In 2007, at the Apple conference in San Francisco, Jobs officially demonstrated the first generation of the iPhone, and he said with confidence: Apple will redefine the phone.
In fact, he did so much more than that.
At that time, the shocking full touch screen, multi-touch interaction, multi-task system, beautiful and concise UI, 15 years later, is still the design basis of every mobile phone.
For the domestic mobile phone market at that time, it seemed that the only thing that could be done was to imitate, imitate, or imitate.
Before the iPhone, there was no iPhone; after the iPhone, it was all iPhone.
For today's car company APP market, Weilai APP is like the iPhone standing at the tip of the tower, such as the Extreme Krypton APP (APP Excavator | Extreme Krypton APP: Like Nio, but how can it be more future? Latecomers such as the like can only choose to imitate and learn from, after all, there is no road that can be more safe and reliable than others have already walked.
The Dongfeng Honda APP, which is also a latecomer, makes me cry and laugh even more.
As the first product to cut into the new pure electric track, Dongfeng Honda e:NS1 naturally received a lot of attention. The new APP of Dongfeng Honda, which was launched at the same time, seems to be left out in the corner.
The sentence "Dongfeng Honda said that it will strengthen the online and offline linkage and provide convenient services around the whole life cycle service scenario of consumers" simply summarized the mission of this APP.
Since it has just been listed, it is even difficult to find its traces in the APP store, and it can only be seen through the QR code on the official poster.
In the few introductions of dongfeng Honda to this APP, it advertises that this APP has four major functional sections, namely: understanding brand information, ordering new models, participating in topic interaction, and playing with the rider community.
At the first glance of opening the APP, the breath of Weilai came to the face, similar UI design, similar homepage three-paragraph structure, similar topic recommendation, to me feel very much like the product manager of Dongfeng Honda APP with the form of casting lots from the Weilai APP casually grabbed several functional paste copy, pieced together these four plates.
Left: Dongfeng Honda APP, Right: Weilai APP
When I talked to my colleagues about this, he said it was a problem for product managers because they didn't figure out what they were going to do and then blindly imitated it.
But I feel that in addition to the shackles of the product manager's own thinking, behind it is the perfunctory and arrogant attitude of some car companies to users.
For example, the only way that Dongfeng Honda APP came up with in pulling new ones is a "team cloud to see the car" that makes me call the insider directly, and I need to pull 4 new users to complete the "3D car viewing" task together, and then the initiator can get a "sacred" lottery qualification, and the prize is not even known.
Don't tell you, I did laugh when I saw this rule and UI design.
Taxi software is still valuable coupon gifts for pulling new ones, not to mention the direct money thrown by e-commerce platforms such as Pinduoduo. When the APP expands its territory, if you still use the traditional "brand is placed here, waiting for the user to find the door" thinking, it will definitely be abandoned by the user.
Left: Meituan taxi pull new activities, right: Jingdong pull new activities
The transformation of electrification is not just staying in the car itself, wei Xiaoli and other new forces have changed, is the entire interaction mode between car companies and users, when you still use perfunctory design, tedious activities to treat users, why should users use valuable time to connect with you?
In the Internet era, every user is precious, every minute of the user is also precious, this kind of chicken rib activity consumes not only the user's liking for the brand, but also the opportunity to kill a new model in the user's mind.
Perhaps you will argue that the latecomers really only have the share of imitation.
But, is that really the case?
Left: Meizu, right: iPhone
Back to the beginning of the story, also in 2007, a small factory in Zhuhai gave up its own Walkman business in the industry to develop mobile phones, and two years later, when the iPhone had ruled the world, it brought a product that everyone at the time looked exactly like the iPhone - Meizu M8.
But similar appearance, is Meizu spent two and a half years to polish the software system, Meizu's interaction chief designer will lurk in the forum, and users to discuss novel ideas and ideas, after the M8 listing, the third-party community formed by users also let the M8 software ecology in a short period of time to take shape, M8 also won the domestic mobile phone market sales champion in that year.
Behind the imitation is sincere innovation or brainless copying, users can of course perceive, and only when they sink their hearts, to investigate, to explore, to collect the needs of users, can we really create a car owner APP for users they need.
When writing the title of this article, I deliberately buried a harmonic stem, which is also what I want to advise all latecomers who want to imitate Weilai: be yourself, in order to move to the future.