Written by Xiao, 2021 Cohort
I will focus more on design thinking when I reflect on the cannery project simulation. In this project, I was mainly responsible for the marketing part. I think, no matter those cases of last year and the year before, or our work this year, our designers lack attention to the market and business part. So the point I want to discuss is that designers need to think holistically and take more business and market factors into consideration, in the future. I also hope that our courses can emphasize this part more.
Two years after I started working, in 2016, I came to a huge obstacle: the output of an Internet product and the mode of bringing it to market was surprisingly the same as that of a traditional fast-market product: product-sales/marketing-operations-commercialization. The four links belong to four different departments, and the cognitive disconnect of personnel between each link can greatly reduce efficiency. And because the Internet product has its own communication properties (because it is a medium itself), if the marketing and commercialization thinking is not taken into account when the product is designed, it is difficult to reduce costs and increase efficiency when it comes to the promotion stage. In fact, over the years, more and more companies in China have realized this problem, and they are starting to combine product design and marketing functions. In recent years, Alibaba has introduced a new position, Full Link Designer (they replaced UI Designer and Interaction Designer with this position). It requires designers to expand their thinking and have a clearer understanding of the entire design process based on their own domain, which includes: market research, product discovery, design development, sales/marketing, operations, service maintenance, and commercialization realization. Designers need to design every node in the business that users will come into contact with, so as to improve the overall user experience in the business consumption behavior.
The opposite is isolated design: that is, those who do visuals don’t look at interactions, those who do interactions don’t look at products, and those who do products don’t look at business. Everyone is designing with an isolated view, and this situation has existed for many years. The result is that business resources are wasted in large amounts, and communication costs between designers become high.
For our project, we are just a team of 5 people. But it’s also an isolated model. Because of the team’s small size, there was not much waste of resources, but I was surprised that everyone on the team except me thought that the marketing part was not that important. I would love to see this perception corrected. We have to recognize that the market situation for digital media products has changed dramatically. In 2009 we could design a product and be done with it because there would be a lot of user demand waiting for a new product to come out and be satisfied. Today, however, digital media products have taken over our entire lives. Users are as familiar with digital products as they are with Coke and burgers. This upgrading of users forces designers to move away from the previous design thinking of making users understand our products, know our products, use our products, and instead make them become emotionally attached to our products, dependent on them, and perceive their value.
So, the digital media product designer of the future must be an integrated thinker. The responsibility is not only limited to the good-looking design, but can stand in the overall perspective of the whole industry/business model, and then think about how the design can help the product to achieve the business goal and have a good user experience and product design on the basis of hitting all the marks.