Based on the problem that the user's smartphone needs to solve

Ms. Wang, who is less than 40 years old, has a bachelor's degree in Beijing and works as an office clerk. At the beginning of 2011, he bought five Android phones, two for her husband and himself, the other three spring festival to the father and sister in their hometown. In the past, a typical Android user was about a 98-year-old City man, according to the 2011 mobile survey released by Eric. Now, Ms. Wang's family may be a big part of the rapidly growing Android user. And if the young man is a Early adoptor of technology, now, Ms. Wang's users are gradually becoming a group, or even a mainstream group, that cannot be overlooked in the market. So the problem is, for many practitioners in the IT industry, Ms. Wang's situation is still in a blur.

This ignorance is the original intention of our user research. Like many good startups, the pea pod products have accumulated considerable number of users, gradually spread out from the taste of the crowd, but we also "who is the user?" This problem, feel more and more confused. Yes, as long as the search will be able to find a large number of industry reports: Android phone shipments, the demographic distribution of users, the growth and decline of the brand ... However, for product design, more specific problems are not solved. We decided to try and answer the question in the form of a user interview. So in the third quarter of 2012, we had a series of interviews with mainstream people like Ms Wang, who were mobile phones. And the results, especially for Ms Wang, may be a very interesting part of the study.

Silent Majority

The subtext of "making smartphones a better place" is that there are still a variety of "bad" devices in smartphones. For those who have rich experience in technology products, our understanding of "bad use" is similar. After all, the company's employees are more of this type of user. However, this kind of posts on the Internet are often discussed by us: some it practitioners come home in the Spring Festival and are often shocked by the ecological use of the Internet in their hometown. While our interviews were initially concentrated in the Beijing area, the shock was the same for those who were not people.

In the interview, we talked about the truck drivers, school security, office staff (car, real estate, institutions, etc.), college students and other occupations, education and age, their common feature is not the kind of people who are proficient in mobile phones. For Android phones, some people experience a little more than a year, and more people are replacing their first Android phone in late 2010 and early 2011. They lack the skills to use mobile phones, and complex operations are either erratic or abandoned because the process is too long. Their user education is more difficult, there is no knowledge of technical terminology, such as Wi-Fi and 3G, or a number of plausible concepts, such as the fear of stealing phone information as long as Wi-Fi is connected. They will not appear in mobile forums and will not give feedback to developers. Instead, they are very much in need of help, far from the developer.

They are by no means without demand or impulse. Everyone involved in the interview has shown a desire for smartphones, someone who wants to have an iphone, someone who says they have long wanted to switch to the Android phone, and this year finally has a wish. They knew (or imagined) the virtues of smartphones and dared to spend money on smartphones. Even smartphones are one of the main platforms for them to kill time and get content. Housewife Wang says that when a child goes home to do her homework, she uses her mobile phone to surf the internet without interfering with her child. Lorry driver Zhang said that when he went out to rest, he used his mobile phone to watch the video and listen to music. and security little Chen uses mobile phone to spend a lot of boring time. Even so for them, smartphone utilization is low because application acquisition is a problem.

Smart phones are not smart

A mobile-phone man said in an interview that he had "played" from a Nokia non-intelligent machine, and felt that the biggest breakthroughs in smartphones came from a variety of applications. Since then, enthusiasts play a variety of different models of energy, a large part of the software part. Ms Wang is not ignorant of the change, and in interviews they all said they chose to switch smartphones because of "more games" and "a variety of software (which the user will not use as an app)". However, when the phone is in hand, installing these applications becomes a big problem. Because of this problem, some of the visitors to the mobile phone, few applications, or even the purchase of the place to ask around the knowledgeable friends installed. And this expensive smartphone, the hardware utilization is not high, "smart" part of the idle, became a gorgeous bit of the non-smart phone.

This kind of application obtains the difficulty actually to have two levels, some users find the application download channel to need others to help, while others are stuck in the downloading, installs and so on the operation. In addition, there is a problem, the user is not fluent in the discovery of new applications, even if the application of the download tool, many applications still difficult to appear in his eyes, even if this application can solve his needs.

There are a variety of factors contributing to this problem, and the "official" App Store, Google Play, is not a domestic service, and a variety of app stores, the fragmentation of mobile phone models, also caused a small problem.

These problems for mobile phone reach people, is a leap of small trouble. But to these users, it becomes an insurmountable high threshold. These users first of all experience in technology products is lacking. We interviewed the driver only primary school culture, 2008 years to learn to use computers and Internet, security is a secondary school after graduating from Beijing to work. They embraced the hype of Android phones enthusiastically and bought smartphones, but the learning curve was steep for them. In contrast, office staff have a slightly better computer skills, but it practitioners often forget that they are not as enthusiastic about technology products as practitioners. A woman doing accounting work told us that the mobile phone is used to buy back, why to spend so much effort "toss"? This does not toss, or will not toss attitude, constitute the public users use the basic state of smartphones.

Two thresholds

Understanding the application download channel has become the first hurdle. Although most of these users were able to understand the concept of the application, the problem was not solved. Some users around the so-called mobile phone tatsu, the talent is likely to be the company network management, relatives of the it male, or his favorite to play their own high-end mobile phone brother. Either way, it seems like a good choice to hand over your own phone. And for other users rely on Baidu search, rather than the application store or vertical search, is a way of migrating from the past network experience. Some vendors ' methods are more aggressive: When users install their products, they are recommended to install their phone assistants as soon as they connect to the computer for the first time. Either way, developers have to face the problem: users rummaging through their phones and not figuring out where to download apps.

For some users who know the download channel, the second hurdle is still the problem. Some have installed their mobile assistants, and some search engines for installation packages. These users can handle some mobile phone operation, mobile phone download run traffic, application installation is not successful, the domestic market spread of a variety of viruses, cracked applications, advertising applications, or caused no small trouble. Survey, many users are stuck in the download installation of the specific link. Many developers for the user experience effort, the application of the quality of distribution itself may need to be resolved first. To ensure that this quality itself requires considerable workload.

"I don't know what I don't know."

In the interview, we have some predictions about the problems of applying downloads. But another phenomenon was unexpected. It's not hard to imagine that many popular users have fewer apps on their phones. But their applications are not only small, but often less mainstream, which is interesting. During the interview, we paid special attention to how they obtained the application information.

A woman has 7788 of apps in her cell phone, some of which she doesn't know how to use. It turns out that these apps were used by her brother to help install and carry another person's preferences. and other users are recommended by the search engine to the application, or in accordance with the application of the home page recommended, installed prerequisites, such as the list. Because these application list often has the promotion factor, or by the search engine optimization, the brush list and so on factor influence, these user's handset often by this kind of product. They are influenced by the traditional brand to apply the criterion of judgment, such as Ms. Wang in the mobile phone downloaded from the daily to the Phoenix Weekly application, but also downloaded a number of commodity card applications, but also by the impact of big brands, such as security small Chen think, Baidu, Tencent production application should be good, he will not now some have not heard of the application, Because "not at ease."

Another problem may be the user's ignorance of their needs. We found in the interview that from the Internet to the application management, from the phone address book to the schedule management, many users have talked about these needs, but did not try to download the relevant applications. Users for many applications in the "I do not know what I do not know" status. They face the search box and don't even know how to organize a group of keywords to find applications that fit their requirements. In fact, for the people, we interviewed also found that a suitable application may be he tried a variety of choice after the one. Such a troublesome process for the people is a waste of energy, not to mention the "do not toss", is going to click on the mouse to do all the public users. In this way, many excellent applications have encountered market problems. People who have the ability to actively look for mobile information, or have their own talent community. But for the masses, the sources of information are largely isolated from them. A good application is intended for the public, but many developers, especially small and medium-sized developers in the mass market marketing capacity is limited. This makes it difficult for these users to gain access to these applications. Is my application not good for no one to use, or a lot of people do not know? Perhaps the latter is the first problem to be solved.

And the public user's contact, let us reflect, a technology product, intends to serve for everybody, this "everybody" needs what. Thanks to the great support of these visitors, we have gained a lot of inspiration. High-quality application distribution to provide assured applications, boutique applications and better application discovery, bring the best applications to users--these require the joint efforts of developers '.

"Who is the user?" is a problem that every developer has to face, and we will review, explore and verify the problem in the future. We also look forward to you, developers, users, all the people interested in technology products, your answers.