A Thinking Journey at the Scale of Design @ Tencent

2020｜Type: Original｜Tag: Experience

From July 2016 to May 2020, I worked as a UX designer in Tencent's User Research and Experience Design Centre. During this experience, I played myself in different roles at different scales of projects. Using the design building as input, I collaborated with experts in different domains to provide solutions for numerous products and services in the business units and groups, as well as companies collaborating with Tencent.

Design Led

# Self-driven design starts with actively seeking collaboration #

A Delightful Good Thing in 2017 was the first time I led the design process of a product and the first project where I was responsible for product design. It was a very small project in terms of the users it served. However, it is full of explorations of public welfare, attempts at the product form, and experiments of technology. It was this exploration that made a freshman find his first confidence in the workplace from technology for good.

In the beginning, there were other challenges, in January 2017, WeChat Mini-Program was officially released, and there is no design experience to learn from. 2017 is also a year when AI began to take off, the new technology brought more design challenges, the use of image training in product design, and the ensuing recall, refusal, and user feedback in machine learning. In addition to that, I also tried to write scripts for CUI - all of this provided experience in designing for machine learning.

View the project A Delightful Good Thing

# Collaborative design of cross-functional teams is a multiple game of community value maximisation #

There are no direct flights from Shenzhen to Dunhuang, you need to transit in Lanzhou. Tickets can be purchased fortnight in advance to visit the eight caves in Mogao Caves. Now, you can watch 1,800 murals and 210 sculptures from 231 caves in five archaeological sites without leaving your home. That's Yunyou Dunhuang on the cloud, which was released in 2020.

As the head of product design for Dunhuang, I led two visual designers, eleven developers, and nine content operators, working with the Marketing and Public Relations team to co-create it with the Dunhuang Academy. My role in the project also includes User Researcher, UX Designer, Product Manager, Project Manager, and more.

I used design thinking to position the product architecture, figure out the front-end and back-end connection, communicate with different levels of clients, promote cross-team collaboration, develop practical solutions and landing programmes, and so on. These experiences have made me grow a lot, and also see my shortcomings. For example, when pursuing breadth, one does not always have the energy to make things deeper. After building a labelling system of users and caves, how to use it? This question took me directly to the next stage of my career.

View the project Yunyou Dunhuang Product Design

Design System

# Initially there was no scale for designing systems, it emerged gradually as the design progressed #

2018 was a year of going deep in design building. In the case of the Data Center Services Management Portal, the solution has jumped out from the business level to accelerate the consistency between the systems. In this project, my role is UX Designer.

At the specification level

Instruction manual style specification has a certain reading cost.
After the project was handed over, there was a certain risk for the application of the specification, which was not well accepted by the designers.
Specifications are not very compatible with new product features, resulting in accumulating more and more special cases and leading to inapplicability.

At the designer level

Designers' own professional experience will have different judgments about the specifications.
Weak cognitive and operational consensus.
Individual designers' perceptions and behaviours are not suitable to standardise.

I took the lead on this in 2018

Make the specification document readable, actionable, and maintainable by making Symbols, Components & Templates.
Define the nodes, standardise the naming, and progressively agree at the cognitive level.
Iterating the Symbol information architecture to further shorten the operational path.
In the same year, further improve the design system in the R&D Budget Management Platform. Think about the presentation of step-by-step tasks from pages, modals, and components respectively, and explore the possibility of combination. Try to communicate with users, establish a style guide, and provide pitch and tone. At this point, the scale of the design system takes initial shape.

Based on these two projects, participated in defining the initial CoDesign, a prototype of a company-level design system. And presented the article Delivering Services for Backend System Users with Progressive Thinking.

Of course, a design system is much more than just UI styles, it is also the way the team works, and the values and principles. From typography, layouts and grids, colours, components, and coding specifications, to pitch and tone, style guides, documentation, and more, design systems put it all together so that the whole team can learn, build and iterate from it.

View the project Data Center Services Management Portal

View project R&D Budget Management Platform

View the article Delivering Services for Backend System Users with Progressive Thinking

Design Thinking

# Small, rapidly iterative design is a collective unconscious delight #

In the beginning, there was no PRD for Images N’ Poems, we used HMW to organise brainstorming and identified the first MVP - Images N’ Poems. With the image transformers and text generated based on the image, it is a WeChat Mini-Program that converts images uploaded by visitors into ink painting or sand painting style and finds the relevant poems for them.

In the next three days, from sketches and decision-making to prototypes, and finally inviting stakeholders to verify the design output. Two weeks later, the product was officially launched and made its debut at CVPR. this was not a premeditated design sprint, but rather a process in which we discovered that the purpose of a quick validation of the MVP coincided with the design sprint. During the whole process, I took the role of Master. Learning and applying at the same time.

View the project Images N’ Poems

# Design that collaborates with cross-functional teams is consensus-seeking toward co-creation #

In this project, my role was User Researcher, UX Designer, and Project Manager.

Stakeholders were involved in all phases of the design. During the define phase, discussions were organised with different roles, including employer branding, overseas recruiter, channel building, architecture, and hiring managers, to define the problem and clarify the objectives.

For example, when conducting the user journey map, we found that the registration was hard because the process was tied to the application flow on the original website. By stripping out the registration and using a third-party login, we were able to make this process easier to increase the amount of CVs submitted. Another example is that we found that there was a lack of information on the original website, so we organised an affinity map to explore the potential information and strengthen the employer branding.

Then, the reclassification of the job categories and the culture with benefits involved multiple teams such as the Tencent Academy, Culture Group, and Benefits Group. Decision-making often becomes tricky when multi-team cooperation is involved. To solve this problem, we invited users to participate in card sorting, collaborating and promoting the work of each team by involving the third-party perspective of users.

The website and the mobile were launched at the end of April and the end of July, respectively. Compared to the previous month, the number of visitors rose by 65% and the number of resumes doubled through the new registration. The length of time spent on the website increased by 22 per cent through the improvement of information on the website and the reclassification of the job categories and culture with benefits.

View the project Redesign Tencent Careers Website

View the article Competitive Analysis of Tencent Careers Site

# Design is designed to help more people think differently #

As the person in charge of the design post of the Launchpad Lab of Product Manager Trainee in 2019 of Tencent Academy, we pass design thinking to trainees more systematically and practically through practical sessions. They can help their teams or even more people in the future, standing in the user's perspective to think about the problem and get insights.

In this project, we found that the previous courses did not have a complete clue, and the cases were rather outdated. With this idea in mind, we invited experienced designers to join us for a discussion. In addition to the theoretical sessions, we found that the practical sessions can rely on the structure of design thinking, in the form of the pyramid structure, in the practical sessions teaching first and then exercising following.

From 2017 to 2019, the design thinking that has been used in the project has gradually expanded from small to large, and my role changed from trainee to master, from learning to applying and teaching. The change in scale of design thinking relies on the positioning of authority and responsibility.

View the article Planning a Design Workshop for the Product Manager

Individuals and Teams

Design shapes individuals as well as teams.

# Man is the measure of all things #

At Tencent's User Research and Experience Design Centre, design is the influence. Speak up for design from different levels.

Personal

For newbies, I try to guide them to establish their standards. Whether it's the three interns I've brought up, the two virtual projects I've brought up, or the Launchpad Lab of Product Manager Trainee.
For the teams, timely think about the experience, stay hungry, and stay foolish.

Company

Company-level products, such as Tencent Careers Website, CoDesign, Tencent VI, and Tencent Home, when facing the information architecture, all get the method of card sorting from Know-how of Card Sorting.
Company-level organisations, such as Tencent Academy and Robotics X, will also get inspiration for organising workshops from the Know-how of Design Workshop.

Society

Yunyou Dunhuang which was released in 2020 has become a phenomenal product in the field of tourism and culture, winning the prize of The Best Communication Product of Chinese Cultural Relics across All-Media of 2020, a brand new milestone of digital cultural preservation in China and around the world.

View the article Know-how of Card Sorting

View the article Know-how of Design Workshop

View the article The Design Story of Yunyou Dunhuang Product Design

# Constantly getting to know yourself #

Man is the measure of all things, and I am grateful and fortunate to have gradually established my design standards at Tencent. Although the process has its ups and downs, sticking to the original intention requires keeping a man in their best state.

For myself, every stage is growth, and every stage has new challenges in life. I am also positively embracing the challenge of product design on a new scale. Cooking was something new to try for myself during the pandemic. Cooking is also a creative process, and I do enjoy the immersion that comes with it. At the same time, I still love travelling and staying connected to the world, never stopping to discover it.

Whether it's product design, cooking food, or travelling. It's all a way to constantly getting to know yourself.