JAVY WANG

Project INTRODUCTION

Get5 is a kind of application distribution platform used in Android devices

I was lucky to join the Net-Dragon company right after my graduation. As the company has successful design experiences of its previous application distribution (91 assistance is the most popular Chinese app market, its the largest and most influential smart terminal management tool), so the company cooperated with HUAWEI, push the app distribution platform to the overseas.

I was involved in the overseas project and came into contact with users from different places and regions. In this way, I learned inquiry methods about user research (personal interviews, web reviews, user surveys by web), and what is user-centered design. Also, I improved my problem-solving capacity. As a team member, I was the primary product operation specialist as ND representative to cooperate with HUAWEI company. 

In this project, I would like to present what I have done in the part of preliminary user research.

What do our users look like? 

Though ND has successful product design experiences in China, contents and some functions need to be re-define according to the different backgrounds and cultures of the users, so what our users look like? 

PHASE ONE(Web Reviews)

Because HUAWEI has a rich local experiences and carrier resources, so the survey about Indonesia market took advice from them: get in touch with a total of 45 people, run through about 20 places. Besides, I collected local market data report from 2 professional consulting website: TalkingDate and iResearch.

Introspection

Because some online information is free and open, most of information were collected from last year, not off handed but its enough to understand the general situation of the market. Moreover, there was not much accurate data, and some were even missing.

Solving method

As the whole team was there, we were able to get in touch with the users, so we choose Depth Interviews to outline the user’s image in the second phase, brought out the user model and prepared for the survey.

PHASE TWO(Depth Interviews, Persona)

Since the platform can only be used in Android phones, sample users must use Android phones and be able to accept an interview for 2 hours

Samples: 6 samples in total       

Target users: salesman, civil servant,  rich student, normal student, business man, mid-sized companies staffs

 Questions

Introspection

1. After we met those issues with the first 3 interviewees, when we interviewing, we chose to interview both interviewees and their friends in order to make the interview more smoothly. 

2. Because the mid-east and Indonesian users are mainly Mohammedan, we need to pay attention about the cultural taboos, for example, Mohammedans pray fourth everyday so we can not pay them a visit during the pray times; we also need to pay attention to the languages and places for the interview, avoid the disrespect of the pigs. We need to respect different cultures.

phase three(questionnaire)

User Samples Select

Limited condition: samples must use android phones, able to fill the questionnaires completely and real, fit the sample requirements.
Total of samples: the operation team was in Jakarta, so the off-line questionnaire survey were mainly around it.  There were 2 groups offline questionnaires in Jakarta area and 3 groups online questionnaires for the all Indonesia, at least 2000 samples, actual samples were 3000.
 

Questions guidance

Result

INTROSPECTION

1. About the off-line questionnaires gave out, we arranged some local students to gave out the questionnaires to other students, since we lost the contact with some of the interviewees and some of the questionnaires were missing, we had a low collection rate.

2. The work load of processing off-line questionnaires were huge, bad hand writing caused lots of invalid questionnaires.The valid questionnaires we collected back ensured the multifarious of the samples, there were 1017 valid questionnaires

3. As we collected the questionnaires while we giving out them, we discovered the invalid questionnaire issue in time, so we invited some local students to help us gave out and manage the questionnaires, 30 questionnaires for each of them and the questionnaires must be done under the companion. At the same time, we increased the amount of our online questionnaires, collected them back by sending the linking messages.

CONCLUSION

During the users research process, what impresses me the most is users interview. So how to be a good interviewer? In my point of view, it should be asking users to better express themselves. Only to ask users to better express themselves and without interviewer’s subjective impressions, can an interviewer do a good and valid interview. At the same time, it is not recommended to ask series of questions as it is easily to cause aversion. Once it happens, users will randomly answer questions and finally the rubbish data will be collected. Thus in the following interviews, I learn to ask users to remember or just state the facts. Only in this way, can I obtain more useful information.   

Besides preliminary user research, we also did lots of user research to iterate the original result. This is not only beneficial for designing promotion plan but also good for design features of the product. This helps our team to obtain 10 million users within two years.