Every time we approach the promotion defense, everyone will rack their brains to prepare PPT. I believe that many students who have participated in the promotion have summed up their own methods, but some students are still troubled. They took many detours in the preparation stage, talked about many projects but failed to extract their own advantages, or because of nervousness, the content of their speeches was greatly discounted, leaving regrets. There is no suitable method for everyone to summarize and promote. Here, I just want to talk about how to prepare before, hoping to see the big picture from the small and bring some inspiration to everyone.

Importance of promotion

After participating in several promotions, I found that the greatest value of summarizing is not to reach a higher level, but to make you think about past projects, reflect on your design output in stages, and re-examine and improve your ability model. After summing up and combing, you will be more aware of your current ability progress and shortcomings.

When summing up, we will find that there are faster and better ways to solve the same problem than before, and there are more efficient ways of cooperation under the same time and resources, forming our own methodology. Some transferable experiences can guide you to produce better solutions in your future work, and you can also share experiences with others and make progress with each other. At the same time, we will also find some shortcomings and regrets in the project, and disassemble and analyze the reasons for the shortcomings to avoid repeating the same mistakes in the future. Then, we will also force ourselves to form the consciousness of collecting data and user feedback, and form the habit of timely resumption and summary after the project goes online.

Organize projects with competency model.

Before we begin to make a summary, we should review what projects we have done during this period. We can connect the past projects in the form of a timeline and mark the start time of each project, so that the judges can see your work focus more intuitively. Next, label these projects, such as the importance of the project, your participation, the highlights of the project, the effect of the project, what ability is reflected, and so on. Then organize these projects in a certain order.

Overview of leasing experience upgrade project

When organizing a project, many people will enter two misunderstandings. One is that the more you talk about the project, the better, which can reflect your workload. However, heavy workload does not mean strong professional ability. Because the reporting time is very limited, the risk of too many projects is to weaken the depth of the project as a whole and it is difficult to form obvious memory points. A complete and thorough explanation of one or two projects is better than a straightforward description of multiple projects.

Another misunderstanding is that it is easy to equate rank promotion with project summary. The core of the rank promotion defense is to prove one's ability to the judges, and the project summary is only a means to prove one's ability. If it is based on the idea of project summary, it will inevitably fall into many details that are not highly related to ability, making it difficult for listeners to extract your characteristics.

Therefore, we must choose projects according to the competency model. Different companies, positions and levels have different requirements for competency model. For example, 58 interaction designers promoted to advanced series have higher requirements not only in interaction design, user research and product understanding, but also in project management, sharing guidance and innovation ability. Before preparation, it is suggested to fully study the ability requirements at this stage, and then sum up the most prominent ability points of this promotion, and build a set of your own according to your own situation.

Comparison of competency models of interaction designers at different levels

Tell the project like a story.

When we begin to summarize, we need to think from the audience's point of view, how to design your summary expression from top to bottom, tell your work like a story, and give people a better sense of substitution. First of all, you need to list the quantity and content of your selected items and form a catalogue; Secondly, the professional output is classified according to their respective roles, and the items that need to be summarized and reported are classified into corresponding sections; Finally, sorting the plates can reflect the multi-dimensional capabilities with the project as the main line, or with the capability model as the main line and different projects to reflect the capabilities.

General process of project resumption

A good design work often needs to break through the limitations of interaction or visual level and reflect more social significance or commercial value. First of all, when summing up, you need to supplement the corresponding description, clearly explaining the project background, analysis process, design objectives, problems solved, design highlights, final value of the project, etc. Secondly, don't ignore the information synchronization with the demand side. After the project is over, you should take the initiative to collect the corresponding data and information. As the output value of your design, data is the most favorable embodiment; Finally, being good at summarizing design methods can form a complete methodology of key project design solutions, which can be reused by more designers and add highlights to your summary.

The Background Analysis of the Upgrading of Renting Experience

When we talk about this project, some problems need special attention. First of all, don't talk about the plan at the beginning. Not all the judges know about this project you did. If you clarify the background and value of the project, your speech will be more divided. Secondly, it is not difficult to complete the project, but it is not easy to do it well. The focus of the explanation should be on the process of your analysis and deduction, and what is the difference with others. Review the difficulties or innovations of this project, analyze the ideas of overcoming difficulties or the process of exerting creativity, and comprehensively and stereoscopically show personal abilities and advantages. Finally, when arranging the layout, try to explain each PPT only around one point to avoid too much page content and too few pictures, which makes it difficult for the judges to digest what you said. The proper combination of animation effects makes the explanation process easy and interesting.

Looking for design breakthrough from publishing error statistics

As for the design effect, especially the projects that have been launched, we should try our best to verify the design results through data information, which can be background statistical data or laboratory data. For example, at that time, I was talking about the case of the revision of Rent Release. We did a quick usability test with the students of the Institute, and made visual statistics on the task duration, task completion and user satisfaction during the user release process, and found opportunities for improvement, so that the judges could intuitively see the effect of the project and make the scheme full and powerful.

Rent a house and release the revised usability test data.

Don't be limited to professional ability.

In addition to the design ability mentioned above, you can also emphasize other personal abilities and contributions, especially designers who have been promoted to the top. The comparative ability model is mainly embodied in three aspects. The first is the project management ability, which is manifested in the projects initiated from the design point of view, the promotion and final landing of the projects, what value the designers have played in them, and what progress has been made in the cooperation mode with other business parties. The second is teamwork ability, such as what are the more scientific and efficient methods in team management and how to create a learning atmosphere for the team. If there is a team, what is the targeted counseling and training for other designers, what is the progress and growth, and so on; The last one is personal contribution, such as patent application, competition award, personal honor, foreign exchange and sharing. , you can explain in detail and show your personal image in multiple dimensions.

Optimizing project management with experience diagram.

Keep practicing and face it easily.

When the promotional materials are ready, your work is not over yet, and the preparation before the defense is equally important. First of all, you can call your supervisor or other small partners as judges to rehearse in advance, try to answer their questions, collect audience feedback, and optimize PPT according to the feedback received. Then, if conditions permit, go to the conference room where you are defending on the same day in advance to conduct a simulation exercise in a real environment, check the playback effect of PPT, and experience the feeling of live speech. In addition, the layout effect of your PPT promotion must be brilliant, because it is also one of your works and can leave the most intuitive impression on the judges.

Finally, keep practicing, let the content of the explanation be familiar to the heart, train your own speaking rhythm, and pay attention to time allocation. As long as you have done enough training and mastered your own content before the speech, you can get rid of the burden and deal with it easily, and at the same time get rid of the excessive dependence on PPT and play more freely. During the defense, try to tell the story of the project, keep eye contact with the judges all the time, observe their reaction, adjust the speed and volume, and keep smiling.

label

Don't take rank promotion as a difficult task, relax your mind and take it as an opportunity for self-summary and promotion. Be sure to build your own competency model before choosing a project. This project is to help prove your ability. Don't think of the project as promotion itself. Secondly, the selection of projects is not limited, and the key projects should fully explain the derivation process of the scheme and prove the rationality of the scheme with data. Thirdly, when talking about the project, we should take care of the listener's feelings, "tell the story" with clear structure and narrative methods, and emphasize the climax of the story. In addition, multi-dimensional display of their abilities and contributions. Finally, I wish you all excellent performance in future rank promotion.

Author: Song Jie, an interaction designer, keeps flowers and cats, has a good temper, and teaches playing board games mahjong privately.

This article comes from the cooperative media @ Netease UEDC, written by @ Song Jie.

The title map comes from Pexels and is based on CC0 protocol.