Zhiji Automobile is a brand-new user-oriented automobile science and technology company jointly built by SAIC, Zhangjiang Hi-Tech and Alibaba Group, which was established in 2020. As the implementer of travel change in the intelligent era, Zhiji Automobile is committed to exploring more advanced intelligent driving solutions to create a better future travel mode.
▲ Photo: Zhiji Automobile
For Zhiji automobile design team, the most important task is to bring a good experience to the interaction between people and cars through high-quality on-board human-computer interaction (HMI) design. Guan Chaoxiong, the software design director of Zhiji car cockpit, once said, "High-quality HMI design is one of the reasons why many consumers choose Zhiji. The rapid iteration of HMI design is inseparable from advanced design tools, and the characteristics of MasterGo, such as efficient collaboration and intelligent delivery, provide key support for us to realize the agile development of HMI design. Zhiji Automobile will also continue to bring more new experiences of intelligent driving to users in the process of deep creation with MasterGo. "
Smooth coordination, with an efficiency increase of more than 30%
MasterGo has fast response speed, many preset materials and rich community resources, and soon spread in the design department of Zhiji. Interaction and products have become the two most used teams. According to Zhou Pingxuan, the designer of Zhiji Automobile, the company highly recognizes the efficient collaborative work mode brought by MasterGo, which makes the communication between upstream and downstream of production, design and research become smooth and improves the overall design and development efficiency by 30%-40%.
The design of HMI is complex. It should adopt multi-sensory interaction mode, transmit and feedback information by visual, auditory and tactile means, and adapt to different application scenarios and environments. Therefore, the design file has many modules and versions. In the past, designers had to export the design draft first, then submit it to R&D for review, and then repeatedly take screenshots to make comparison and modification according to their feedback. After the modification, they had to re-transmit it. Only the time for exporting, uploading and downloading files should be calculated by the day.
▲ Photo: Zhiji Automobile
Nowadays, a link of MasterGo can solve the above problems. Project members operate in the same link, and internal collaboration and external sharing are extremely simple. When the design documents are changed, everyone will see the latest draft anytime and anywhere, and there will be no different versions of the documents. Computers and mobile phones can view them in real time, and the styles can be reused when the permissions are opened. When reviewing the design draft, if you have any suggestions, you can mark comments in the corresponding position through the comment function, and the designer can make targeted modifications and adjustments without waiting for the file transmission and editing process of traditional design tools.
"The most valuable thing about MasterGo is that it no longer needs a group of us to find a design element together, but can find what we need directly from the resource library." For example, to find a module component, in the past, it was necessary to find another module associated with this module and find the corresponding person in charge, and then the person in charge went to his own module library to find it, and so on.
▲ Figure: Zhiji car designers use MasterGo.
In addition to greatly improving the team’s collaboration efficiency, Zhou Pingxuan also mentioned the advantages of MasterGo in system management and design assets. "The document presentation in the MasterGo workbench can also be set regularly, and every document can be followed. We can see that the whole process from 0 to 1, from birth to growth, can directly trace its source and improve the unity of asset management of the whole team."
Create an excellent HMI design system to enhance the product interaction experience.
Xiao Rui, the designer in charge of building the control library of Zhiji Automobile, believes that AIGC technology can quickly generate various design materials, but it is not suitable for HMI design scenarios. He explained that AIGC technology is more suitable for users who have a lot of marketing needs at the C end, and they often need to do a lot of banner or other short and fast promotional materials without too much refinement and personalization.
"The car model needs very high and accurate design. We have a special modeling department, which will render different interior decoration drawings according to different models. We have strict requirements for details such as light and texture. We need intelligence, but we are more focused and accurate. At this point, MasterGo meets our needs well." Xiao Rui said.
▲ Photo: Zhiji car designers discuss the MasterGo design draft.
Xiao Rui also said that MasterGo’s support for control selection also brought them great convenience. He said that when calling controls, colleagues in the application team liked MasterGo’s control selection very much. It is not only convenient to adjust the control, but also has a variety of options. If you mark the properties, you can choose the style you need according to different parameters, which can greatly improve the design efficiency and consistency.
"For HMI design, we need to consider things from the system level rather than a single application level, so we emphasize unity and consistency. Unifying component libraries and design specifications in MasterGo is the basis for achieving standardized management. " Xiao Rui said. He believes that on the basis of standardized management, collaborative efficiency improvement brings designers more creative space. "This will allow us to have more time and energy to focus on innovating and optimizing HMI design, and bring better interactive experience to our users."
"Internal" worries about "external" troubles, and localization and migration follow the trend.
Internet product designers are no strangers to foreign collaborative design software. After the outbreak of supply interruption, the designers of Zhiji Automobile paid more attention to the security of design software and began to look for the optimal solution in domestic software.
When Xiao Rui talked about local design software, he felt that it would greatly slow down the efficiency of designers. For example, when the document versions of the sender and the receiver are different, updating the material library will automatically break the links of some controls; If you open the same file with different software versions, the layout will be misplaced and you can only reassemble the elements; If the file version update is not synchronized, the file transfer process will be interrupted for no reason, and it will be impossible to download after the time limit; Publishing new files must be exported and imported locally, and then manually downloaded and updated, which is a complicated and time-consuming process.
▲ Photo: Zhiji car designer computer desktop
After comprehensively comparing the collaborative design software on the market, Xiao Rui decided to introduce MasterGo into the Zhiji design team. "Sketch to MasterGo has the highest degree of file restoration, and the overall migration cost of our team is very low." After the privatization deployment, the efficiency and professionalism of the MasterGo team made Xiao Rui firm his choice. "On one occasion, we put forward two requirements, one is to copy and paste as it is, and the other is to share files in HTM, PNG, PDF and other formats. The MasterGo team responded quickly and gave us a lot of positive feedback. No matter the product manager or the front-end developer, they were sincere and professional, and they helped us solve very difficult problems in the shortest time."
▲ Figure: Zhiji car designers use MasterGo.
As an online product design tool to achieve "synergy and efficiency improvement", MasterGo’s increasingly excellent product performance and details exactly fit the brand connotation of Zhiji Automobile. It is simple and simple, which not only unifies the overall situation but also polishes the details, and is convenient and changeable. When asked about the expectation of MasterGo, the UED team of Zhiji Automobile believes that "online collaboration is bound to become the mainstream trend in the future, and learning and adapting to online collaboration tools is a skill that every designer must master. MasterGo is a tool, a platform and an opportunity. MasterGo has opened the door to China’s collaborative era and is gradually changing the way China designers work! "
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