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This article mainly explains "how to make a good tool product experience". The content of the article is simple and clear, and it is easy to learn and understand. Please follow the editor's train of thought. Let's study and learn "how to do a good tool product experience"!

Tool products usually have higher barriers to use, more complex product logic, and more stringent requirements on interaction and experience, especially for design tools.

We look for the existing design methods and find that there is no specific methodology for the design method and experience measurement of productivity tools, so we derive a design and experience model specifically suitable for productivity tool products. it is summarized as follows: 2 elements, 4 core dimensions, 4 experience goals and 9 experience principles, hoping to bring some help and new ways of thinking to peers.

Refine two elements of productivity tools

First of all, the two-element theory of productive forces holds that productive forces are composed of people and means of production, and people produce new labor materials through means of production. As designers, productivity tools are an indispensable part of our daily work, such as Sketch, Axure, C4D and other design tools. Designers produce new interfaces, models, prototypes and other materials through design tools.

C4D screenshot, a design tool commonly used by △ modelers

In addition, of course, there are documents, notes, videos, special effects software and other productivity software that produce other content materials. As a result, productivity tools usually appear in work scenarios, serve professionals, have an inherent process of use, and ultimately produce outputs that meet user expectations.

Secondly, how to define tool products, especially to Class B productivity tool products that pay attention to energy efficiency?

"tool originally refers to the instrument used at work, but later extends to the means to achieve, accomplish or promote something." behind the means represented by the tool, its core is to help people improve the productivity to achieve the goal. Therefore, in addition to the tool itself and the productivity goals that need to be achieved in using the tool, another very important factor is the person who uses the tool. For tool products, the most important thing is the relationship between "people" and "tools" as well as "people", "tools" and "productivity".

2 elements of △ Productivity tool

As can be seen from the above picture, the most important factors that affect the productivity results are "people" and "tools". People operate the tools to achieve the desired goals and get the production results, while the tools guide people in the opposite direction. Provide methods and processes on how to achieve production results.

As far as "people" is concerned, that is, users of tool products include different user roles and roles with different mental and behavior patterns; as far as "tools" are concerned, horizontal "function" and vertical "performance" are the core content. the function achieves the user's scene goal, and the performance helps the function to be realized stably and efficiently.

So, for design tools that aim to improve productivity, the four most important dimensions are coming out-"role", "mind", "function" and "performance".

Four core dimensions of △ productivity tools

Interpretation of the four core dimensions of productivity tools

Next, these four dimensions need to be further defined and disassembled.

Roles, that is, the target users who use the tool, are classified into different roles according to the differences in the user's goals, behaviors, and views. the detailed disassembly will also include the role list, role attributes, and role behavior. Take Kujiale decoration design software as an example, the roles of the design tools are professional home decoration designer, sales home decoration designer, hard decoration designer, draftsman, store guide, ordinary owner and so on. As far as the building information design software is concerned, the roles of the design tools are professional home decoration designers, managers, project managers, construction personnel and so on.

The role of △ building information tools

The mind refers to the way and habit of people to understand things, and the mind will influence how users perceive the world around them and how they act; the mind depends on the cognition of the corresponding roles, memory, the channels and methods of active access to education and passive education, as well as the use habits of role-based competitions.

For example, the home decoration industry has an inherent design and implementation process, which affects the basic cognition and mental model of all employees in the industry.

Design process of △ Building Information Industry

Function is the system solution or service provided by the product to meet the needs of users, including the list of functions, the usage scenarios of functions, the frequency of use, the important level of functions, and so on. For example, Kujiale decoration tools provide users with household drawing, model addition, rendering and other functions to meet the core needs of users and complete high-quality solutions.

Performance, which refers to the performance of the system in the work to be done at a specified time and using resources; the dimensions that can be examined are system-related data, hardware usage, BUG and availability, etc. For example: in the Kujiale decoration tool, the display frame rate of the tool is an important factor affecting the performance. When the frame rate is lower than a certain threshold, the user's model operation in the scene will feel obviously stuttered.

Interpretation of four Core Dimensions of △ Productivity tool

Matching four experience goals of Productivity tools-- four-Image Model

The four core dimensions can only provide the direction of experience and thinking of tool products, but can not become the goal of measuring experience. The available experience goals must have a clear goal result and definition. Taking productivity as the starting point, tools (including function, performance) and people (including roles and minds) are used as horizontal and vertical axes to cross-match the four core dimensions, that is, to produce target keywords of four target quadrant blocks with their respective priorities.

Applicability: when the "function" matches the "role", what we need to consider is whether the same tool product can meet the needs of users of different roles, and whether the same function can match different scenarios and related tools. Here is highlighted is the "applicability" this experience goal.

Efficiency: when "performance" and "role" are cross-considered, the product needs to help different roles meet the efficiency requirements of users with high performance in a variety of usage scenarios, on the one hand, shorten the time to complete typical tasks, on the other hand, improve the quality of tool products, that is, "high efficiency".

Learning cost: when considering "function" and "mind" as a whole, the experience of excellent tool products should achieve the perfect mapping between functional form and mental model as far as possible, in line with the general norms of the industry, so as to facilitate users to understand, recognize and learn, in order to achieve the goal of reducing the "learning cost" of tools.

Stability: similarly, when "performance" matches "mind", the experience goal of tool products focuses on "stability", that is, ensuring mental unity in time and space with the stability of tool performance. no matter when and where users use tools on different browsers on different systems, they should ensure unified feedback and provide a stable experience.

This is the four-image model applied to the design and experience measurement of productivity tools.

△ four-image model

On the contrary, looking at the relationship between the four disassembled experience goals and productivity, although there is no rigorous function formula, but their previous relationship is very clear: applicability, efficiency, stability are positively related to productivity, while learning cost is negatively related to productivity.

△ figure 10: the relationship between productivity and core dimensions

Therefore, when the core demand of users for productivity tools is to improve productivity, designers need to consider design goals from four dimensions: applicability, efficiency, stability improvement and reduction of learning costs. To sum up, the most core and universal experience goals of tool products can be "high applicability", "ease of learning", "high efficiency", and "strong stability".

4 experience goals of △ Productivity tool

9 experience principles for dismantling Productivity tools

So how can goals be translated into principles that can guide and test the design?

Google's GSM model target (Goal) → signal (Signal) → index (Metric) is a data model familiar to interaction designers, which determines the corresponding signal of the target by establishing the target, and then decomposes it into quantifiable signal indicators to complete the transformation from the target to the index.

Drawing lessons from GSM's way of thinking to disassemble and map, the four-image model can be disassembled into more focused "experience principles" and subsequent more detailed "experience rules" from the four general tool product experience goals of "high applicability", "ease of learning", "high efficiency" and "strong stability", and then use appropriate index data to measure experience through the concrete signals divided by the experience details.

Nine experiential principles of △ four-image model

As can be seen from the above picture, in the process of product design, framework design, interface design and development of productivity tools, the principles that need to be considered are: breadth of application, scalability, cognitive matching, interface efficiency, learning and help, output efficiency, operational efficiency, information depth, resource occupation and other nine principles, to help designers and engineers evaluate plans at different stages of product research and development.

Thank you for your reading. the above is the content of "how to do well the experience of tool products". After the study of this article, I believe you have a deeper understanding of how to do a good job in the experience of tool products. the specific use of the situation also needs to be verified by practice. Here is, the editor will push for you more related knowledge points of the article, welcome to follow!

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