Say a word about a poor mockup
Last week a publication appeared Prototype this , defined by the author as “holivarnaya”.
Since we are talking about the saint, why not throw a couple of branches on the fire?
I am an interface designer. And I love mokapy.
And why should I not love them, if I only do what I do them?
For a start, we note that mockups and prototypes are not the same thing. In a non-Russian IT dictionary, there are several terms for visuals that correspond to different stages of work on an IT product. The boundaries of these terms are blurred, but, nevertheless, having seen something interface-graphic, it is not difficult to classify it.
1. Sketch (sketch, sketch) - the initial instant sketch of the hand that goes to the head.
2. Wireframe (block diagram) - a diagram or drawing representing the “skeleton” of a site or application page. No decorations, only the location and approximate dimensions of the headers, text blocks, illustrations, multimedia and navigation bars.
3. Prototype (prototype) - a model for testing a concept or process. Pictures can be inserted, color tonal gradations appear, etc.
4. Simulation (simulacrum, simulation, full-function prototype) - on complex projects there is also a model for testing a concept or process, but - Hi-Fi (high fidelity - high accuracy, unlike protopipa, which is a model of low accuracy - Lo-Fi) . To create simulations (or simulations, if you will), iRise is usually used. It uses libraries of visuals that allow you to portray pages very close to the final view, there are drop-down lists, buttons that change their appearance when you hover, navigation between screens, pop-ups, etc.
5. Mockup or mock-up ( mock-up ) - a non-working model, made in full size and looking like a working instance will look like. That is, the webpage made in Photoshop, submitted for layout is mocap. And it will become a design when interactivity appears. In fact, mockups can be relatively dynamic and interactive, but more on that later on.
')
Projects in which all these stages are fully represented are extremely rare. And since the developers are too busy to understand the nuances of what they don’t use, the term “prototype” can be called anything in between the first handwriting and the finished product.
At the dawn of site building, prototypes were made by designers themselves, calling them “sketches”, “sketches”, “sketches”, etc. - who in what was much. At the same time, they even somehow did not imagine that they combined in their work at least two or three different specializations. Approximately a hundred years ago, a motorist was a driver and a mechanic in one person, and a little earlier, he wished to make a bronze ax to dig the ore himself.
But now IT specialization has crystallized, indicating that the industry is growing up. The past pure-ponto sites are being replaced by really working, complex services, cost estimates are growing, the structure of working groups is becoming complicated, the 21st century is knocking on the skull boxes of managers. And this is good.
But why do designers not like this division of labor? - Yes, very simple: due to the significant loss of control over the process of creating a product. Previously, it was possible to cook anything, but now there was another hostess in the “kitchen” who knows better how to prepare semi-finished products, and the designer’s task now is to bring them to standard and beautifully serve. Moreover, these damned "interaction designers" are blowing at all angles that their work is more important than graphic design, and everyone agrees with them!
Whether it is different professions is not a question. They are different, and it has been repeatedly proven. Can the talents of the interaction designer (I’m going to write “UX” for brevity) and the graphic designer be fully combined in one person? Not always, but they can. Approximately the same as some pianists can tolerably play the guitar. The question remains, is it always necessary to separate the processes of creating UX and graphics and give them away to different people?
In general, everything is simple: if a visual designer has enough abilities, experience and time to practice UX, it is better to give it all (UX specialists cannot cope with visuals if there is no designer past behind them).
But the harder the job, the more insistent the question of the division of labor. Consider two typical extreme options.
1. An option ideal for a visual designer, from the point of view of UX as simple as an amoeba: a web-designer online portfolio.
Here he himself - the customer and the performer, and cope with UX easily. Career usually begins with this and other simple sites, performed by a team of 2-3 people, where the designer communicates with the customer one-on-one and is fully confident that everything not related to programming is his design diocese. Often with this confidence he goes further in the profession.
2. Option adult: a large and complex client application that demonstrates in all its glory the difference between interaction design and visual design, for example, a WPF project that has been in development for two to three years or more before the first release.
Usually the stakeholders on such projects are so important people that they simply don’t have time to talk with the designers. Therefore, service managers are responsible for the adequacy of setting the tasks. These are experts from the same industry as stakeholders, but with a bias in IT. They understand what tasks and how the product should solve, but at the beginning of the work, the final form of the application is vague, especially if the project is innovative and has no existing analogues.
The project, of course, is divided into short segments - sprints (usually a month and a half and a half long), and the UX group, in close, daily interaction with the service directors, gradually from sprint to sprint, gradually forms models of users with different modules and basic principles of working with the product. A UX group can consist of 2-3 or more UX designers and a visual designer.
UX designers have their own leader, who is actually a business analyst, and he has to dig deep into industry specifics. On the basis of working with directors of services, he determines which methods and techniques for building the interface will be used and which will not, i. develops a certain vision of user interaction with a future product.
A visual designer develops his own vision of managing the user's attention and emotions within the framework of a certain visual identity. It can be said that it creates a script for managing the attention and emotions of the user, but in real life, of course, there is no documented “script”, there is only an idea and some initial blocks that gradually “overgrown with meat”. And the designer does not dance from the stove along with a business analyst, but spends all his creative energy cumulatively, spending only a few hours a week discussing already created interaction models and using video clips with UX sequences. In this case, of course, he can offer his UX-solutions and implement them if they do not break the general concept of interaction scenarios.
On the other hand, no one interferes in the work of the designer to visualize the product, because this is similar to a symphony that has not yet been written - no one but the author can know how relevant this or that note in the finished work will be.
Most of the projects are somewhere in the middle between these extremes, and the one who manages the project is more aware of whether to entrust the UX to a visual designer or not. As a rule, interaction design is a more labor-intensive and more important part of the work on a product, and if the designer wants to control the interface creation process, he must migrate towards the UX. But at the same time you need to be prepared for the fact that one day you will be removed from the creation of the visual and you will have to watch it from afar.
Such a prospect somehow does not smile at me. I love prototypes, but I like mockups even more.
I am on Habré in the status Read-only and I can not leave comments. Therefore, please, my good readers, go through the interface hub and put in a word about a poor mockup.
Publications Prototyping this was followed by Questions to the post of Alex Rublev about design . Although they did not ask me, I can answer from the shop rows.
1. Why, when designers are asked to remake something, tantrums happen to them? Moreover, the more substantial the improvements - the more terrible tantrums.
- Watson, this is elementary! The designers with whom you dealt are not from the highest league and will never be in it. If a person, making an interface for a touchscreen, draws millimeter buttons, then this indicates his lack of analytical skills. He can be a good schedule, not a good designer. Design is not how beautiful everything should look, but how beautiful everything should work and solve the tasks. And if the designer in the process of work indicated a miss, he should thank colleagues for the contribution that allows to make the product better.
2. Prototyping does limit the freedom of flight of creative thought, but it greatly reduces the likelihood of rework. Thus, less likely design hysteria. This does not justify the use of the method?
- A rhetorical question that does not require an answer. The creative idea of a designer should fly in a given direction as a carrier pigeon, and not anywhere like a moth. ;-)
Or maybe I did not come across such designers?
If you are not afraid to learn the scary truth, then the level of your designers corresponds to the level of your projects: “From tens to hundreds of man hours , money, blood and sweat to get an interface convenient for people. And five hours of designer work, before or after. "
- The cost of a visual is half a percentage point of the project estimate? - So, for you, the quality of a visual is a matter for the fiftieth. Get it and sign it! Do you think in epplah and googles work on the same principle - “well, everything is ready, we will hire someone to decorate for 5 hours”? - Not at all, they have whole designer departments sitting there!
Yes, the customer knows better whether the level of performance of the visual affects the profitability of the project. But what does “before or after” mean? There is the generally accepted, thousands of times proven information systems development methodology, which determines the sequence: customer's request> business analysis> UX> visual design> programming> QA, etc. It doesn’t matter whether the project is done using the vintage waterfall method or the Ajayl with sprints - the sequence is the same. You can, of course, twist and move the cart before the horse, but why? Apparently, then, that the project management has visuals on the drum: they will do it before or after, that designer or this one - if only this fuss of creative personalities ate less money. And for some reason, normal designers love when their contribution to the product is taken seriously. And usually they have a choice where to work. Ce la vie ...
Since we are talking about the saint, why not throw a couple of branches on the fire?
I am an interface designer. And I love mokapy.
And why should I not love them, if I only do what I do them?
About prototypes or Call a spade a spade
For a start, we note that mockups and prototypes are not the same thing. In a non-Russian IT dictionary, there are several terms for visuals that correspond to different stages of work on an IT product. The boundaries of these terms are blurred, but, nevertheless, having seen something interface-graphic, it is not difficult to classify it.
1. Sketch (sketch, sketch) - the initial instant sketch of the hand that goes to the head.
2. Wireframe (block diagram) - a diagram or drawing representing the “skeleton” of a site or application page. No decorations, only the location and approximate dimensions of the headers, text blocks, illustrations, multimedia and navigation bars.
3. Prototype (prototype) - a model for testing a concept or process. Pictures can be inserted, color tonal gradations appear, etc.
4. Simulation (simulacrum, simulation, full-function prototype) - on complex projects there is also a model for testing a concept or process, but - Hi-Fi (high fidelity - high accuracy, unlike protopipa, which is a model of low accuracy - Lo-Fi) . To create simulations (or simulations, if you will), iRise is usually used. It uses libraries of visuals that allow you to portray pages very close to the final view, there are drop-down lists, buttons that change their appearance when you hover, navigation between screens, pop-ups, etc.
5. Mockup or mock-up ( mock-up ) - a non-working model, made in full size and looking like a working instance will look like. That is, the webpage made in Photoshop, submitted for layout is mocap. And it will become a design when interactivity appears. In fact, mockups can be relatively dynamic and interactive, but more on that later on.
')
Projects in which all these stages are fully represented are extremely rare. And since the developers are too busy to understand the nuances of what they don’t use, the term “prototype” can be called anything in between the first handwriting and the finished product.
About the principles of the designer’s work or why prototypes are good
At the dawn of site building, prototypes were made by designers themselves, calling them “sketches”, “sketches”, “sketches”, etc. - who in what was much. At the same time, they even somehow did not imagine that they combined in their work at least two or three different specializations. Approximately a hundred years ago, a motorist was a driver and a mechanic in one person, and a little earlier, he wished to make a bronze ax to dig the ore himself.
But now IT specialization has crystallized, indicating that the industry is growing up. The past pure-ponto sites are being replaced by really working, complex services, cost estimates are growing, the structure of working groups is becoming complicated, the 21st century is knocking on the skull boxes of managers. And this is good.
But why do designers not like this division of labor? - Yes, very simple: due to the significant loss of control over the process of creating a product. Previously, it was possible to cook anything, but now there was another hostess in the “kitchen” who knows better how to prepare semi-finished products, and the designer’s task now is to bring them to standard and beautifully serve. Moreover, these damned "interaction designers" are blowing at all angles that their work is more important than graphic design, and everyone agrees with them!
Whether it is different professions is not a question. They are different, and it has been repeatedly proven. Can the talents of the interaction designer (I’m going to write “UX” for brevity) and the graphic designer be fully combined in one person? Not always, but they can. Approximately the same as some pianists can tolerably play the guitar. The question remains, is it always necessary to separate the processes of creating UX and graphics and give them away to different people?
In general, everything is simple: if a visual designer has enough abilities, experience and time to practice UX, it is better to give it all (UX specialists cannot cope with visuals if there is no designer past behind them).
But the harder the job, the more insistent the question of the division of labor. Consider two typical extreme options.
1. An option ideal for a visual designer, from the point of view of UX as simple as an amoeba: a web-designer online portfolio.
Here he himself - the customer and the performer, and cope with UX easily. Career usually begins with this and other simple sites, performed by a team of 2-3 people, where the designer communicates with the customer one-on-one and is fully confident that everything not related to programming is his design diocese. Often with this confidence he goes further in the profession.
2. Option adult: a large and complex client application that demonstrates in all its glory the difference between interaction design and visual design, for example, a WPF project that has been in development for two to three years or more before the first release.
Usually the stakeholders on such projects are so important people that they simply don’t have time to talk with the designers. Therefore, service managers are responsible for the adequacy of setting the tasks. These are experts from the same industry as stakeholders, but with a bias in IT. They understand what tasks and how the product should solve, but at the beginning of the work, the final form of the application is vague, especially if the project is innovative and has no existing analogues.
The project, of course, is divided into short segments - sprints (usually a month and a half and a half long), and the UX group, in close, daily interaction with the service directors, gradually from sprint to sprint, gradually forms models of users with different modules and basic principles of working with the product. A UX group can consist of 2-3 or more UX designers and a visual designer.
UX designers have their own leader, who is actually a business analyst, and he has to dig deep into industry specifics. On the basis of working with directors of services, he determines which methods and techniques for building the interface will be used and which will not, i. develops a certain vision of user interaction with a future product.
A visual designer develops his own vision of managing the user's attention and emotions within the framework of a certain visual identity. It can be said that it creates a script for managing the attention and emotions of the user, but in real life, of course, there is no documented “script”, there is only an idea and some initial blocks that gradually “overgrown with meat”. And the designer does not dance from the stove along with a business analyst, but spends all his creative energy cumulatively, spending only a few hours a week discussing already created interaction models and using video clips with UX sequences. In this case, of course, he can offer his UX-solutions and implement them if they do not break the general concept of interaction scenarios.
On the other hand, no one interferes in the work of the designer to visualize the product, because this is similar to a symphony that has not yet been written - no one but the author can know how relevant this or that note in the finished work will be.
Most of the projects are somewhere in the middle between these extremes, and the one who manages the project is more aware of whether to entrust the UX to a visual designer or not. As a rule, interaction design is a more labor-intensive and more important part of the work on a product, and if the designer wants to control the interface creation process, he must migrate towards the UX. But at the same time you need to be prepared for the fact that one day you will be removed from the creation of the visual and you will have to watch it from afar.
Such a prospect somehow does not smile at me. I love prototypes, but I like mockups even more.
Ps Answers to questions asked not to me ;-)
Publications Prototyping this was followed by Questions to the post of Alex Rublev about design . Although they did not ask me, I can answer from the shop rows.
1. Why, when designers are asked to remake something, tantrums happen to them? Moreover, the more substantial the improvements - the more terrible tantrums.
- Watson, this is elementary! The designers with whom you dealt are not from the highest league and will never be in it. If a person, making an interface for a touchscreen, draws millimeter buttons, then this indicates his lack of analytical skills. He can be a good schedule, not a good designer. Design is not how beautiful everything should look, but how beautiful everything should work and solve the tasks. And if the designer in the process of work indicated a miss, he should thank colleagues for the contribution that allows to make the product better.
2. Prototyping does limit the freedom of flight of creative thought, but it greatly reduces the likelihood of rework. Thus, less likely design hysteria. This does not justify the use of the method?
- A rhetorical question that does not require an answer. The creative idea of a designer should fly in a given direction as a carrier pigeon, and not anywhere like a moth. ;-)
Or maybe I did not come across such designers?
If you are not afraid to learn the scary truth, then the level of your designers corresponds to the level of your projects: “From tens to hundreds of man hours , money, blood and sweat to get an interface convenient for people. And five hours of designer work, before or after. "
- The cost of a visual is half a percentage point of the project estimate? - So, for you, the quality of a visual is a matter for the fiftieth. Get it and sign it! Do you think in epplah and googles work on the same principle - “well, everything is ready, we will hire someone to decorate for 5 hours”? - Not at all, they have whole designer departments sitting there!
Yes, the customer knows better whether the level of performance of the visual affects the profitability of the project. But what does “before or after” mean? There is the generally accepted, thousands of times proven information systems development methodology, which determines the sequence: customer's request> business analysis> UX> visual design> programming> QA, etc. It doesn’t matter whether the project is done using the vintage waterfall method or the Ajayl with sprints - the sequence is the same. You can, of course, twist and move the cart before the horse, but why? Apparently, then, that the project management has visuals on the drum: they will do it before or after, that designer or this one - if only this fuss of creative personalities ate less money. And for some reason, normal designers love when their contribution to the product is taken seriously. And usually they have a choice where to work. Ce la vie ...
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/170549/
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