Ant Design Design values provide internal criteria for designers to evaluate design quality, inspire and arouse ant design's design principles and patterns, which in turn leads to providing guidance and general solutions for specific design problems.
The light-speed iteration of the digital world makes products more complex. However, human consciousness and attention resources are limited. Facing this design contradiction, the pursuit of "natural" interaction will be the consistent direction of Ant Design.
- **Perception of nature:** according to cognitive psychology, about 80% of external information is obtained through visual channels. The most important visual elements in the interface design, including layout, colors, illustrations, icons, etc., should fully absorb the laws of nature, thereby reducing the user's cognitive cost and bringing authentic and smooth feelings. In some scenarios, opportunely adding other sensory channels such as hearing, touch can create a richer and more natural product experience.
- **Act of nature:** In the interaction with the system, the designer should fully understand the relationship between users, system roles, and task objectives, and also contextually organize system functions and services. At the same time, a series of methods such as behavior analysis, artificial intelligence and sensors could be applied to assist users to make effective decisions and reduce extra operations of users, to save users' mental and physical resources and make human-computer interaction more natural.
Interfaces are the medium of interaction between users and the system. They are the means rather than the purpose. Based on the pursuit of "natural" interaction, the product interface created by Ant Design should be high certainty and low cooperative entropy.
- **Designer certainty:** Enterprise-level products are the product of divide and conquer. The more participants, the higher the entropy of cooperation. This is why low-efficiency design and difficult maintenance of the product system exists. By exploring the design rules and modular design ideas, designers are provided with simplified design rules, components and patterns to empower designers and reduce the cooperative entropy.
- **Keep restraint:** Don't make a decision until we have to Designers should focus on valuable product features using minimal design elements to express. As Antoine de St. Exupery said: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
- **Object-oriented:** Explore design rules and abstract them as "objects" to enhance the flexibility and maintainability of user interface design while reducing the designer's subjective judgment and uncertainty of the real-world system. For example color value conversion, spacing typesetting.
- **Modular design:** Encapsulate the complex or reusable parts could provide limited interfaces to interact with other modules, ultimately reducing overall system complexity, thereby improving reliability and maintainability. Designers can use existed resources or abstract their reusable resources to save the unnecessary and low additional design to keep their focus on where creativity is most needed.
- **User certainty:** User's daily work is completed through the collaboration of enterprise-level products. In addition to considering the design consists of a single product, good certainty is required to be maintained across products, terminals, and systems. Consistent appearance and interaction, maintaining a user-oriented familiarity, can reduce the difficulty of learning, cognitive and operating costs, and improve work efficiency.
A product or function created by the designer is not only the needs of the user but carries a mission from the user. Product design should be based on the perspective of work to promote the achievement of the user's mission. Simultaneously, based on "nature" and "certainty", it regards the user's human needs and creates meaningful human-computer interaction for the work process.
- **Meaning of result: Clear goals, immediate feedback.** Understand the objectives, clearly disassemble the sub-objectives according to the use process, and let each interaction revolve around the achievement of the main objectives. Provide appropriate and immediate feedback for each action, so that users can understand the operation results. Besides, emotional design can be used to pacify users' negative emotions and enhance users' positive emotions.
- **Meaning of process: Moderate challenge, full devotion.** Adjust the difficulty of work in different scenarios, make the function trigger at the right time to match the user's skill. If not necessary, do not add entities. Do not distract users, let users focus on task achievement, rather than the interface. Let the current work be neither to simple nor too complex. The challenges are moderate, but higher challenges are raised as the user's capabilities grow. It allows users to continue to immerse themselves in the flow of work and gain fulfilling work experience.
The growth of enterprise-level product capabilities is accompanied by the evolution of user system roles. Designers should be responsible for the products they create and improve the discoverability of functions and values. Designers should design with the vision of development and consider the common growth of both ends of humans and computers.
- **Value connection:** The growth of products depends on the expansion and deep use of users, while the growth of users depends on the growth of product functions. Designers should establish system design thinking, understand the value of product functions, explore user needs in different scenarios, and establish a connection between value and needs. Let product value be discovered and help users build more effective and efficient ways of working.
- **Man-Computer Symbiosis:** More connections between product functions and user requirements make human-computer interaction closer and users and system symbiotic. When designing products, users and systems should not be separated from each other. They should be considered as a dynamic group to ensure that they are flexible, inclusive and full of vitality.
