Sorry for not updating for a while. Take advantage of this Dragon Boat Festival holiday, chat about some recent thinking.

1.

A few days ago, I saw some students on the Internet mentioned the idea of thinking about users as white people. My reply was “yes, but it’s too old”. This idea is a product of the ancient days of the Internet (if there ever was one), and I remember looking through books on the Internet in the library as an undergraduate and seeing similar statements about minimalist design, no complexity, Don’t make me think, etc.

Why are they called ancient times? Because all kinds of things on the Internet ocean at that time were almost new, every user who came here to “surf” was confused and worried, and every product was designed with the mentality of searching up and down. Engineers, product managers, entrepreneurs, at this time, like users, are pioneers on this ocean, to establish a new order, to create a new way of life, what is the best way? Copying, of course, the old order and the old way of life.

So you can see from the original product definition, QQ is the network pager, 3721 is the network address book, portal website is like the network newspaper and magazine, BBS is the network bulletin board, everyone’s way of accessing the Internet is simple and easy to understand.

At the product experience level, both in the early PC era and the early mobile era, there were very few complex interactions. On PCS, it’s all about links and buttons. On mobile, there are lots of symbols, few complicated gestures, and text rather than ICONS.


As someone summed up the evolution of the TAB at the bottom of Instagram, it can represent the evolution of interactive vision in the mobile era.

More of this kind of analysis at the design level is available online, so I won’t go into it here.

To describe all this is more to explain that, after so many years, “treating users as white people” is not necessarily a general rule in a large number of Current Internet products, and there are many limitations to it.

2.

As with a debate topic, let’s define what is white. In different contexts, xiaobai has multiple meanings:

  • Users who are not familiar with Internet products, such as the elderly and children who seldom use Internet products
  • Users who are not familiar with the product area, such as those who have never ordered takeout, are relatively insignificant compared to takeout products
  • New users of a product, such as those who have never used Meituan takeout

In the context of the previous description, everyone refers to the white is often the first kind. However, nowadays Internet products, especially a large number of products involving offline business, all have these different types of users.

Why distinguish between these users? Quite simply, the cost of learning varies greatly, in other words, it doesn’t matter how “educated” your users are when it comes to using your product.

For example, meituan launched taxi service in cities with Didi. What should be the product design concept? Is the user as the first kind of white? Not necessarily. By roughly replicating almost all of Didi’s driver-passenger processes and experiences, Meituan can instantly attract didi’s existing users at almost zero learning cost. (In fact, meituan does the same.)

In this case, Meituan only needs to treat its users as the third category of users, namely “users who have used Didi but not Meituan”. For the first type of the second type of small white, the replacement cost is too high, not worth the loss, in the commercial competition is not necessary.

Therefore, if you are now the first product manager of Meituan Taxi, do not treat users as white users who may be confused and confused in every link. This is an example of not “treating users like white people”.

So what should we do? Quite simply, we want to look at the difference in usage cost when the target user moves.

To regard users as the first type of complete white, that is, to regard users as people who may make mistakes in any steps, may not understand, and may not be clear, is a kind of stupid practice, but also a kind of lazy practice, equivalent to ignoring the user’s old experience, but also a kind of imaginary crowd.

For example, we are doing the express drivers thank red envelopes, passengers can send red envelopes to drivers, if we treat drivers and passengers as complete white, we need to do a lot of education: what is red envelopes? How to give out red envelopes? What are red envelopes for? How do I get a red envelope? Where’s the money in the red envelope? And so on. The process can also be many times more complex – you may fear complete incomprehension. In fact, these are almost not needed, because even the third and fourth tier cities, counties and towns of uncle aunt have been wechat red envelope education for many years, this little white in the company group is almost non-existent.

3.

The content to be presented and provided by the product should be user-oriented, not imaginary. How to do that is simple: We need to know our audience.

To illustrate the above, a simple formula can be: poor cognition of users = cognitive needs of new products – existing cognition of users. The more important thing we want to study is the latter, which is how far users have come to perceive our products.

I have already given two examples, so I won’t go into them. Many product managers put the cart before the horse by indulging in theorizing about scenarios and methodologies rather than reaching out to users and asking them for input, guessing instead of trying to see if they understand what they’re doing.

4.

Do not put the user when small white, the user when the user.

Above, hope can help you.