Editor's introduction: When designers design products, they will always be asked what the value of this design is, and the criteria for judging in different scenarios are different, such as they can be measured from commercial value, user experience, etc.; the author of this article thinks about how to correctly tap the design value, let's take a look at it.
Do you think in your day-to-day work about how much value design can bring to your business? Or how much value can you feel from your current job? Is the value of design still only in the completion of the visual performance of the prototype, to tear up the aesthetic pickiness of various product details?
The answer is obvious instead of. As a designer, you need to develop a systematic design idea in your daily work, think about problems from the perspective of business and user experience, fully understand the business from the underlying logic of the product, tap the opportunity points of design, and help the growth of the business through the means of design. This article will take the design process of the 58 Life Circle Mini Program from 0 to 1 as an example to talk to you about how designers can play their own value in the project.
In order to make a design close to the business goal, it is necessary for the pre-project designer to have a deep understanding of the positioning of the product and the underlying logic of the business, and to think about why we want to make this product? What do users get from our products?
In today's Internet era of unimpeded information, major social e-commerce platforms continue to pour into the local life field, and 58 local service to store business has launched a new life circle mini program with the adjustment of direction. The products are mainly positioned as a preferential discount platform for eating, drinking and life services, aggregating preferential activity information while introducing more high-quality supply chain cooperation, and providing users with high-quality special products through social e-commerce channels.
In this way, we have clarified the value of the life circle products: users can enjoy a variety of affordable and low-cost goods and services on our platform, and can also be upgraded to talent users, to achieve self-use and save money, and distribution can earn commissions.
Social e-commerce plus private domain traffic is the main operating model of the platform at present: on the one hand, through the WeChat public account to push articles to local users, and embedded in the official account, users can click to jump to the Mini Program to buy; on the other hand, based on the social sharing of talent distribution, through the fission spread of talent users in WeChat, at the same time we also provide sustainable and stable income for talents, incentives and empowerment of talents.
In the era of sharing economy, with the change of consumption habits, and with the help of WeChat dividends and through fission to pull new growth, and finally open up the entire WeChat ecosystem of traffic, conversion, monetization of the closed-loop model. The WeChat ecosystem is undoubtedly an ideal platform for social e-commerce.
Immediately after we conducted a survey and analysis of the target users, the current characteristics of our user group are as follows: mainly the new middle class of 25-39 years old, the overall trend is younger; high frequency trading attributes; high spending power; high price sensitivity and so on.
Products are ultimately for the user, different products face the needs of different groups of people is also different, so we need to understand the user in depth, know what the user really needs? Only in this way can we better focus on the design strategy, pass on the core values and services of the product to the user, and thus improve the user's experience.
The process of user purchase decision-making seems to be a simple purchase of goods, but it is actually a systematic decision-making process, the entire critical path from commodity browsing (information acquisition) to understanding goods (detailed cognition) to payment success (purchase decision) has experienced several key nodes, from the beginning to the end to present a funnel-like situation, the conversion rate is getting lower and lower.
Therefore, before product design, we have sorted out the critical path of user decision-making accordingly: mainly before purchase, during purchase and after purchase, while focusing on each link to strengthen the user's inner perception and tap the opportunity points in the design.
The main problems we solve in these stages can be summarized into the following three points:
Before purchasing: how to make it more convenient and efficient for users to find goods;
In purchase: how to convey the core value of the product to the user, so that the user can purchase more smoothly;
After purchase: How to let users have some protection after buying, and make some promotions and attempts in the improvement of the repurchase rate.
At this point, the overall design idea of the product has been very clear, if we do not disassemble and analyze the macro level of the business in the early stage, the designer may not be able to find the power point of the design in the later stage, resulting in the design is not in line with the actual business scenario.
Around these backgrounds, after many communications, the design and product students finally reached an agreement, and the main design goals of this time are:
Improve the efficiency of user information reading;
Improve the efficiency of user purchase decisions;
Improve user service assurance awareness.
After clarifying the design goals, the last part is that the design is landed, the correct design is always around the product strategy to execute, and through the deep design solution to create a high-quality purchase experience for users, then we will design the visual program from the following dimensions:
1) Less is more throughout
In fact, designers are often required to display more information as much as possible in the limited page space, but under such appeals, our interface will often lose a lot of white space, resulting in a large information density, which will affect the user's reading efficiency and even reduce the user's desire to browse.
Therefore, in the design strategy of the home page, we maintain sufficient white space between the contents of each module, simplify the use of the dividing line, and make the interface more concise and refreshing;
For the efficiency of information transmission, we use the card design to organize the functional structure of each module, the card makes the page information more focused, can help users identify effective information faster and more efficiently in browsing; at the same time, with the use of large rounded corner design language, so that the page visually more affinity, but also in line with our young user tone.
2) The page hierarchy is simplified
The efficiency of user access to information is mainly dominated by the order between the hierarchical relationships, we rely on the basic framework of the card, through the use of different graphics, colors, fonts, font sizes, the first page of the functional modules to distinguish the priority, for the user to create different reading experience. The diamond bit icon uniformly adopts the fill style of gradient color, improves color saturation, and matches the lightweight style, making the core business function more prominent, so that users can quickly identify effective information.
3) Larger images highlight content quality
Due to the harsh use of page space by products, our image proportions are often compressed very small and narrow, sacrificing image quality. Then in order to better help users to read the information content of the picture, we have uniformly expanded the picture design pit of the waterfall stream on the list page to highlight the quality and attractiveness of the picture.
1) Strengthen key content information
The detail page is a depression of product value and information, and users need to make decisions in many contents, so the prominence of important information on the detail page is the key to improving the efficiency of user decision-making. In the design strategy of package listings, we mainly do the following things:
Strengthen the visual focus of price information, focusing on the comparison of discounted prices;
At the same time below the price, the label of the amount of the reduction is exposed, the same is 1000 yuan of goods, the direct drop of 100 yuan and the 9% discount in the amount although there is no difference, but the user will feel that the direct drop of 100 yuan of the preferential force is greater, better enhance the user's perceived value;
Increase the bubble prompt of the user's purchase record, give the user a psychological hint that it is worth buying, and use the herd psychology to stimulate the user to place an order to buy; 3. The bottom adds a new share money-making suspension button to guide the user's interests and stimulate the user's behavior.
The details of the phone bill recharge also adopt the same strategy in the design, strengthening the highlight price content. In addition, we have increased the time limit label indication, the limitation of the short time limit will give users a stronger sense of urgency, so that users can not lose the opportunity to not come again, so that users have a sense of scarcity of goods, the use of rush psychology, to promote users to make quick decisions.
2) Simplify the payment behavior path
When the path of the payment process is relatively deep, it may lead to users having the cognition of low operational efficiency, easily interrupting the operation process, resulting in the loss of users.
Therefore, in product design, we use the attributes of WeChat ecological convenience payment to reduce the excessive layer jump between pages to achieve the purpose of simplifying the payment path, making the user's purchase behavior more smooth, and further improving the user's decision-making efficiency.
1) Enhance the service guarantee experience
The quality of the after-sales service experience affects the user retention and repurchase intention to a certain extent, when the user encounters a problem after placing an order and needs to be refunded, what the product can do is to provide timely error correction measures, so that users can quickly solve the problem and enhance the sense of service security after purchase.
In order to enhance the simplicity of the function operation, we continue the card-like visual container on the entire refund process page to carry content information, ensure the consistency of the visual experience, and reduce the user's cognitive burden.
The above is the thinking process behind the product design of the 58 life circle from 0 to 1, from the analysis of the early stage of the project to the confirmation of the design goal, and then to the subsequent split to different dimensions to carry out the landing of functional design, and finally presented in full in front of the user.
As a designer, I think the most important thing is to jump out of the shackles of the drawing boy, broaden their boundaries, pull the design from performance and execution and extend forward, in the whole design process, dig deep into the needs and business goals, and then do the control and precipitation, give play to the designer's greatest value, and make a design that is good for the business and user experience.
Author: Hu Xi, visual designer
This article comes from everyone is a product manager cooperative media @ 58 User Experience Design Center (WeChat public account@58uxd), author @ Huxi
The title image is from pexels, based on the CC0 protocol