Editor's Introduction: There are many rumors in the design industry that companies do not recruit designers over the age of 30, and some people think that UI design needs to be transformed at the age of 30. Faced with such an awkward age, where is the way out for designers to reach the age of 30? The author of this article expresses his views on this based on his own experience, he believes that there is compound interest in ability, and after the age of 30 is the age of compound interest, let's take a look at the author's insights.
Anxiety about age hangs over the heads of all UI designers. And I, 34 years old, want to talk about my opinion.
Many people have heard rumors that companies do not recruit designers over the age of 30; some people firmly believe that UI design will enter the bottleneck period at the age of 30, and unless it is transformed, there is no room for development at all. There are also people who think that middle-aged people's thinking is solidified, poor plasticity, and unpopular in enterprises. In addition to these, there are all kinds of trivial things after starting a family, as well as physical and energetic physiological decline. Designers over the age of 30 are under the pressure of disadvantages, competing with young people for positions, and it seems that they have no chance of winning. Designers can't help but get anxious - when designers reach the age of 30, where is the way out?
Baidu keyword association rest assured, I am anti-anxiety, tired of chicken soup. I will only discuss with you how to face anxiety and get rid of anxiety. Back to a few questions above:
Surrounded by family chores, you can see them as a burden and let them drain your energy. It can also increase the sensitivity of awareness and feel the small blessing brought by the sweet and sour;
In the face of the gradual decline of body and energy, you can adjust your work and rest more regularly, continue to get positive feedback, and feel the freedom brought by self-discipline;
Of course, there are middle-aged people whose thinking is solidified, but these people do not begin to solidify their thinking until they enter middle age. On the contrary, creativity is that everyone has an excellent factory configuration at birth, but it is consumed or stimulated to varying degrees in the process of growth. When entering the workplace, creativity is basically qualitative. Thereafter, young people without creativity will become middle-aged people without creativity; creative young people will become predecessors who continue to shine in the workplace, even with reputation.
Anxiety is an emotional response stimulated by real-world factors, but the intensity is not positively correlated with the actual threat. That said, you and I may not have to be so anxious.
But on the other hand, we should not ignore real threats beyond personal perceptions. To quote one of my mentors: Everyone pays for their personal perceptions.
The follow-up is divided into three parts:
1. What exactly is age anxiety?
2. What are the threats outside of cognition?
3. Where is the way out for designers after the age of 30?
<h1 toutiao-origin="h2" > what exactly is anxiety about age? </h1>
Before discussing this, let's take a look at the big picture: UI design work is hard to find right now. Due to the oversupply, in order to improve the efficiency of resume screening, employers have set up hard barriers on some conditions: for example, academic qualifications, such as age. The threshold of academic qualifications and majors does not affect everyone. But age is a barrier that no one can escape.
Let's take a look at a set of data, the following figure is from Lagou.com's Spring 2020 Recruitment Report:
There are three types of design in the top 10 most competitive positions – UI design, visual design and graphic design. Among them, the most fiercely competitive is UI design, with 118 people competing for a position. Visual design, as another type of design in the Internet industry, is close behind.
Note that there is a sentence in the remarks: "The easiest positions to recruit are concentrated in the design category, especially in the design talent of 1-3 years, 3-5 years, and the supply is oversupplied." That is to say, in the job market, a large number of young designers at the beginning and middle levels are concentrated, which increases the overall fierceness of competition. It is initially speculated that this is due to the continuous influx of new beginner and intermediate designers in the market, resulting in a continuous surge in the number of people in this experience segment. But these people did not progress to become senior designers and left the industry.
Relatively speaking, from the primary to intermediate level, the time period is relatively short, but the advanced to become a senior designer, the larger span leads to a longer cycle. Why is there a large influx of beginner and intermediate UI designers? In the past few years, UI design is a hot position, most of the practitioners have changed from other design fields such as industrial design and graphic design, and talents are relatively scarce, and Internet companies can give good treatment.
So the UI crash course blossomed everywhere. The training cycle of these crash courses is usually as short as a few months, and the content is some basic design essentials and software skills. Relative to the development position, the professional threshold of the UI is "low" (some people think that design is art), and a large number of non-design graduates enter the Internet industry in this way. And this training method can not lay a solid underlying framework, nor can it guarantee that the trainees can achieve continuous improvement for more than 3-5 years based on this framework, unless the designers themselves delve into it and practice diligently.
What are the factors that prevent designers from advancing to the advanced level? From the resume received from the recruitment UI, you can see some commonalities among designers: serious homogenization, only the number of stacked works, and lack of deep thinking.
What design style to adopt is the choice after comprehensively considering product positioning, company strategy, customer groups and the scene in which it is located. In addition to external factors, the design style is also a manifestation of a designer's inner temperament. Even if he may imitate and borrow at different stages, will develop and change, his innate temperament and aesthetic tendencies will determine his style of detailed expression. Therefore, homogenization is abnormal, a simple and crude "plagiarism", is lazy, good at lazy designers can go far?
Design works display website, there is a pixel-level plagiarism scene, some works are piled up in large numbers of works, or the pursuit of personal skills, but you can't see how much thinking is integrated into the process.
In fact, the essence of design is to solve the user's problems, and senior designers will allocate more time and energy to deep thinking, which starts at the macro and acts in the micro. The final design details presented are the result of thinking about real problems. What exactly is anxiety about age?
It cannot be denied that some companies do have a pathological corporate culture and discriminate against the age of candidates. But such a business should not have been an option in designer career planning. More employers assess whether candidates in that age group have the appropriate abilities.
And many designers, whether it is design skills or other work capabilities, the problem is not in age, but in the ability does not match.
<h1 toutiao-origin="h2" > what are the threats outside of cognition? </h1>
Tell your own little story.
Nine years ago I switched from industrial design to GUI design, and in a large design project, I cut tens of thousands of drawings and consumed at least two months. For those two months, I was an emotionless cut robot, doing mechanical brainless but demanding delicate "physical work" every day, and I had to start over when I was distracted and prone to error.
But now, any UI software can export cuts in multiple formats and sizes with one click. I wanted to console myself that those two months of cutting must have brought me some value. But in fact, there is no value except for wasting time. In the past, some positions in some companies were dedicated to chipping, and what kind of challenges did these people experience in the workplace after their jobs were replaced by design tools at zero cost?
Figma's automatic layout function and constraint function allow designers to get rid of low-level labor
I envy the technical environment in which young UI designers live – design tools unleash productivity without being trapped in low-level labor. But the development of science and technology has brought liberation to designers, but also brought challenges.
Artificial intelligence has brought dimensionality reduction blows Speaking of challenges, an artificial intelligence product, it is estimated that designers are not strangers - LuBan of Alibaba Intelligent Design Lab.
In 2016, Luban put 410 million advertising pictures, which is equivalent to 200 designers who did not eat or drink for 200 years. Shocked isn't it? But don't forget, Luban is an artificial intelligence, it is still learning quickly, whether it is performance ability or style changes, it is making rapid progress. If the designer's efforts are still working overtime and production capacity, you will always face competitors who work harder than you but ask for lower prices, and even the dimensionality reduction blow of tools and artificial intelligence.
I once interviewed a candidate from a big factory. I asked him, where do you think your advantages are? He said he was a pixel controller, and he would pull out any loose element of the design. Maybe compared to the less serious designer, her design attitude is commendable, but what about compared to tools that can intelligently correct errors? The competitors we face are not only the new people who will continue to pour into this industry in the future, but also the crushing of artificial intelligence beyond imagination.
Because Luban is a design ability and design execution product abstracted from large-scale data, this determines its upper limit - there is a gap between its best level and the best level of human beings. But the lower limit of the machine, or its worst level, is much better than the human design.
So I judged that AI design will be at the mid-to-upper level, it will not reach the top, but it will be better than many new designers. This may be a problem that students who have just graduated from design schools must face, for them, the pressure of the first start-up stage of society will be much higher than that of their predecessors, you will not be able to stay in the low order for too long, and your design execution will be quickly made up.
For high-level designers, I don't think there is any need to worry, because if you know its principle, you will know what can be done for the machine, which things to focus on themselves, I think the future of senior designers will always be scarce.
——Le Cheng, head of Alibaba's Intelligent Design Lab
< h1 toutiao-origin="h2" > where is the way out for designers after the age of three or 30? </h1>
In other words, what core competitiveness should designers after the age of 30 build? I try to portray the outward manifestations of competitiveness from a perspective that others can perceive.
<h2 toutiao-origin="h3" >1. The commercial value of the work</h2>
Designers' aircraft drafts are often seen on domestic and foreign design websites, and the picture is exquisite, but it is only an aircraft draft and has not been paid by customers.
These works are actually "not yet successful" – cool effects do not successfully solve the problem, do not impress the customer, so they do not have commercial value. In addition, the B-side field design is very different from the C-end. Many designers regard "user experience" as political correctness, but "user experience" itself is not equal to "user needs", let alone "business value". Although there is nothing wrong with paying attention to the user experience, but only paying attention to the user experience, you can only pay a cup of water, and the more you go, the more you go.
For example, the B-side scene - the perspective of user experience is a certain road, such as Xiao Zhang returning home from a certain place, and a good user experience can make him teleport from the starting place to the destination with his eyes closed. And user demand is the macro perspective of a city, there are various users, in addition to passenger Xiao Zhang, as well as driver Xiao Wang, as well as traffic police Xiao Li, as well as their superiors, city managers... Each character has their own core interests.
Here, there are differences in the needs of each user, there are cooperation and conflicts of interest, and if you try to please the "user experience" of everyone, you will only get lost in it.
As a senior designer, the design perspective must be flexible in the macro and micro line of sight. Only by grasping the needs and core values of key stakeholders from the macro level and polishing the usability at the micro level can it be possible to output a design solution with commercial value.
<h2 toutiao-origin="h3" >2. Gives positive impact to the team</h2>
Designers in the middle and middle levels need to focus on honing their skills. However, in the advanced stage, only the expressiveness of the picture is not enough to "play", and it is also necessary to consider what positive influence can be brought to the team.
For example, the output methodology improves the team's design level, and the improvement of the way of working improves the overall efficiency of the team. The designer's perspective must be broad, not only look at the acre and three points of land at hand, but also see the links outside of their own work, and expand to the output efficiency and quality of the team. You can even try empowering the requirements side or the development side to make the whole team more agile. In short, only by exporting individual ability to team results can personal value be verified or even amplified.
<h2 toutiao-origin="h3" >3</h2>
Some designers complain that the details of the prototype drawings given by the product manager are incomplete or even not beautiful enough. If a designer's daily job is to place elements such as icons and buttons against prototypes, where is his irreplaceability? Not satisfied with the known, insight into the problems that others can't see, continue to explore deeper where others stop, and creatively solve problems under the limits. This sensitivity, curiosity and self-motivation are the foundation of pioneering ability and the key to distinguishing good designers from ordinary designers.
<h1 toutiao-origin="h2" > iv, finally</h1>
To gain a moat for personal competitiveness, you need to constantly open up your own cognitive boundaries and redefine your ability range. Knowledge has compound interest, ability is also compound interest, after the age of 30 is the age of harvesting compound interest, not in the comfort zone trembling to feel anxiety and fear.
Author: Du Xiaodu, public number: can stay in the study all day
This article was originally published by @Noh Stay All Day In The Room is a product manager, and reprinting without permission is prohibited.
The title image is from Unsplash, based on the CC0 protocol