Under the background of the "going to sea" wave of Internet enterprises, as designers, facing the new and unknown market, how to find the design direction suitable for overseas products? For the localization topic, this paper will provide some practical design experience.
Localization design case analysis:
In recent years, the growth rate of the domestic e-commerce market has slowed down. In the past two years, due to the impact of the epidemic, shopping habits in most parts of the world have to change from offline to online. The huge blank e-commerce market has attracted giants to go to sea for development, and the overseas market has gradually become a new blue ocean.
According to the research of Accenture's "unicorn" in China in 2021, 45% of Unicorn enterprises believe that overseas expansion is crucial, of which 82% plan to enter the overseas market within 24 months. From games, developer services and SaaS (software as a service), to hardware equipment, e-commerce and other industries, more and more start-ups have aimed at globalization from the embryonic stage; According to the 2021 China's cross-border e-commerce market data report released by the ECOSOC e-commerce research center of www.ecosoc.com, the size of China's cross-border e-commerce market in 2021 reached 14.2 trillion yuan, an increase of 13.6% compared with 2020, of which exports accounted for 77.46%. In addition, according to the 2022 China capital overseas investment and M & A report of it orange, the number of overseas investment events participated by Chinese capital in 2021 reached 454, a new high since 2004. In the first two months of 2022, Chinese capital has invested more than 40 overseas, with a scale of about 5billion yuan. According to the report of the Research Institute of the China Council for the promotion of international trade in March this year, China's outward direct investment flow and stock have ranked among the top three in the world for four consecutive years. Nearly 80% of Chinese enterprises will maintain and expand their outward investment intentions and are optimistic about the prospects of outward investment.
China business news 2022.5
It is not difficult to see that even today, when the epidemic is raging all over the world, "going to sea" is still an important direction for the development of Chinese enterprises. Including jd.com, more and more Chinese enterprises have begun to pay attention to overseas markets, and have blossomed in cross-border e-commerce, game and other independent application development and investment, from camping at sea to gradually growing into a global enterprise.
Top 50 leading brands in China going to sea
The success of Chinese enterprises going to sea is inseparable from a key point - localized design. As a designer, facing the new and unknown market, how to find the design direction suitable for overseas products? In the past few years of serving jd.com's Southeast Asia business, we have gradually accumulated some localized design methods. Here are some tips for you.
Jd.com's international layout has also lasted for many years. In 2015, jd.com officially entered the overseas e-commerce market, launched several national pavilions, and began to set up independent sites overseas at the same time. At the end of 2015, jd.com established jd ID, and then established JD central in 2018. Based on the Southeast Asian market, the two sites have gradually formed a global layout and continue to expand to the Netherlands and other European and American countries. Internationalization has become an important battlefield of jd.com.
When a product needs to enter a new national market, in the period of start-up and rapid development, as a designer, we must first have some basic knowledge and understanding of this country.
Avoid risks and determine the direction
There will be a thousand Hamlets in the eyes of a thousand readers, and the differences between people are even greater than that between countries. Due to the influence of cultural background, historical origin, natural conditions and other aspects, people from different countries will have different feelings and reactions to the same thing. Facing a strange country, we need to break the inherent impression, abandon the innate cognition of users, and try to treat them with an objective eye.
We can understand the market through some general research, so as to avoid risks and get the general direction of experience design. Here, we can quote some classic analysis models to help us do all-round research and analysis.
Pest is a very commonly used analysis model. How an industry or company can develop depends not only on its own strength, but also on the external environment. Pest is an effective method to judge the development prospects of an industry or company. We can collect public information to clarify the political, economic, technological and social environment of the target market. However, these are not enough for the design. Another model, NESC, adds the research content of natural environment and human environment on this basis, which includes basic information such as religious customs that are important for Southeast Asian countries.
These two models actually contain most of the characteristics of a group based on the country, which can greatly outline the basic situation of a country. Through the analysis of these two dimensions, we can preliminarily deduce some basic principles of localization.
For example, joy, the mascot of jd.com, was originally a puppy, but dogs are not allowed to have close contact with people in Islam. In order to avoid the taboo of religious customs, the Indonesian station used the image of a pony as the mascot. In many countries that attach importance to religion, it is very important to fully express respect for local culture.
Here is a theoretical tool for humanistic research, Hofstede's cultural dimension theory. This theory has been published for more than 40 years. It divides cultural characteristics into six dimensions and is widely cited in the study of cross-cultural differences.
Hofstede (1997), a Dutch scholar, believes that culture is to people what computer programs are to computers; The program limits our way of thinking, our perception, our actions, etc. he tries to use the data mainly from the multinational company IBM to establish the characteristic types of various national cultures. These data come from the survey of 100000 people in more than 50 countries. Subsequently, this theory was continuously improved by the latecomers, and gradually expanded to regularly conduct large-scale research and information collection in various countries around the world, which was summarized into national dimension values, providing theoretical support for cultural analysis. The six cultural dimensions in the theory are as follows:
With these data, we can more intuitively see the cultural characteristics and differences of various countries, and we can also deduce many valuable conclusions. The following figure shows the comparison of Chinese culture with Indonesian and Thai culture in various dimensions:
Understand users and explore cooperation
The second part is user research.
User research methods:
Tencent has a classic course "think like a mushroom", which describes a short story:
There was a mental patient who did nothing every day and hid in the corner with an umbrella. All doctors felt that the patient was hopeless. One day, a psychologist stood beside him and squatted there with an umbrella without saying anything. After holding on for a week, he finally gathered around the expert and said, "are you also a mushroom?"
This story tells us that only by thinking in the way of users can we find the root of the problem. Demand comes from understanding users - understanding users requires empathy and becoming users, "I am the user". It is not easy to have an insight into human nature and push others with oneself. We need to understand users and the market, so as to find opportunities, and we need to "talk" with users.
Using research is a big topic. To understand users, it is not enough to rely on fantasy alone. We have to approach them with real weapons, such as in-depth interviews, questionnaires, feedback, entering the scene, observing user behavior, etc. We are far away from overseas users, but we also need to understand users' ideas, their concerns, shopping tendencies, demands, etc. when we need to do a user questionnaire survey or interview symposium, the best solution is to cooperate with overseas local teams to complete it.
First draft of Indonesian user questionnaire
The above figure is a survey question we completed together with the CX team in Indonesia when we were doing the user survey of Indonesia station. We put the questions and curiosity of users into the questionnaire, and feed back through the distribution, collection and analysis of the CX team, so as to obtain the real ideas of users.
User research:
In addition to targeted research, periodic user feedback tracking is also important.
The two commonly used indicators are customer satisfaction and net recommendation value. Customer satisfaction pays more attention to the feelings and attitudes of users' supervisors, while net recommendation value tends to loyalty and recommendation willingness. The two indicators are usually used in different scenarios. The indicators we track regularly are NPs, which tracks users' feedback and data changes at any time, and is regularly summarized and implemented in optimization.
In addition, the research must be granular. When we have a very clear research purpose for some key process nodes, we can set some trigger conditions in the system process to trigger users' feedback on the current operation. The real environment scenario can help researchers get closer to users and understand the use scenarios and needs of various user groups.
For example, the click on the search list is lower than expected, and many users browse the search list for a long time, turn over the products on several screens, but fail to enter the business details page. At this time, the corresponding questionnaire prompt can be triggered to ask the customer if there are problems, so as to find the user's pain points more accurately.
Clarify advantages and explore innovation
The feedback questionnaire triggered when the search list page is browsed to a certain depth.
The development of new businesses and products cannot be separated from the analysis of competitive products at the macro level. In short, we know ourselves and the enemy, and we will never be defeated in a hundred battles.
When we enter an overseas market, there are often some mature local products in the same industry, or local products of other international companies, which may have cultivated a certain cognitive foundation and usage habits for local users. Our understanding of the local market may not be so deep. At this time, if we use similar competitive products and compare these competitive products and their upstream and downstream horizontally, we can understand the market from a broader level. Through the analysis of competitive products, we can better understand the market and users, clarify the differences, advantages and disadvantages between us and competitive products, so as to know ourselves and know the enemy, and further look for innovation opportunities.
For example, when we are doing the o2o project of Thailand station, through the comparative analysis of direct and indirect competitors, we can clarify the capability advantages and market positioning of our own products. It also understands the basic cognition of users about this business model.
We extracted the elements and colors that users have formed a benign cognition, moderately differentiated them from competitive products, and further deduced the brand logo, brand color and mascot of instant joy.
Although our o2o business is still a new model in the Thai market, we can still get a lot of valuable information from the analysis of indirect competitors such as taxis, convenience stores, takeout and so on, and we can also outline users' acceptance of different business models, design styles and elements.
Therefore, when analyzing, don't stick to the direct competitive products in this industry, and choose products that are similar and similar to our products from other industries, which can bring breakthrough inspiration. We may all have encountered such a dilemma. When we think about how to break through a new business or how to design a function, we think about all kinds of ideas and known competitors, but we still can't think of a way to break through, that is, we encounter a bottleneck. At this time, we should look at some competitive products in different industries to get more ideas.
Positioning problems, pushing to strategies
In the process of making products, when we have clear goals, such as the need to analyze and deduce a key module, we can deduce strategies through data analysis.
Mature designers tend to internalize their design experience into a kind of design intuition. Using intuition to design has advantages and disadvantages. There is not much judgment here, but for an unknown overseas market, intuition is not necessarily reliable.
Let's look at a set of data:
This is the source proportion of UV in a single day in Thailand. In fact, it is very different from our intuitive understanding. Domestic app traffic is the absolute king. PC and M terminals may be very few, but in Thailand, m terminal traffic is the highest. Many people will wonder, why? Let's move on to the data:
Further extracting the data sources of each end, we can see that the most UV sources on the app end are high-definition mobile phones, that is, Apple's plus and Android's 1080 screen (if you look further at the data, you will find that most of them are Android phones).
Why do small screen mobile phones account for so little? Take a look at the proportion of m-end traffic, and our doubts are solved. Small screen and ultra small screen mobile phones account for the highest proportion of traffic accessing the m-end. These mobile phones may be older models, or models that have been eliminated in China. Their systems may not support the installation of apps, so they can only access the m-end page.
Let's take a closer look at the PC side. Surprisingly, small flat-panel and ultra small screen devices account for 35%. We make a vertical comparison between PC and m. We can see that the resolution of some small screen devices coincides. In fact, many fake tablet computers can only browse the PC page because of the problem of device recognition, and the experience is very poor.
Different analysis methods echo each other, and we will have a better understanding when we look at the analysis of previous research. Thai users have a high share of mobile phones and a strong acceptance rate of mobile Internet, but their average income is not high. Many people use small and low-cost mobile phones, and even second-hand mobile phones exported from China.
These users, who account for a very high proportion, have a strong desire to use the Internet, but due to the limitations of equipment, they can only enjoy the shrunk version and castrated version of products. Knowing this objective situation, the iterative strategy of products and design also needs to be adjusted accordingly. For example, for Thailand station, we need to further optimize the experience of small screen, promote the landing of responsive pages, and optimize the identification of end-to-end at the technical level.
Data comes from users. Through a series of data precipitation, processing and analysis, we can find opportunities to make decisions and then return to users to improve user experience, drive business growth and drive business.
Here are some common concepts and methods of data analysis:
These five concepts connect a basic framework of data analysis thinking, and also build a comprehensive analysis system for business and products.
The core of data analysis ability lies not in method theory and tool model, but more in establishing a kind of data consciousness. We should be able to sensitively find the data we should pay attention to, find out the potential laws from these data, and infer the causes behind the data.
Reduce cost and increase efficiency, optimize performance
The last part is more inclined to the precipitation of the performance layer, through the accumulation and summary of design assets and experience, optimize the design performance of the unified product front desk.
Design principles are like grammar in English. As long as we follow the framework of grammar, arbitrary collocation can form an accurate language. A unified design language can ensure the consistency of the platform, reduce the cost of communication, improve efficiency, and enable designers to focus more time on projects.
Jd.com's Southeast Asia site has been deployed since 2015. At present, there are two sites in Indonesia and Thailand. Next, it may expand to more countries, and the differences between countries will become more and more complex. For example, the length of text varies greatly in different countries. It is easier to align left and right in Chinese typesetting, which is not suitable for western language. Therefore, Western typesetting is more suitable for up and down arrangement, which needs to be more flexible, and more text space is reserved.
The structure of the text itself will also lead to the difference of line height, which will also affect the typesetting to a certain extent.
For the design of icons, the icons used by domestic products (such as jd.com main station) are relatively simple and understandable for domestic users, but for overseas users, the semantics of this design are not clear enough. Considering the universality of understanding in many countries, we still need to adopt a design with clearer semantics.
In combination with the differences and unity of national designs, we are also gradually settling the design asset library of Southeast Asia station to help visual designers establish a clear understanding of design concepts and maintain the consistency of product lines in the overall product design style. The asset library is not only used to optimize the experience of existing sites, but also can help the rapid construction of new sites in the future.
Because of the length, this paper focuses on the five directions of localization design. In fact, each direction and chapter can be further studied and analyzed.
The tools and methods in this paper are not only applicable to the localization design of overseas markets, but also valuable for other business models. A lot of content comes from the daily work summary, and there may be errors. Welcome to correct and supplement, and I hope to continue to exchange and study with you in the future. Thank you ~
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