Design should not only consider providing products or services, but should adopt a system-oriented thinking to better meet people’s actual needs. Design is an activity that contains elements: empathy, problem-solving, thinking and prototyping, and finding alternatives.
The key elements of the product: technology, characteristics, experience. One’s experience emerges from these elements: motivation, expectation, ability, immersion, and culture.
Experience = strategy
Most experiences and strategies are based on how people perceive the experience.
Misunderstandings that arise when doing experience:
1. Characteristic confrontation: Collect all the characteristics of competitors, form a matrix, and finally make a homogeneous product.
2. Do the best: do not only do the best, but only provide unique value for the key needs of users.
3. Novel design: whether it is reasonable or not, whether there is value
4. Lack of contextual design: the user does not know in which context it can be used, and it is not related to people’s living habits.
Why experience is important: Experience design focuses on the moments of interaction between human assets and the brand, and the memories that these moments can produce.
When designing a product, you must not only act as a designer, but also as a user, to create an effective experience strategy. Experience strategy exists because of user expectations, helping people accomplish what they want to accomplish. The experience is from the outside to the inside. It is through the user’s motivation, behavior and situation to lead the development of products, services or systems, and ultimately meet people’s expectations.
The elements of the experience strategy are based on:
1. It is truly extracted from the user’s perspective, and confrontation in characteristics is not an experience strategy.
2. It is the most important thing for users. In order to truly understand these experiences, designers must put themselves in a position as a user to understand. It is these experiences that make people use them, not the company that manufactures them.
3. Cost investment and management are required. Like other opportunities, business decisions need to consider the impact on experience.
4. They come from the user’s perspective, not from the company’s control.
New ways to understand people We must understand people, not just from a market segmentation or demographic perspective.
Ways to understand people include emotion, culture, and context.
Empathy can help us understand uncertain behaviors and motives, so that we don’t have to clearly specify every action and the driving force behind it.
Empathy understands the subjective experience of a person or a group of people through substitutional experience. This generation avoids the sense of distance and also ensures objectivity as an observer.
Grasp complexity and cultivate empathy
Whether the product that focuses on experience is successful, and whether everyone has the same understanding of the vision of users and experience.
The research of designing products and services includes two things: proposing ideas and evaluating ideas.
Grasp complex ideas through qualitative research. Qualitative research is about quality issues such as experience, situation, behavior, etc., unlike quantitative research about measurable aspects, qualitative research pays more attention to the process than the result—compared to what, where, when, and how And why. Because of the focus on how and why, qualitative researchers need to spend a lot of time talking with people. Qualitative research is dependent on the situation where all people live, work, and entertain. The places and situations are the most important.
Mistakes often made during research:
1. Always make the same mistake to the user.
2. Functional availability is excellent, but sales and utilization rates are very low.
3. The product is improved, but lacks innovation.
4. There are a bunch of reports, but no one knows what they are talking about.
5. The research team is very busy and spends money, but it has not succeeded.
6. The market and positioning of the product are very good, but it cannot be provided.
When researching, the results of the research should be feasible and long-lasting, and do not conduct isolated research; mix a variety of methods, through interviews or field research, aside from market segmentation, can get a more comprehensive understanding of users; integrate research Enter the design process; create truly useful deliverables: clear and straightforward, attract readers, tell stories.
Stop designing products.
We make a product, a service, or a system. Don’t define it as a design problem. Start with the experience we want to design, and then find the part that can convey the experience. Stay focused on the product and don’t over-research.
It is necessary to transfer individual products of sight to a larger system. Don’t just look at a product. It is necessary to ensure that the various parts of the experience can complement each other and can perfectly and just meet the needs of users.
Design competitiveness
The competitiveness of design lies in:
1. Design is human-oriented, which assumes observers, operators, users, consumers and context.
2. Design is production. It creates things that we can see and think about. The design can simulate the interface between the system and the user, forming the final layer of the experience, and can provide a clear vision of how it is or how it is applied.
3. Design is a decision, and it facilitates rapid exploration of various trade-offs. Show the combination of the same direction and different parts. Everyone can see the design and respond, and can put it into the selected context for evaluation.
Design is not just a designer’s business, it is not a panacea, and it is not simple. Without a business perspective, the design will fail. Design cannot be isolated, and design practice cannot be separated from systems and strategies.
Regarding design as an enterprise’s competitiveness requires more than just a department, not just activities before commercialization. Design is a method of solving problems, making decisions, and strategic planning, and can get better output. It is also open, anyone in the enterprise can participate in and provide solutions.
The correct design process, choose from more ideas:
1. Predict a variety of options.
2. Shift the focus and broaden the horizon.
3. Recognize the constraints and drive excellent solutions.
To achieve amazing designs, maintain a lasting “wow” feeling, and sustain user loyalty, you need to:
1. Know the platform on which you communicate your experience
2. Solve a wider range of unmet needs.
3. Create and evolve a reproducible process
4. Plan and arrange a “wow” experience.
5. Give up control of users, control will limit growth.
6. An agile method for users to become designers
Many current designs adopt the waterfall model, which is not agile.
The waterfall model is a strictly continuous process that is irreversible in a sequence of stages. From the initial stage of formulating complete requirements, the waterfall model is designed, implemented, and finally tested, and then launched. Each stage exists independently, and the next stage can only be started after all the work is completed.
Waterfall model defect: It is impossible to understand all the requirements in advance. After reaching the final delivery stage of a stage goal, a new key requirement or function that must be realized is discovered, whether it is a problem in the development process or user feedback in actual use , Or market changes, all the new information generated cannot be responded to in the waterfall process.
The advantages of the agile model: lower costs, less documentation, agile methods can continue to adopt user feedback and maintain the openness of the design.
Agile model method
1. Highly iterative process, shorten the development cycle
2. Integrate users into the research and development process.
3. Create a smaller working group
4. Pay attention to accuracy and timeliness.
The key factors for using Agile to achieve success:
1. To reduce friction in iterations. (Friction refers to the cost and effort to enter each iteration)
2. Communication and collaboration.
3. Repeatedly evaluate and test prototypes
How to implement agile methods:
1. Take small steps.
2. Encourage innovation in specific methods.
3. Provide clear and positive feedback and support.
4. Decide to reduce unnecessary documents.
5. Encourage people from different teams to communicate directly.
6. Ask yourself what you can do to make product development more iterative.