Liszt: Product Innovation Methods and Misunderstandings of Different Schools丨Innovation Workshop

foreword

Liszt is a senior product manager and an entrepreneur. He has served as the product manager of Shanda Network, the founder of Ona Education, and the head of an innovative business of ByteDance. He has rich product experience in online education, smart hardware, and interactive entertainment.

Joining Shengwang in 2021, he is now responsible for Shengwang's pan-entertainment product line, and is committed to providing audio and video underlying capability support for the next generation of real-time interactive product innovation.

01 Definition and scope of product innovation

1. Definition of product innovation

Before introducing the product innovation, first put forward a quiz: now the trolley case is an essential tool for business trips, so do you know when the trolley case was invented? The answer may surprise many people. The trolley case was invented in 1972, and in 1971, humans had already landed on the moon, but the astronauts who went to the moon on business did not have a trolley case.

In fact, the main body of the trolley case - the part for storing items has existed for many years. For example, the storage box was invented more than 3,000 years ago or even earlier, and the material is mostly wood or bronze. Bamboo basket is also a form of wooden storage box. Another component of the trolley case is the wheel, which was invented earlier, about 5,000 years ago.

Although the two-part trolley case looks simple, and the need for travel and business travel has been there and growing since ancient times, it was not until 1972 that the prototype of the trolley case appeared, and it was not until 1987 that it was replaced by an airline plane. Chang invented the shape of a trolley case for daily use in modern times. Why did such an invention take so long? The innovative approach we'll introduce later may be able to answer this question.

Regarding product innovation, Schumpeter, the father of innovation theory, believes that innovation is a new combination of old elements . Just like a trolley case, it is actually a combination of a case and a wheel, forming an innovation with great commercial value. Disruptive innovation guru Christensen believes that there is no disruption in technology and demand, only the new composition of technology and demand can bring about disruption.

For example, the RTC technology provided by Shengwang is actually a common technology in the industry, but combining the real-time interaction of RTC technology with demand scenarios may bring some disruptive market opportunities.

Brian Arthur, the founder of complex science, believes that all innovation is a process of constantly re-expressing old tasks in new possible worlds . Taking the trolley case as an example, how to carry luggage lightly and comfortably during business trips is actually an old task, but a new expression of the old task in the new world is the form of the trolley case.

Jobs also said that to create is to connect things . The first generation iPhone released by Apple was an innovative product that combined a touch-screen iPod music player, a mobile phone and an online internet browser.

According to Richard Foster, a senior partner and director of McKinsey & Company, innovators profit by changing the order of things . Another expression of this sentence is that most of the time, innovation is the recombination of the three people and goods. These combinations may bring new order based on new rules, bring new value to users, and bring new benefits to those who do such combinations.

2. Scope of product innovation

To sum up, we will find that product innovation is not a thing out of nothing, but a recombination and transformation based on existing scenarios and things. This is the essence of product innovation, and innovation is everywhere. Figure 1 illustrates some of the categories of product innovation.

■Figure 1

02 Different genres of product innovation approaches

There are various schools of product innovation methods. Here I cite four representative methods, namely 3B rules, experiential innovation, blue ocean innovation, and disruptive innovation. These abstract methodologies can help us find more products. Innovative ideas.

1. The 3B rule

The 3B rule was first proposed by David Eagleman in the book "Flying Species". It is a combination of three English words starting with B - Bending, Breaking, and Blending . to make. The original book defines them as:

• Deformation is a variety of distortions, including size, shape, material, time;
• Dismantling is breaking everything into pieces;
• Fusion is a source of unconstrained creativity.

Because the innovative application scenarios of the 3B rule referred to in this book are mainly in the field of artistic creation, it is more like a process of artistic creation. In the process of creation, the artist may consciously or unintentionally complete the creation through the 3B rule, resulting in a different style from other works of art.

For example, the oil painting shown in Figure 2, it was created by Picasso in 1907 and is now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, USA. The right side is a related comment on this painting.

■Figure 2

Compared with Picasso's past style, this painting has a big change. In history, this painting has even been regarded as a watershed of Picasso's different creative styles. Before this painting, Picasso's paintings still tended to be realistic. From this painting His cubism also became more and more exaggerated from the beginning of the painting. The images of the two women in the middle of the painting tend to be more realistic, but the images of the three people on the left and right are already in the category of Cubism.

Without knowing the historical background, we may admire Picasso's wild ideas, but once we find the prototype he refers to - 3 ancient masks excavated from different parts of Africa, we will find that it is actually derived from the original There is deformation, dismantling and fusion of artworks. This is a typical application of the 3B rule to artworks. If you go to an art exhibition, you can also use the similar 3B rule to disassemble it. You may find that these works of art are actually an application of the 3B rule, and their styles are derived from other The inspiration of things, these mutual inspirations also ultimately promote the progress of art.

So for Internet products, how to use the 3B rule? This may be easier to understand than works of art. Seven Cats Free Novel is a popular app in recent years. It can actually be considered as a derivative variant of Qutoutiao. The mechanism is shown in Figure 3:

■Figure 3

The main model gameplay of Qutoutiao is to provide massive news information, many of which are provided by content creators and content porters; through the fission mechanism, the cost of customer acquisition is reduced; through advertising revenue sharing, on the one hand It solves the problem of its own income, and on the other hand, it also solves the problem of motivation for content porters and content creators.

Seven Cats Free Novel introduces the fission pull-new mechanism and advertising revenue sharing mechanism of Qutoutiao, but the subscription system for the novels comes from the Qidian Chinese website. This is a long-lasting production process of online novels. It is a bit like crowdfunding. , each reader votes for a novel of interest, and these votes can be partially converted into the author's income.

In the past, the key chain of subscription-based novels was completed through the user's paid coupons, and the author's revenue share was determined according to the number of clicks and readings of the novel. And Seven Cats Free Novel takes this kind of paid coupons and revenue sharing mechanism out of subscription-based novels, and pulls new ones through advertising revenue sharing and fission mechanism, which accurately solves the problem of economic cycle and forms a new product form , which is an innovative change it has made, and has become a typical case of the 3B rule in Internet products.

Another typical case is the popular metaverse game roblox in the past two years, which actually combines many popular gameplays in the past, as shown in Figure 4.

■Figure 4

The first is sandbox games. Creating and influencing the world through players is the core gameplay of this kind of game. To a certain extent, this gameplay has also become a key factor for roblox to maintain vitality and continuous growth. The second is MMRPG, the real-life avatar and virtual currency factors contained in such large-scale real-time interactive games make roblox players have more sense of integration and participation in the scene. The third is Lego. This pixel style gives roblox a certain design aesthetic on the one hand, and on the other hand reduces its requirements for the computing power of the device.

The combination of these features extracted from other products makes roblox the game. Of course, the characteristics of roblox may be far more than these. We believe that these innovations based on the 3B laws make it one of the prototypes of the metaverse.

So how should the 3B rule be applied? The application of the 3B rule can be simply divided into three steps. The first step is to disassemble the products we are familiar with or like into small building blocks. The second step is to randomly take out a few small building blocks to make a combination, and analyze whether it is likely to become a new product (there is a high probability that a new product will be obtained, but this product may not have usability or user value). The third step is to expand thinking: if the value of each building block that is disassembled is scored, and the function of each building block is defined, is it possible to assemble a good product based on user scenarios and needs.

When you are doing product analysis, you can try to do such disassembly and analysis. In the disassembly and combination of different products, new products and gameplay may appear.

2. Experiential innovation

Experiential innovation is also a common innovation method now, and its steps are experience-request-improvement. It is rumored that Zhang Xiaolong of WeChat once said, "The most powerful thing about Steve Jobs is that he can become a fool in 1 second, while Ma Huateng needs 5 seconds, and I need almost 10 seconds."

The "becoming a fool" mentioned here is actually a very interesting topic, which refers to experiencing the product from the user's perspective to feel the user's emotions and needs.

But just becoming a fool has no meaning for product innovation, and completing innovation requires rhetorical questions and attempts . The rhetorical question is to ask questions while simulating the user experience: "Why do you feel this way? What should be a reasonable approach?" The attempt is to test whether the improvement idea can bring more after getting the answer or conjecture based on the rhetorical question. user value. This is the basic idea of experiential innovation.

For example, when I was just working, looking for a house was a very painful process. The problems I faced on various housing platforms included a large number of fake houses; the information was incomplete, only the basic address, area, and price. We asked why there is such information on the platform of looking for a house (of course, it may have been much better in recent years), and the reasons behind it may include the following:

• The cost of information verification is very high, because there are a lot of houses sent out every day, and these houses are scattered in different places, and the landlord may not be able to cooperate with you, resulting in a very high cost of information verification;
• Brokers pay attention to personal interests, because the houses on the platform are all released by real estate brokers. When users are viewing houses, even if they know that the information may be fake, they will tend to pick good-looking properties and contact them for viewing. If you can get more customers, the broker will release some false information, causing the bad currency of the platform to drive out the good currency;
• Platforms are viciously invoked for marketing efficiency, and there is competition between platforms, which requires higher conversion rates. In order to improve the platform’s attractiveness to users, the platform will condone and even conspire with brokers to publish a large number of false housing listings.

But what kind of experience do users want? I think there should be three:

• For buyers (renters), their needs are real listings and complete information, which can improve decision-making efficiency and reduce ineffective home inspection costs;
• For sellers (rental houses), their demand is to be able to trade faster without taking the price difference;
• For brokers, their needs are dignity and income.

Since the experience that the three parties really want is different from the capabilities provided by the platform at that time, why does such a platform always exist? How can a change be made? Zuo Hui, the founder of Lianjia and Shell, made changes and innovations based on his observation of the industry. The final product is shown in Figure 5.

■Figure 5

As can be seen from the picture, the dimensions and granularity of information have changed a lot. Compared with the relatively simple platform at that time, it is very different. It includes VR, video, floor plan, decoration, etc. The plan and a lot of detailed content, the completeness of the information has been greatly improved, and the real estate is also emphasized. For such a change, his explanation is that he believes that the concentration of data will determine future consumer choices.

As a result, Lianjia has gradually become the existence with the highest gross profit margin in the industry. Its agency fee is much higher than that of its competitors. The agency fee of Lianjia in Beijing and Shanghai is generally between 2% and 3%, while the real estate agency of other brands. It is 1% to 1.5%. This is the benefit that experiential innovation brings to them. Of course, I know that you may have had some bad experiences on these platforms, but overall, the quality of Lianjia's brokers and the quality of platform listings are above the industry average. I believe everyone can agree with this judgment.

So what is the difficulty of experiential innovation? I think it has three levels of difficulty, as shown in Figure 6.

■Figure 6

The first is the difficulty of experience, that is, if you are not a user, how can you become him in one second? There are actually scientific methods for this, including defining user personas, user interviews, and life experiences and experiences. In fact, part of the reason why Jobs can do it is that he has a very rich life experience and can understand the views and needs of different users through different experiences.

The second is the difficulty of rhetorical questioning, that is, is it a key question in a key link? In fact, in many cases, analyzing the reasons behind the problems requires certain industry experience and industry understanding, and it is not enough to just stay at the level of complaining . For example, the real estate we just mentioned, its key problem is the interest chain, which is very difficult to break.

The third is the difficulty of improvement, that is, if this matter is very difficult, or the choice of the whole industry is different, we need to give up a lot of short-term and medium-term interests to pursue a long-term possibility, can we persevere? This is the reason why many improvements cannot be made.

On the one hand, this is the right thing to do. This is what Zuo Hui mentioned in his book "Detailed Talk". At that time, he found that the brokers in the whole industry could not truthfully explain the housing information, so they did not Recruiting new brokers in the industry, but choosing to train fresh graduates into real estate brokers of Lianjia, this is very difficult, and the cost of training is also very high, but he insists on doing it difficult and correct. It was the success that it has achieved today.

On the other hand, it is to iterate in small steps, speak out boldly, and let users see the value. If the improvement direction is determined, it is best to be seen by users faster to verify whether the tried direction is really what users care about, whether it can really help them solve problems, and whether it is their key needs. The waste of time and resources may be even greater if improvements are made that users don't care about because of lack of validation.

3. Blue Ocean Innovation

The method of blue ocean innovation involves culling-decreasing-increasing-creating , and it is derived from the book Blue Ocean Strategy by Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. This is actually a book that has been around for a certain number of years. It may also be an enlightenment book for many early Internet entrepreneurs. It is still a new book for a long time. If you are interested, you can also read it.

Elimination, subtraction, addition, and creation are only a small part of this book, and I've pulled it out because it may have some relevance to our approach to innovation. Elimination means that some factors in our industry that have been subject to competition for a long time can be eliminated. These factors may be ignored or disliked by customers and should be eliminated. Reduction refers to factors that should be lowered below the industry standard. These factors may be required by customers, but are not of such a high degree of concern. The marginal cost of its investment is not proportional to the marginal benefit and should be reduced. Increase refers to the factors that should be raised above the industry standard. These factors may not have been valued by everyone in the past, but they can bring more benefits to users and should be increased. Creation refers to factors that no one in the industry has yet experienced or tried that may have value and should be created.

As an example, Figure 7 shows yellow-tailed kangaroo wine. This wine may have been seen or drunk by many people, but it is actually a relatively low-priced wine.

■Figure 7

So how does its culling-decreasing-increasing-creation work? Before introducing the working method, we may first add the background of its establishment. When Yellow Tail Kangaroo Wine was established, the mainstream markets for wine were France, Spain, and Italy, mainly in the high-end market. The yellow-tailed kangaroo was produced in Australia at the time, which was characterized by cheapness and large output, but its winemaking raw materials, winemaking process and winemaking awards were in a completely backward position in the traditional wine market.

How did the yellow-tailed kangaroo break out of this situation? It first removes the art of brewing and honorary awards, and does not spend energy on this, nor does it do high-investment marketing to promote stock and quality. Then because of the limitation of its own origin, it is relatively disadvantaged in terms of vineyards and production areas, so it no longer emphasizes the name and tradition, and reduces the complex taste of the wine, because in fact many times the complex taste of the wine is in The experience of the general public is not necessarily fully recognized or fully able to feel it.

Yellow-tailed kangaroos have also reduced their range of wines, focusing instead on a small number of wines that have the potential to be hits. Plus, Yellow Tail adds economical wines that create a relaxed setting and ambience that transforms wines from traditional dinner wines to casual everyday wines.

This approach helped Yellow-tailed Kangaroo to open up more sales links, allowing it to enter the channels that the public can access in daily life, such as supermarkets and convenience stores. Fun and adventure became a gimmick for the yellow-tailed kangaroo brand, and some novel flavors were then introduced to the market.

Yellow-tailed kangaroo's approach succeeded, and it created a new consumer-grade wine market. In the past, many people did not drink wine often or did not understand wine, but because it opened up new channels, provided lower prices, and lowered the psychological threshold for drinking wine, more people chose yellow-tailed kangaroos. Such a cheap wine.

This new market may be a market that traditional wine merchants have not seen or disdain to do in the past. The reason may not be that the gross profit is low, but that there is no way to achieve such a large output. But it can create great new value in this new market, and its value on a single brand is even higher than that of many traditional French wines. Although the wines of traditional famous wineries have high unit price and high gross profit, their production is small and cannot be compared with that of yellow-tailed kangaroos.

The second example is Cirque du Soleil. The main performances of traditional circuses are animal performances, such as letting lions jump through fire rings, and letting monkeys ride dogs. Traditional circuses are mainly active in the outskirts of the city, and the main crowd is working people, because the experience of watching movies in traditional circuses is not so good. The performance environment of these animals is relatively poor, and considering the living needs of the animals themselves, they may It is also more suitable to be raised in the suburbs, so traditional circuses are more likely to attract a group of curious audiences through animal performances.

But how does Cirque du Soleil do it? As shown in Figure 8.

■Figure 8

It eliminates performing stars, animal shows, on-site franchise sales and performances with multiple co-stars; it reduces fun and humor, excitement and danger (performances such as animal jumping through fire rings are actually exciting and dangerous); it improves prices and added unique venues; creating new themed art forms, elegant viewing environments, multiple productions and artistic music and dance.

Why did its transformation succeed? In fact, it is because it sees the demand of high net worth people to watch acrobatic circus.

In the era when Cirque du Soleil was established, the consumption of high-net-worth individuals mainly focused on musicals, plays, concerts, and symphonies. These art forms were all serious works of art, which looked elegant, but not so fun, and belonged to the arty type. , but what is the type of show that suits everyone? It is a combination of dance and acrobatics with witty and interesting performances, which finally constitutes Cirque du Soleil, which ripped open the traditional serious performance market and created a more casual performance market. The environment is much improved from traditional circuses, and high-net-worth individuals are more willing to watch performances in such an environment.

In fact, Cirque du Soleil has found a new blue ocean. The essence and purpose of blue ocean innovation is to find a new value field and discover value in this value field through innovative methods.

The third example is BeReal, an Internet product. This product was released in 2019, and it has been in a stage of rapid growth this year, especially from the beginning of this year to April, its downloads this year accounted for 65% of all downloads, which means that this year's downloads are higher than the previous two. More than twice as many years combined, 2022 is considered a year of explosive growth. Its target application is Instagram, which was originally defined as a social product, but has now become a media product, losing its social nature.

BeReal emphasizes the raw, the real, the unfiltered, the real social interaction between friends. It does not aim to enhance personal influence, but to return to the original meaning of social networking. This is a new gap in the current social products that it has found. There are a group of users who really want to communicate with friends. This demand is not being met on Facebook and Instagram today.

To this end, BeReal has made some changes, as shown in Figure 9, it removes the filter to ensure that all content is real shot, and also removes the like function, which eliminates the user's deliberately beautifying himself in order to get likes Reduced the degree of freedom of editing some photos and videos; increased the restrictions on browsing rules, only uploading photos can see the dynamics of friends, there are a large number of silent users in the past social applications, but in order to let more people participate in BeReal Come in, you must upload it before you can see other people's dynamics;

Created a function called time to BeReal, which will pull several friends of the user together and open the front and rear cameras to shoot at the same time, which is also a mode that was not used in social applications in the past. , turn on the rear camera at the same time, and then shoot a video to share with friends, which enables users to see both their own performance and the real world. These characteristics make BeReal popular with users after its launch, and it has found a new blue ocean, which is a group of highly active users with real social demands.

■Figure 9

4. Disruptive innovation

Disruptive innovation comes from Clayton Christensen's book "The Innovator's 囧囧", which is also a very influential book in the field of entrepreneurial innovation. We only quote some of the core points. , as shown in Figure 10.

■Figure 10

These theories in the picture may not be easy to understand. We will talk about an example that everyone is familiar with, which is Pinduoduo. I am referring specifically to the early days of Pinduoduo. The current Pinduoduo and the early Pinduoduo are actually two completely different products. We can actually go back a few years ago to analyze why Pinduoduo was a typical disruptive innovation success story at that time. Figure 11 shows the six features of Pinduoduo and their corresponding performance.

■Figure 11

First of all, in the early days of Pinduoduo, it actually assembled a lot of mature gameplays in various platform applications. Whether it is from the App product side or the supply chain side, there is no real innovation, but the mature Components are assembled. Then, in the early days, Pinduoduo mainly focused on low-tier cities and urban-rural borders, so the products were cheaper.

The early mainstream market may not accept Pinduoduo, but this situation was actually reversed after Pinduoduo launched tens of billions of subsidies. In addition, the core points of Pinduoduo’s early days were buying, cutting a knife, helping to receive red envelopes, event marketing, etc. This is actually a major breakthrough in its marketing. When Pinduoduo had reached a certain scale, in fact, Ali noticed it and made a follow-up product called Taobao Special Edition. Now this product is called Taote, but this product has always been in a tepid state. state, there is no particularly good effect.

It can be found that Pinduoduo does meet the six characteristics of disruptive innovation, so why can disruptive innovation be formed? You can take a look at the added value section of Figure 12.

■Figure 12

The value that the first feature brings to it is that the product can be released faster and go online faster. Because the R&D team of Pinduoduo was small in the early days, if it was built with mature components, it could achieve a functional requirement that may be 60% to 70% faster than that of Taobao. The choice of cheap industrial products also solves the problem of the supply chain. Many people who do e-commerce and even life services believe that in fact, the importance of the seller of this type of product is higher than that of the buyer, that is, the importance of the supply side lies in the demand side. In the early performance of Pinduoduo, we can find that it has indeed solved the problems of the early supply chain through these suppliers that Taobao and Jingdong will not choose. It does not need to build its own supply chain, so it will not be limited by the need for investment. Lots of resources on this kind of thing.

In the emerging market segment, its target groups were ignored by mainstream e-commerce platforms in the past. The consumer products of these target groups were actually those products that looked fake at that time, but in fact these products have always existed, but we thought they would not appeared in the mainstream market.

However, at that time, Pinduoduo found that there were a group of users who could accept fake products considering the price, which gave them a lot of motivation to clearly define user portraits, precisely locate customer groups, and focus on product marketing. However, in Taobao and JD.com's view, they may want to focus on the upper layers of the value chain and make products with higher net worth and higher profits. Therefore, there are relatively high-margin branded products such as Tmall, Tmall International, and Tmall Real Estate. They do not want to lower the brand image. This is one of the reasons why Pinduoduo does not appear in large enterprises. It's just that they didn't expect this way to form such a large-scale market opportunity.

For Pinduoduo, for its target market group, it provides a better experience than Taobao and JD. Although these experiences may be a downgrade experience for the target group of Taobao and JD. It is an upgrade experience for the target audience as well as the supplier, which ultimately leads to disruptive innovation.

In fact, there are still many innovative methods and theories. Maybe every innovative tycoon has his own set of logic, but today we will share these four first.

03 Learn user experience from Nintendo

Developers may not have paid enough attention to user experience in the past. Today, I will list a few basic knowledge and methods in user experience design, hoping to give you some inspiration.

Nintendo is actually a very magical existence. I believe that many people have played Nintendo games, and even have Nintendo consoles. In fact, it has established its position in the game console market from the era of red and white consoles and handheld consoles in the 1980s, but their functions have always been the weakest, the most unfriendly to developers, and the worst picture. The handle experience is not as good as the other two, but the historical sales are far more than Sony's PS series and Microsoft's xbox.

This is a very magical thing. It seems that it is impossible to list all the indicators in one direction, but it succeeds. So why is Nintendo the most successful game company? There may be different opinions on this point, but the common conclusion is that Nintendo's games, especially some games developed by Nintendo, are the best in the industry, the best to use, and suitable for all ages, among which the most benchmarking It is the Mario Brothers in Figure 13, which is a benchmark product of Nintendo and the single highest sales volume in the history of all games.

■Figure 13

We do not consider the background, marketing capabilities and various other factors of Nintendo and Super Mario, and only focus on the design of the game itself to see what Nintendo can learn from. We may enumerate the intuitive design, surprise design, story design and its planning of the new feature learning roadmap in the picture, these may only be part of it, we will only share these points today.

1. Intuitive Design

Figure 14 are two pictures of Nintendo's opening, through which we share what intuitive design is.

■Figure 14

Much of the content in this section is based on a book by Shinichiro Yushu from Japan called Nintendo Experience Design: Creating Unwittingly Impressive Experiences. In the picture on the left there is a mountain and a little man with a hat and a beard, facing to the right, along with white clouds, green grass, and a string of numbers. What is the intuitive guidance that this opening map gives the user? This is where you need to understand the first approach to intuitive design, as shown in Figure 15.

■Figure 15

Because this book is translated from Japanese into Chinese, some words may be a bit awkward to read. The assumption-try-happy in the picture is the first way of intuitive design. The assumption refers to the spontaneous establishment of "Do you want XX?", try to refer to is the spontaneous decision to "try XX", happy refers to the spontaneous confirmation that "XX is correct". This takes advantage of the common characteristics of people's brains to achieve an effect that is in line with the user's intuition.

How is this scene intuitive? As shown in Figure 16.

■Figure 16

We abstracted the first picture into a black-and-white wireframe. It actually solved the problem of energy-indicating information transmission. This energy-indicating information transmission is divided into several parts. The first hint is that there is a person standing on the left. The man has added a beard and hat so that everyone can see that the man is facing to the right. The second hint is that the mountain on the left is a bit like a wall, presumably implying that there is no road on the left. The third hint is relatively bright green grass and white clouds, pulling you to the right through people's sight, and the hint here is that you can move to the right. It just so happens that it provides a handle with a direction key, and there is a right button on it, so everyone will naturally click to the right.

At that time, due to the limitation of memory cards, Nintendo's games did not provide any user guidance. However, the current products will have a lot of guidance prompts. In fact, this is a very bad experience, indicating that their functions are in line with the natural thinking of users. There is no confidence, and users need to be guided to let users know what functions these buttons represent. And really good applications do not need these.

This is the first way of intuitive design, which is to use the common characteristics of the brain to let users try it through some information hints and direct operations. When the last step finds that it is right to use it, the user will become very happy.

Returning to the right part of Fig. 15, when the user goes to the right, if there is no new indication information, the user may wonder if he is going wrong. I believe that everyone has had such a lost experience in other games, but how did it solve this problem in Nintendo's Super Mario? Walk to the right for about 5 seconds and you will see the first enemy.

Originally, users should be very nervous when they see the enemy, but the moment they see the enemy in this game, there may be some small surprises, because this proves that the right way, but the tension of encountering the enemy subsided , which is intuitive. In this process, users not only learn the functions of the game, but also gain simple happiness. This is only a simple small happiness. The big happiness needs the surprise design in the back.

The second approach to intuitive design is to use people's shared experience, as shown in Figure 17.

■Figure 17

Figure 17 is also a scene in a Nintendo game. At this time, the player has to break through the spider web and enter the back door. If the user has certain life experience, he may think of a breakthrough method, which is to try to hit the spider directly. The web, and then found that it couldn't break open, maybe the toughness of the spider web would bounce him back, but after the bounce, he would find that there was a brazier next to him, which could be ignited to burn the spider web.

This is the use of people's common experience, and it is also a commonly used method in intuitive design. This method is also very common in Internet products. Early Internet products like to use a quasi-materialized design. This kind of design uses people's common experience.

2. Surprise design

Intuitive design only solves the problem that users will use, but users will use it does not mean that users will retain it. The assumptions and tried experience in intuitive design will bring certain pressure to players. This pressure comes from users who do not know whether the assumption is true or not. Correct, and then you will be disturbed by this assumption when you try, and the attempt may not be successful every time, it may fail, and there will be frustration when it fails.

Therefore, when the intuitive design appears repeatedly, the user's heart is repeatedly disturbed and happy. After this process continues for many times, it is easy to experience fatigue, which is called the psychological saturation effect in psychology. Once the psychological saturation effect is reached, it will feel that the game is infinite repetition, which requires the third method of intuitive design-surprise design, as shown in Figure 18.

■Figure 18

3. Story Design

The third method of intuitive design is story design, which is more often used in some complex products. It enables users to identify themselves, the meaning of participation, and remember and share points in long-term product use. The story design process is shown in Figure 19.

■Figure 19

It can be found that the above part is actually the intersection of intuition and surprise. For example, one surprise is crossed in five intuitive design parts, and three intuitive designs are crossed for another surprise. In this process, environmental stories, foreshadowing, etc. are also needed. In fact, These story designs are also done in Super Mario, which gives the user a sense of engagement and immersion. We also have a similar Internet product, Ant Forest, as shown in Figure 20.

■Figure 20

Its purpose is to enable users to increase the frequency of opening Alipay. For this reason, they have given a meaning to opening the Alipay App, which is environmental protection. The story of this environmental protection is that every time users use online payment, they can save carbon emissions, which can then be exchanged for saplings to be planted by Alipay. This is a very positive story, so many people enjoy it and use it all the time, and this also achieves another goal of Alipay - through the energy collection mechanism of Ant Forest, Alipay has certain lightweight social attributes .

In fact, it turned out that Ali had always wanted to socialize, and he also laid a foreshadowing through Ant Forest. Of course, part of the story of planting trees is true, and part of it has been artistically processed by the product, but the result of its realization allows users to realize their own value through an otherwise boring software, which has made a great contribution to environmental protection. So in the process of designing products for customers, we can consider adding some stories to make them find a sense of accomplishment in the repeated process.

4. Learning roadmap for new features

Finally, we share a little knowledge, that is, for new functions, should we study in a decentralized way or focus on learning when we first enter the product. According to my original experience, many people choose to decentralize. Just like reading, learning is gradual. But in the game it's the exact opposite.

This is also supported by theory in psychology, that is, at the beginning of the experience, people's attention and learning efficiency are the highest, so Super Mario concentrated on four types of props at the beginning of the level, avoiding the follow-up. complexity and intractability.

In fact, many games also have such a feature, that is, common gameplay is displayed at the earliest time (but now the complexity of some games has increased, and the introduction of new gameplay will have to be introduced in the middle process). In principle, The design of these functions can allow customers to complete the learning of product functions in a few cycles through intuitive design and surprise design when they are first recorded.

04 Innovation Toolbox

Next, two innovation toolboxes will be introduced, one is user personas and the other is user interviews.

1. User portrait

First, the basic method of user portrait is divided into three steps, as shown in Figure 21.

■Figure 21

The first step is to diverge and fill in all possible attributes of the user, as shown in Figure 22.

■Figure 22

The diagram on the right is like a form that can be filled in from the perspective of personality traits, attitude towards life, and personal goals. In addition, there are some more dimensions on the left, such as demographic attributes, psychological attributes, etc. After divergence, the second step is to focus. When divergent, you will find that users have many characteristics, and there are differences between these characteristics. You need to choose an end user to represent the image of all potential users.

For example, in the sketch on the right in Figure 21, assuming that all users like dogs, this can be one of the core features of product user portraits. Then continue to dig based on this point, which is focusing.

The third step is substitution, which simulates the decision-making process of people who like dogs. From divergence to focus to substitution, the ultimate goal is to form a particularly concrete user portrait. Based on this user portrait, specific people can be accurately located. This is the ultimate goal of user portraits.

2. User interview

User interviews contain a variety of tips, here are just a few that might be helpful.

Before we apply the interview, we must first make a question outline , and then do a pre-interview experiment with R&D or product based on the question outline. Through the pre-interview experiment, we revise the interview outline and check whether the questions are suitable. This is what needs to be done in the preparation stage.

The second step is to greet each other in a step-by-step manner. Many R&D personnel and product managers may be accustomed to directly asking some relatively private questions, such as making a blind date application, directly asking users how many times they went on a blind date this month, etc. If the user is more sensitive or shy , this kind of straight-forward question may not get the desired result. At this time, the user must be relaxed through greetings and step-by-step methods, so as to get the real answer.

The third step is to encourage users to speak freely . For example, if you think there is something wrong with the product, but the user is embarrassed to make an opinion, how can you let the user put down their guard and output the real idea? In fact, you can put the user and you in the position of helping each other, pointing out that if you want to collect product problems, you need the user's help, otherwise you will be scolded. At this time, the user may share his understanding of the problem based on goodwill, and then express it freely.

The fourth step is to ask more about past real experiences . For the previous example, many users may not be able to give the answer objectively, and the information extracted by the user may hide some problems. At this time, the user can actually be guided to describe in the form of storytelling. Real process from which valuable information is obtained.

The fifth step is not to use terms that users do not understand . This is a common mistake made by Internet practitioners. We are used to saying some internal proper nouns to customers, but we do not notice whether the customers understand it. For example, the word scene is a commonly used term in the Internet. Sometimes the needs we refer to are completely different from the needs that users refer to. So we must follow the way users speak to them, especially during the interview process.

The sixth step is to intersperse on-site operations and encourage oral thoughts , which I have a deep feeling. In the past, we have done a photo search application. The data of this type of application has always been very different from our own expectations. We have always wondered what went wrong. It turned out that many of our initial designs and interaction logic were different from what users expected. So sometimes it is more accurate to see how the user uses it than to ask him how to use it.

Interspersing on-site operations and encouraging oral thoughts are an important method for user interviews. Many professional interview companies and institutions often let users go to the scene to operate and then observe in secret. Because we are around the user, it will also interfere with the customer, thereby affecting his normal use. A better way is to invite the customer to the study room, let him operate the application, and observe it without the user's knowledge. real results.

Of course, the user just doesn't know that we are doing observations, but it is also clear in advance that we are doing a user interview. After the end, we will also confirm with the user to explain whether we have video data during this process, what problems are recorded and why In doing so, make sure that the observation is within the legal bounds.

The seventh step is not to ask closed-ended questions . This is also a mistake we often make. Closed-ended questions are that the user's answer can only be yes and no or good and bad. The answer to this question doesn't really have much value. For example, ask whether the function of a product is good or not? 60% of users say yes, 40% say no, even if I get this data, I don’t know how to optimize 40% of bad, and 60% of good is good. So we should ask open-ended questions, which are the user's views and perceptions of features. Instead of making subjective evaluations, based on the user's real feedback with details, we can know his attitude and tendency towards the product.

The eighth step is to give users a sense of honor . This is a problem that we often ignore. In fact, customers often verify products with a skeptical attitude. The quality of the product has no absolute relationship with it, which is not conducive to us obtaining sincere feedback from customers. In this regard, we should guide customers to know how much this matter has helped us. Without him, we might not be able to accomplish anything, and even if the client asks a question you already know, it's best to be surprised.

Because in this case, the customer is affirmed and willing to share more things. Giving users a sense of honor can not only be used in user interviews, but may also be helpful in daily social interactions.

05 Inspiration Box

Finally, I would like to introduce to you a project where you can find inspiration, that is, the inspiration treasure box. "Inspiration Box " is a project in the RTE NG-Lab program initiated by Shengwang and the RTE developer community. "Inspiration Box" hopes to gather with you the needs and ideas of RTE (real-time interaction) in various scenarios, and form a co-construction mechanism on this basis to bring the scenarios closer to technology and accelerate the process of demand landing.

Anyone who is interested in the RTE field, whether you are an engineer, product manager, designer, user... can contribute ideas or product solutions related to real-time interactive scenarios, as well as raise scenario-based questions or needs, and are interested in Scenarios continue to be explored, communicated, and discussed. You can also further participate in or initiate project co-construction, seek the support and help of more people, and promote the product implementation together.

On the basis of the "RTE Vientiane Map" of the sound network, the "Inspiration Treasure Box" map was launched, and further collected the related industries, sub-scenarios, products, functional requirements and technologies in the real-time interactive field.

You can click here to visit the Inspiration Box code warehouse, view the "Inspiration Box" map , discover your own entrepreneurial inspiration, find your own business solutions, and supplement the interesting scenarios, products, and technologies you find to help others. You can also submit your own product or technology to be displayed in the map.

The "Inspiration Box" map will be gradually updated and iterated with the operation of the project. I hope to see your contribution in the map as soon as possible!