invision上的在线课程《成为一个产品设计师》很不错，是Tinder的产品经理兼首席设计师来讲的。
网址：https://www.invisionapp.com/ecourses/making-a-product-designer/
课程是英文的。看的过程顺便翻译过来（笔者并不完全认同课程中的观点），供感兴趣的朋友参考。
课程共9篇，这篇是Chapter 1：What’s a product designer?（查看原文）
Well—you are. Or you’re about to become one.
正在看这个教程的你，看来是一个，或者正准备成为一个产品设计师。
And you’re a part of something big: a design renaissance. The rise of the product designer.
你是一件了不起的事情的参与者：一场设计复兴，产品设计师的崛起。
Because design is the new language of business.“Software is eating the world.” Technology isn’t the differentiator that it used to be. Startup costs have dropped near zero, lowering the barrier to new entrants. Companies can now operate at scale in single domains, entirely in code.
因为设计是商业的新语言。“软件在吞噬一切”。技术并非像以往一样是竞争优势了。
创业成本已经接近于零，降低着新进入者的门槛。公司可以完全靠代码在单个领域里经营。
And all that means that the product and its experience have become the major differentiators.Code’s easy to replicate. A superior experience is not.A product’s design—how it meets human needs, how it brings delight, and how it works, both behind the scenes and on stage—has never been more in the spotlight.
这些意味着产品和产品体验成为主要差异。代码是很容易复制的，而优秀的体验不会。一个产品的设计——如何切中人们的需求、如何带来愉悦、如何工作的，无论看到的和看不到的，都从未如此被关注。
So what does that mean for the designer, the one whose job used to just be to “make it pretty?”
It means that you now lead the charge. For the customer. For the experience. For the brand. For the business.
这对于以往只是让产品更好看的设计师来说意味着什么呢？
意味着现在起你需要带头负责。包括客户、体验、品牌和商业。
Geoff Teehan put it like this: “This is a most amazing time to be a designer. It’s the golden age, we just don’t know it yet. In some cases, you can work directly with people like Ev, Zuck and the like. That’s pretty insane.”
Geoff Teehan这样说：“这是作为设计师最美妙的时候。这是黄金时代。我们只是还不知道。在某些项目里，你可以直接跟像Ev, Zuck一样的人们一起工作。这太疯狂了。”
So, you want to design the product of the future? You’d better know your design history.
Because the role of product designer was born in a typewritten memo from 1931, penned by a manager at Procter & Gamble, who would later become Secretary of Defense and create NASA.
Don’t buy it? Let me take you back.
所以，你想设计属于未来的产品吗？那你最好了解这个设计领域的历史。
产品设计师的角色诞生于1931年一张打字机打出的备忘录里，由宝洁公司的一个经理写出。这个经理后来成为美国的国防部长并创建了NASA。
不信？我们来回顾一下。
It’s May 1931. Cincinnati, Ohio. Neil McElroy is responsible for growing sales for the Camay soap brand, and it’s not going well. Camay’s in danger of being overshadowed by P&G’s Ivory soap.
McElroy realizes that the way his organization has an old-fashioned structure. So he sits down in front of his Royal Typewriter and taps out a proposal that would impact industries that didn’t even exist yet. His proposal: the brand man.
在1931年5月，美国俄亥俄州，辛辛那提市，Neil McElroy正负责Camay牌香皂的销售增长，事情进展并不顺利。Camay面临着被宝洁的Ivory牌香皂压制的危险。
McElroy意识到他的组织结构已经过时，所以在他的打字机前坐下来，敲下了一个将会影响当时甚至还不存在的行业的提案，那就是：品牌负责人。
The brand man was a novel idea at the time. Companies like P&G hired people for specific business functions such as, say, sales or research or administration.
But the brand man—and later, brand manager—would be tasked with guiding a product to success. He’d seek to understand which processes worked and which didn’t, trying “to apply this same treatment to other territories that are comparable.” And he’d go into the field to measure results, reporting back with data to tweak their approach.
品牌负责人在当时还是一个很新奇的主意。像宝洁这样的公司雇佣的都是负责具体业务功能的人，比如销售、研究员或者行政人员。
但是品牌负责人（后来变为品牌经理）被安排来负责引导一款产品走向成功。他要寻找哪些过程有用、哪些没用，试着把相同的策略应用到类似的营业地区。而且他要实地测量效果，带数据回来报告，以调整他们的方法。
Soon, P&G would reorganize their company around this newly invented role, and McElroy would take over the company. Competitors around the world copied them.
McElroy couldn’t have foreseen his role in creating the concept of product management in software. But it was a former P&G brand manager who would introduce this concept to software in 1981: Scott Cook, founder of Intuit. Their first product was Quicken. You may have heard of it.
很快，宝洁围绕这个新发明的角色调整了公司组织，McElroy接管了公司。全球的竞争者们复制宝洁的做法。
McElroy不可能预见到他在创造软件行业的产品经理这个概念中起到的作用。但正是宝洁的前品牌经理Scott Cook在1981年把这个概念引入到了软件行业。他是Intuit的创始人。他们的第一款产品叫Quicken，你可能听说过。
A young Scott Cook proudly holds up Quicken.
Now, in 2015, we’re witnessing the rise of product design. And the product designer stands on the shoulders of the product manager. So to really understand what’s up with product design, we first need to understand how the product manager came to be.
Rewind to the 1980s. Software companies were on the rise. As new product development got more complicated and engineers ran out of bandwidth, usability tended to suffer. On top of that, products were becoming more and more consumer-oriented.
现在是2015年，我们在目睹着产品设计的崛起。产品设计师站在了产品经理的肩膀上。所以要真正理解产品设计的现状，我们首先要理解产品经理的演变。
回到1980年代。软件公司飞速发展。由于新产品的开发变得愈发复杂，工程师用完了带宽，可用性变得难以忍受。最重要的是，产品变得越来越以消费者为导向。
Scott Cook was one of the first to implement brand management–like principles at a tech company. From day 1, he sought to observe customer needs and solve them with a product.
Other companies, like Microsoft, came at product development from a different direction. They realized, in Joel Spolsky’s words, that:
“[The] marketing team was ranting and raving about customer needs and nobody had time to talk to them or translate their MBA-speak into actual features. There was a lot of product design stuff that took a lot of work: talking to users, running usability tests, reviewing competitive products, and thinking hard about how to make things easier, and most programmers just didn’t have the time (nor were they particularly good at it).”
Scott Cook是最早在科技公司执行类似品牌管理的原则的人之一。从第一天起，他就试图观察用户需求并用产品来解决。
其他公司，像微软，则从一个不同的方向开始产品开发。他们意识到，用Joel Spolsky的话说：“市场团队叫嚣着用户需求，但没人有时间跟他们聊，或者把他们的MBA式的言论翻译成实际的功能。大量的产品设计事务需要很大的工作量：和用户交流，进行可用性测试，分析竞品，努力思考如何让事情更容易。大部分的程序员只是没有这个时间（并非他们不擅长做这些）”
Microsoft decided to fill the gap, and named the role, “program manager.”
That was the 1980s. Flash forward 30 years and we have a new term: product designer. So what’s the difference?
The product designer blends aspects of a product manager and a designer. Product management as we know it is shifting into the realm of the designer.
微软拒绝填补这个空缺，并指定了这个角色：项目经理。
那是80年代。快进到30年后我们有了一个新的名词，产品设计师。那么区别在哪里？
产品设计师混合了产品经理和设计师两个方面。正如我们知道的，产品管理正在进入设计师的领域。
In other words, a product designer bears responsibility for 2 broad tasks:
1. Identifying the opportunity for a new product in a customer’s life
2. Bringing that product into existence
也就是说，产品设计师承担两个方面的责任：
1.在用户生活中识别新产品的机会；
2.把产品实现出来；
Why has this happened?
As noted earlier, design has become a significant competitive advantage. To realize that advantage, companies need people who understand the customer, the problems they face, and how the product can help them overcome those problems. Then, that understanding needs to be synthesized, visualized, and designed into a solution. And someone has to choreograph the epic process of bringing that solution to light, ensuring the effective collaboration of folks from a host of disciplines, including writing, web dev, engineering, marketing, and more.
为什么会这样呢？
正如前文提到的，设计已经成为一个重要的竞争优势。为了实现这个优势，公司需要有人理解用户，用户面临的问题，以及产品如何帮助用户解决这些问题。然后，这些发现的需求需要被整合，变得更直观，然后被设计成解决方案。必须要有人来编排实现这个方案的伟大过程，确保来自诸多专业的人们高效的协作，包括文案、web开发、工程师、市场人员等等。
Of course, like most roles in the tech world, a product designer’s responsibilities will shift slightly with every new company and challenge. In some places, product designers might need to learn to write code to bring a product to life. In others, a deep understanding of a customer’s psychology is a critical ingredient.
But wherever they call home, product designers work to close the gap between developer and customer.
The customer is who the product designer really works for. And in our next chapter, that’s exactly who we’re going to examine.
当然，就像科技行业的多数角色，产品设计师的职责会因公司和挑战而稍有不同。在有些地方，产品设计师可能需要学会写代码来实现产品，而有些地方，对用户心理的深刻理解则是关键。
但是不管怎么说，产品设计师的工作是填补开发者和用户之间的缝隙。
其实用户才是产品设计师的工作对象。在下一篇，我们就要仔细观察的正是用户。
Praxis
History and theory are nice and all, but they fade quickly without practice. Moving forward, at the end of every lesson we’ll highlight 3 action items you can apply to your design process right now. Because your time is precious. (And reading sentence fragments is easier than reading full sentences.)
习题：
历史和理论是挺好的，但没有练习很快就会忘记。后面每节课的结尾我们会标出3个你可以立即用到你的设计中去的行动条目，因为你的时间是宝贵的，读句子片段比读大段的句子要容易很多。
关于作者：@scotthurff
Scott Hurff is the lead designer and product manager at Tinder. He also teaches designers new skills at designers.how.
翻译：@M_Zheng_
转载请先联系。
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