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Design in China Takes A Great Leap Forward
 By Liya Zheng
Published - 12 December 2007

The 4th annual User Experience conference in China took place in Beijing this year. The number of local speakers in 2007 increased dramatically from the last year's conference. Both the materials covered in the talks and workshops reflected a huge leap forward for the User Experience community in China.  It was echoed in the opening speeches, that China's user experience and design industries are key to the country's economic growth. User Experience practitioners have an exciting future and an increasingly strategic role to fill. A key topic to address when we look into our industry's future is how can Chinese and foreign companies use our talents to help them succeed in the global market place.


On the last day of the conference, I conducted a workshop to talk to 25 Interaction Designers about how to work more strategic with our design process and approach. The goal of this workshop was to to address exactly the big question I posed. I wanted to take their thinking from producing great designs to question how they can take a key role in having positive impact on actual market success. We all know that accountable and repeatable successes do not lie in creative genius mentality. So we practiced doing strategic design. A few themes emerged from the discussions in the workshop and I want to share them here. 

Challenges for designers in China
My workshop consisted of Interaction Designers from UX groups in Yahoo China, Lenovo,  Haier, Tancent and many others. They shared with me cultural and organizational obstacles present in their design practice. Some of these will sound familiar to their Western counterparts as well.

First off, designers work downstream. It is often that product strategies and requirements are already decided before a designer is assigned to the task of "designing" the product. The product strategies often are heavily technologically and business focused. This makes the designer's job much more difficult especially when upfront user research is not yet a common practice in China. These designers rarely have the opportunities and freedom to innovate from people's needs. Also, product management is explicitly responsible for profitability, making product strategy conversations further out of a designer's reach. Lastly, I observed that "collaboration" is quite a foreign concept to the local culture. Having been raised and educated in China until my teens, I sympathize with the challenges young designers have to overcome in this area. All of these challenges adds up to a very difficult environment to do great designs in. I have to commend their efforts in still managing to produce great design thinking. However, the companies are the ones missing on this talent and it's something they will not be able to continue to miss when consumer demands go up.

The rise of the Chinese experience economy
Currently, China’s economy is largely based on an manufacturing-age mindset. This mindset causes the work flow of a product development organization to resemble that of the old assembly line. Everyone is responsible for one task and is rewarded for successfully doing just that. When that task is completed, it is passed on to the next person. Design is just one function in this linear process where collaboration and teamwork is a foreign idea. The product manager writes the specification and gets a design resource to finish "drawing up the concept". Despite the current situation, I believe that Chinese companies will join the rest of the world in the Experience Economy sooner than we would think. The Chinese economy have been growing at rate that many of us can't ignore. The government, while still politically far removed from the world, is committed to growing the economy at GDP rates in the teens on average. Thus, Chinese companies will realize, like their Western counterparts, that Design thinking will need to be core to their organizational structure.



The user experience field will take a huge leap forward, working at a higher level in the organizational chart as well a huge demand for design thinking to bring these companies into the next decade. The designers I talk to are ready for it. Consumers will become smarter as spending per capita increases with the rise of the middle class that we see so much of in Beijing, Shanghai, Canton and so many other major cities. Chinese designers are optimistic that this day is coming and they want to be prepared to take that opportunity. I saw great energy and a yearning to build up their skills to face challenges and responsibilities that comes with design being a core competitive advantage of an economy. I believe that the struggles Interaction Designers are facing in China today will soon become an opportunity for them.

Designers making a leap into strategic design thinking
In China, it is common that people are very focused on producing great designs all alone. But innovation does not come from one individual being a creative genius. It comes from top-notch team work & collaboration, the ability to take user insights and turn them into viable product strategies, and careful planning consulting to a stakeholder team as well as great facilitation skills to reach consensus and alignment in the company to push product visions forward to meet market timing needs. During the workshop, I asked the 25 Interaction Designers to bear with me and strategically think about their design work.

When I presented them the problem they must refrain from designing the product, which is their first instinct. I asked them to do this first:

  1. Define business opportunities from stakeholder interviews.

  2. Analyze user needs to find business opportunity.

  3. Find a project focus and articulate it in a marketing pitch.

  4. Plan the product releases collaboratively with their product development colleagues.

  5. Do usage scenarios for the future product concept.

  6. Do value-based design -- design the concepts with user values in mind and practice presenting them by talking about value first.


Next steps for user experience in China
After returning from the conference, I got many emails from participants in my workshop that they will start to apply the techniques they learned in the workshop to their work. They desperately yearn for a change in the culture of their companies and the structures that keeps them from adding as much value as they could. So In 2008, I will be publishing a 3-article series to address the needs that these designers shared with me. I will be offering some concrete, step by step advice on how to change your role in your organization and gain influence on the success of the products and services that you design by doing up front design strategy.

References

  1. Workshop: Communicate your design vision by first defining a clear strategy. Slides:  http://www.slideshare.net/liya/design-strategy

  2. Six Techniques for Advocating Design in Your Organization. http://www.apogeehk.com/articles/Six_techniques_for_advocating_design_in_your_organization.html

  3. The empathy Economy. http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/mar2005/nf2005037_4086.htm

  4. Strategy by Design.  http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/95/design-strategy.html