Editor's note: This article is from WeChat's public number, "Job" (ID: zhirent), by Gao Ya,...
Last time we introduced Grab in the "Your Company" section, we received many questions from students about the "giant" company that dominates Southeast Asia's mobility industry, such as its working environment, atmosphere, and working style. Today, in order to answer your questions, we invited Mr. Goya, a senior product designer in charge of GrabFood product design at Grab, to share with you what it's like to work at Grab Beijing. We hope it will be helpful to you.
△ Gao Ya, Senior Product Designer, Grab
Goya graduated from the University of Warwick, a top 10 university in the UK, and before joining Grab, she worked as a Design Lead at App Annie.
Design like an anthropologist
In the design world, there are always some 'truths' that play on words. For example, "Want your users to fall in love with your designs? Fall in love with your users" or "People ignore design that ignores people". or "People ignore design that ignores people" (People ignore design that ignores people), all of these words have to be traced back to the "User Centered System Design" put forward by Don Norman1 in 1986, which was revolutionary at that time and completely changed the industry's thinking mode of human-computer interaction and the basic method of product design.
In the decades that followed, all companies and designers engaged in product design and development would put 'user-centeredness' on the wall, hang it on their lips, turn it into a core value of the company, write it in their portfolios, and no one would question its authority. But people usually lack thinking about what they take for granted.
For example, how exactly should we go about user-centered design? To what extent is it sufficient?
This doubt reached its peak when I joined Grab, whose market is focused on Southeast Asia but whose R&D centers are spread all over the world, as if it wasn't worried about the dislocation that comes with developing a product at a distance. But I was worried that as a designer in the Beijing R&D center, I was miles away from my users, who grow up next to the equator, who have no seasons, who drink tea with sugar, who look at tropical landscapes, who eat satay skewers, rice with coconut milk, fish ball soup with milk, who don't eat pork, and how could I, a lover of sesame sauce and rice with lard, design a product for them that is closely related to food?
△ Street food in Indonesia
The experience I've had since coming to work at Grab has completely reassured me that "user-centeredness" is more than a slogan here, unlike many other companies. Unlike many other companies, "user-centered" is more than just a slogan here, and the way Grab works often reminds me of Levi-Strauss's Tropic of Melancholy, in which Levi-Strauss traveled deep into the jungles of the Amazon River and the forests of the Brazilian highlands, to places that had nothing to do with his upbringing and life. There he experiences the shocks, dangers and surprises of difference and strangeness. He observes the people of each tribe, living and talking with them. It's an anthropologist's way of working, and it's how Grab puts its "user-centered" mantra into practice.
Into the fields, all of them.
The GrabFood team in Beijing consists of close to 200 people. Almost everyone has traveled to Jakarta (Indonesia is GrabFood's most important market), either to do user research, meet with local colleagues, test the product, or just to experience life, a kind of field research.
Direct observation is one of the most important ways to get first-hand, raw information. And you'll find that just being there is a huge amount of information that can be used to assist in future product design decisions. You can feel the motorcycles whizzing by on Jakarta's not-so-spacious streets, which are more crowded than Beijing's Third Ring Road during rush hour, and the street stalls are everywhere, while cashless payment is not popular enough.
Taking every opportunity to use your own products locally is also an essential part of the process. Even as the direct developer of a product, there are still a lot of awkward and fun things that can happen the first time you use a product in person. My Danish boss didn't know there were two grabbers on the back of a GrabBike when he first used it in Indonesia, so he hugged the motorcycle driver in the back seat and drew uneasy glances from the driver; I took out a Grab to order a late-night snack on my first late night in Jakarta, and I was shocked by the number of restaurants open 24 hours a day, and then I was stumped by a menu with no pictures and no names that I could understand. I was shocked at how many restaurants were open 24 hours a day, and then I was faced with a menu with no pictures and a name I couldn't understand, which was a real pain in the ass.
If the above two aren't enough, Grab has a secret weapon - the Immersion Project - which is open to everyone and has a lot of interesting content.
Depending on the target product, you might spend two days sitting in the co-pilot of a Grab online taxi driver, assisting him in picking up orders and transporting passengers; you might also sit on the back of a Grab delivery boy's motorcycle, delivering takeaways for two days with him. This is a bit like the immersive theater that has become popular in the last two years. The intention is to allow participants to break boundaries, step into the middle of the stage, and participate in the user's daily work and life scenarios, gaining a first-hand perspective, observing and experiencing them in an intimate way, which enhances empathy and provides a more direct and deeper understanding of the problems that the product needs to solve.
△ GrabFood's Immersion project
Outreach-rich user research
Nazish, the head of user research at GrabFood, used to say, "We study humans before we study features." This accurately reflects the focus of Grab's user research. This accurately reflects Grab's focus on user research; Grab also does a lot of usability testing based on product design, but in addition to that, the U&R and product teams emphasize on Foundation Research, which is the "study of humans".
Like, "Why do people order takeout?" or even "Why do people eat?" These backtracking explorations of the thinking models of people in different regions can help designers understand users' motivations, behavioral patterns, and perspectives on problems on a metaphysical level. These are not instant weapons that can help you solve a specific design problem right away, but it will slowly but surely help you to build the cornerstone of the building before it is completed, and all the designs and decisions made on top of it will be better grounded.
Even daily usability research can be turned into a small window to study human beings, and understanding as much as possible about the motives and reasons behind users' behaviors will often yield unexpected results. For example, in a usability test, it was found that a participant would not order food from a restaurant that was about to close because he was worried that the restaurant would close before the driver arrived, causing the driver to make a wasted trip; while another participant would make the comment, "I can understand this icon, but I'm worried that a lot of other Indonesians can't understand it". After hearing similar responses like this a number of times, it can be summarized that there is a general aspect of thinking of others in the character of Indonesians.
In addition to serious lab user research, we also have some more fun and relaxing projects, such as going to a user's home for a meal. Users are usually better able to express their true thoughts in a relaxing environment. It is also an unusual experience for us, as the visitors, to see the composition of their family members, where they eat, and what kind of meals they have.
△ The design team goes to the user's home for dinner
Recognize users as individuals, but also recognize them as a group
As user-centered design methods, fieldwork and user research have many obvious advantages, but they also share some disadvantages, such as not being easily quantifiable and not being exhaustive. The analysis of user behavior data can then complement this. However, these two schools of thought are not conflicting, but rather complementary. The data gives conclusions with an established understanding of the user's mindset, and can be used to frame scenarios that support the data's results and give the data a reasonable interpretation.
Susan Sontag once said of Tropic of Melancholy, "It speaks in a human voice". As Grab's designers, we went into the fields, rode on the motorcycles of the drivers who delivered the food, talked to the diners, went to their homes to eat, and ordered a Sate Padang with GrabFood just like every other ordinary Indonesian, and it was only in this way that we could get the 'human voice', and thus establish some kind of real connection with the users. Only then could we get the "human voice" and create a real connection with our users, who began to appear in our minds more often in an unmistakable image, telling us their problems and guiding us in the right direction of designing the product.
"Each person has a world dragging with him/her", and only if you enter his/her world first, the product you design can enter his/her world as well. (Oh! That seems to be another 'truth' playing with words.)
Don Norman is a renowned scholar in the field of cognitive science, human factors engineering and other design fields, and a well-known author in the U.S. He is famous for his book Design & Everyday Life (also known as The Psychology of Design) in the field of industrial design and interaction design.
② Fieldwork: Fieldwork is the basic methodology of anthropology and the earliest anthropological methodology. It is the practice and application of the basic research methodology of cultural anthropology and archaeology, i.e., the "direct observation method", and it is also a preliminary step to obtain first-hand primary data before the research work is carried out.
