Written by Xiao, 2021 Cohort
All product design starts from a problem needing to be solved.
But when providing solutions, application designers tend to solve the problem based on the thinking of offering users specific functions as much as possible rather than thinking of the motivation behind people’s behaviors and the scenes their problem exists in.
I think when designing a product, we should start from the behaviors and act sequence based on the specific scene to match and organize each function instead of presenting them separately.
For example, the scene of online course learning. Could you count how many apps you would use when studying online? For me, class meeting—Zoom; online chatting-WhatsApp, WeChat, Discord; Files sharing- Google Doc or email or iCloud Drive; for team collaboration design —Miro
Actually, above all are just some basic tools, it can be more if we subdivide each part. I need to download a dozen apps to meet these needs in the scene of online studying and teamwork. This is because meeting, communication, collaboration and sharing are segregated, which makes people easily feel confused and overwhelmed and causes troubles in matching information and files. Why is this? Sometimes I feel that these tools do offer some solutions and create problems at the same time.
So this is my two cents: what if we design a product on the basis of following the process of behaviors generated by people in a specific scene?
Taking the online course learning as an example, Firstly, let us comb the process of it:
Set up the course meeting time—course meeting—studying materials sharing-allocate assignment group- set up different assignment group-group meeting—allocate tasks—materials sharing and communicating based on the task-online collaboration (design, communicate, type) Do you see it looks like a flow line of people’s behaviors? And each part had different needs. Why do we have to open so many apps to disperse users’ behaviors through so many apps? Why do we have to open WeChat or WhatsApp when we collaborate in Miro? Why when we have a course meeting in Zoom but have to share our documents through email?
But what will it be if we design it on the ground of people’s behavior process?
Set up different chat windows based on different courses—We use a calendar to set online course meetings—-click it directly into the meeting—sharing the course materials into the chat box of this course during the meeting and automatically archive them.——after allocate the assignment groups, the discussion group set up automatically—group members could discuss through voice or text in the group chat box—-establish corresponding tasks and the corresponding files can be embedded in the task—- collaborate design online (support voice communication at the same time)
So, the functions are no longer separated and integrated in the flow process of human behaviors in the specific scene instead. We need sharing materials during the meeting, we need communicating during collaborating design, we need everything when we start our task.
Now, how do you think if we focus more on people, focus more on the flow line of people’s behaviors in the specific scene? Start from this point, maybe we can provide better user experiences.