The following I have classified the skills and requirements necessary to become a UI designer into eight categories, namely: icon design ability, interface design ability, interaction design ability, aesthetic ability, brand thinking ability, user Experience, communication and understanding ability, planning and proposal ability.

Icon design capabilities

Icons are the most basic elements in UI design, and icons connect the entire world. No matter what language you use, icons play a huge role as a visual language. A good icon can allow users to "understand it in one second".

Icons come in different styles, which may be very skeuomorphic or very flat. Through different design styles, you can be more original and unique, so that you can be remembered by users. It is really important for users to remember our icons. You must know that every mobile phone is like a Swiss Army knife. It has countless functions, and our APP product is just one of thousands of functions. In the flat era, in addition to the layout of text and pictures, the channel through which we can convey users' emotions and sense of design is the various graphics and icons on the page, so it is very important to make users feel good and remember it in the first time.

If the icons are not made well, users will lose their enjoyment when using the interface. Therefore, I suggest that everyone who studies UI design needs to do a lot of icon exercises in daily life.

Interface design capabilities

The essence of the interface is to transmit and display information. Interface design usually includes graphics and text, and is the processing of material selection and presentation.

Color plays an extremely important role in any design. It is an important design element that expresses the designer's emotions and awakens the user's emotions. Color not only determines the overall style of the App interface, but also directly affects the user experience and clicks. Generally, the main color will be used on the header part of the App interface or the main elements in the interface, and other colors will be used to assist the main color. Generally, the choice of app color should be determined based on the content of the app, and different colors can be used to convey different emotions to users.

Text is the foundation of communication and understanding. As the main body of interface information transmission, it is also the core of the interface. Text is an essential design element and one of the important factors that give the interface design aesthetics. It needs to participate in the organization and arrangement of visual design together with other design elements. The text in the interface is mainly used for titles, slogans, text, pictures, etc. The user's reading habits must be fully taken into consideration to facilitate user browsing and give users a good reading experience. The font selection should conform to the overall design style of the interface, and the color tone selection should also be coordinated with the overall tone of the interface.

Image is also a way of expressing content and text, but its visual expression includes light, shadow, color and other forms, and contains richer content. It can transform ordinary things or dry text into Express it with more lively and vivid pictures. At the same time, the greater the difference in the interface of each image, the more diversified the presentation of the internal content description, which makes it easier to attract attention and stimulate user browsing and interest.

Typesetting layout elements mainly arrange the composition of visual elements in the interface. These elements are clearly visible in the list. Good composition can also help the entire interface to be unified and efficient, and will not make users confused during use. Confused and irritable emotions.

Interaction design capabilities

Interaction design is to transform business logic (functional specifications or content requirements) in a way that users can understand by analyzing user mental models, designing task processes, and using interaction knowledge. The process of expressing it to users and ultimately realizing product strategy (the best balance between company needs and user needs).

Outputs - The outputs of interaction designers are also relatively rich, including competitive product analysis documents, user feedback collection, flow charts, design sketches, design prototypes, etc.

Visual comfort is the first impression that users get when opening a product, and each subsequent step of operation and feedback is the key to whether users can quickly solve pain points through interactive behaviors.

A good interactive experience can improve user interaction efficiency, display information correlation forms more intuitively, distract users' attention and increase user patience, express the emotion and temperament of the product, and enhance the quality of the product.

A good interactive experience lies in: saving interaction steps as much as possible and reducing the difficulty of interaction, simulating the real physical environment, improving the sense of fun, soft interface transitions, and creating relationships through the same elements between different interfaces.

Aesthetic ability

Aesthetics is a process in which people judge the beauty or ugliness of all things. It is a subjective psychological activity that people make based on their own requirements for something. A view of things, which is also subject to objective factors, especially the era background in which people live, which will have a great impact on people's judgment standards.

Because everyone has a different understanding of beautiful things, there will be aesthetic differences. The standards for measuring beauty are relative, but people have summed up a set of aesthetic principles in life practice. Excellent design must Follow the formal laws of beauty.

Therefore, excellent design works must meet the standards of beauty and be recognized by the public. Only designers who are proficient in the formal laws of beauty and have good aesthetic abilities can design excellent works.

For designers, cultivating good aesthetic ability is particularly important. The way to improve your aesthetic ability is to pay attention to observation and analysis in life and constantly improve your overall quality.

Brand thinking

No matter what product is made, the design is to convey the service value of a certain brand. In the current era of homogeneity, many products seem to come from the same plastic surgery agency , we can’t tell the difference even if the names are removed.

In the future, the requirements for UI designers will not only require product interaction capabilities, but also continuous reflection on how to design differentiated products. Expression based on the characteristics of the brand also requires us to continue to dig deeper.

User experience

We always look at it from the perspective of product formation. The inertial thinking is that design is product art. Art is emotional, while design is relatively rational and precise. Art expresses the creator's personal consciousness, while design is to solve users' specific problems. Art is not realized from the user's perspective, but to express emotions about something from a personal level.

Design, especially Internet product design, is designed around user scenario behavior and has a certain pertinence and scope.

User experience design has an important goal: to create valuable and meaningful experiences. In order to better understand user needs, we not only need to do scientific research, but we also want users to participate in our design process. We must understand the users' most real product needs. Therefore, user experience design is first to solve a practical problem of the user, secondly to make the problem easier to solve, and finally to leave a deep impression on the user and give him a wonderful experience in the whole process.

Communication and understanding skills

Design should be meaningful. If the products we design are easy for users to use and help them realize their needs, users will feel satisfied and happy. Planning and designing a product requires a lot of effort and collaboration from all departments of the team. Therefore, communication and understanding skills are particularly important.

When dealing with the same design problem, everyone’s position and expertise are different. If a designer is always self-centered, it will easily cause misunderstandings and conflicts, making the communication process even more unpleasant. If you want to achieve effective communication and complete existing work tasks as quickly as possible, you must consider the problem from others' perspective and strictly follow a design specification that is consistent with the needs of the end user to simplify the entire process.

Planning and proposal ability

Planning and proposal ability is an essential skill for every designer who wants to approach management. The review meeting after each iteration is a proposal, and sharing design insights and experiences with members inside and outside the team is also a proposal.

Proposals need to have very strong logical ability and be broken down from large aspects to small points. For example, in a revision iteration, proposals can be made from three major directions: the large framework layer, the interaction layer, and finally the visual presentation layer. What's even more special is to add videos to the proposal. You can create interactive animations and then integrate these animations into a video to display them more intuitively.