an MVP perspective, a journey map design can’t be too broad or too narrow. One core action is a good way to define what you want to focus on. Engagement is a manifestation. The book Flow perfectly interprets the engaging strategy of how to make users flow in the journey. In fact, when we are evaluating a user journey, the most common metric, User Conversion Funnels, is based on the journey map. Because it’s the easiest way to observe behavioral changes during the flow.

🗺 ️The user journey map has two main values:

1. One is to define user problems. The human-centered process is one of the ways to do sense-making. It’s not necessary to do user research if your strategy makes sense.
2. The second value is to design a blueprint, the predecessor of the product/service road map. A good synthesis skill will be powerful to find out great value propositions that inspire team brainstorming winning strategy. A useful or valuable design can make things more meaningful to you.

The Brief of User Journey:
Observation > Behavior > Insights >
Opportunities > Value Proposition

2. Prototyping

Prototyping involves a very wide range of design processes and content. Starting a design is equivalent to starting a prototype. Designers find their inspiration in planning features by setting up user scenarios. The purpose of planning scenarios is primarily to help the team to find out their target audience’s user feedback. These user needs will be validated during the design usability.

Therefore, the actual transformation from insights to actions (from user needs to functional specifications) determines information architecture. The architecture must reflect your strategies, which include features that are highly prioritized and features that need to be designed for attention.

👀 Attention Design (Hooked)is a design strategy that is used to manipulate a user’s cognitive psychology. Attention design is also a leading design of interface design. A practical design not only makes product/service valuable but also brings creative confidence to designers.

Prototyping makes things tangible, which means every test is measurable by designing “how” during an experiment. When the prototyping process accumulates more “hows”, whether they are successful or not, it is the competitiveness of design KNOW-HOW. It will support you to do things right.

The Brief of Prototyping:
Value Proposition > Strategy > Information Architecture >
Design Strategy > User Experience > User Interface

Pause & Think: what’s the difference between UX-to-UI & UI-to-UX?

3. Design Story

The interface design can be measured through product metrics or user feedback. It helps designers to iterate or return to the journey to figure out new opportunities. A design story from the journey expresses a contextual design with user interfaces.

The purpose of a story helps the design team not only connect the dots of a company’s goals but also understand the design of the product in their hands. The key results may not necessarily be profitable, but they must be valuable to the company’s vision.

Visioning connects purpose to challenges from individuals to teams. Especially in the business field, good leadership often lifts a person’s vision to higher sights, even to a company’s vision. When you realize the company’s vision, the vision will guide you to do the right thing, a meaningful design.

The Brief of Design Story:
User Interface > Iteration/Reflection >
Visioning > Challenge > Observation

Designing interfaces is not just a design topic, but a more comprehensive strategy subject. Interface design makes the industry feel sexy and not easy to control. If you are a digital product designer, I believe that your design desires to solve problems and create values for a bigger impact. 🌳

If you have read this framework, in the end, you may have an image in your brain. Welcome to share and communicate with me what’s your picture. And if you like this article, clap the article together. 👏👏👏