This triggered some of my thoughts, and the messy thoughts floated in my mind. I have to record these.
I always think that a product manager should be labeled as "creator", but this is often overlooked. Most product managers are concerned about "usability", while others have been digging for "usability". Broadly speaking, innovation (product, technology, design ...) can be said to be an abstraction of "entrepreneur" personality, and the "structural hole" in society is calling the creator who found it to fill it.
All right, let's not digress. Recently, I have been studying the relationship between products and narrative stories. In a sense, playwrights and (especially) product managers are similar. Both stories and products enlarge and even create a scene experience for readers/users. The famous screen master robert mckee wrote in the story:
A good story needs the creator's understanding of the real world and insight into human nature. The same is true of good product design. Product managers need to know the world and others. Back to the topic that products are like people, how to understand that products are like people.
As an Internet practitioner, Zhang Xiaolong, the founder of WeChat, is the idol of most of our products. We are also familiar with the gentleness, restraint and beauty he has been preaching. But what I have always wanted to explore is whether the product design methodology and values of WeChat are universal, or a "survivor bias effect", or a certain law behind it.
In the early days of Tencent, QQ, games and other businesses were quite uncontrollable and unkind. In fact, Tencent's early reputation was negative. Is it because Tencent is strong enough and has enough supporting resources that WeChat can restrain kindness and poetry in this way? We can see that the product practice of some successful startups should be quite "wild" and quite unrestrained.
I can cite many similar evidences to the contrary. Actually, it shows one thing. This set of good values of WeChat has boundaries, not universal values. If you don't distinguish this line, it will become a bunch of idolized quotations.
Is it Zhang Xiaolong's own personality, kindness and introversion that makes the unique WeChat have the same temperament? In other words, a product manager with the right personality needs to be put on the right product to achieve the success of the product, because the product manager is expressing his values and personality through his product design.
If so, how to ensure that the designer's personality will be accepted by users on a large scale, instead of becoming a "catharsis of megalomaniacs"? Finding the right product manager for this industry has become a very uncertain thing.
Products should imitate people's good character as much as possible. If we use batch thinking to solve problems, how can we find the product personality suitable for large-scale industries at one time?
In a flash, I found that I knew the answer.
1. What kind of people are most popular when acquaintances socialize?
Therefore, WeChat, a social product, was created to imitate the most popular personality characteristics in social activities and restrain oneself (that is, to be considerate of others). Then this is achieved by controlling the design of product details, such as "the person who receives the information is the most important" and "the user only does single-threaded work, such as reading the article of WeChat official account, and there is no prompt function to disturb the user".
2. What kind of people are the most popular in the financial field?
Therefore, most financial terminals have dense data and charts, and multi-screen and multi-thread parallel design.
The answer is:
Find out what the top or most popular common personality traits are in the industry/scene, and then put these personalities and virtues into the product and show them with the design of details and functions.