There is of course a tension between artistic ideals and commercial realities. Unlike Facebook or LinkedIn, WeChat users see a maximum of two ads per day through the Moments feature. Zhang said no: “I told the team to establish a rule that WeChat shall always have a four-icon bar, and never add anything to it.” Another example is the almost complete absence of advertising. Over the years many people suggested adding to this list, like many other apps, to support users’ behavior.
For WeChat, I now see the necessity of subtraction – making things simpler –and focusing on the product’s aesthetic quality.Īs one example, the feature bar at the bottom of the WeChat screen is four icons: Chat, Contacts, Discover, Me. It felt wrong because it no longer looked neat. When I started designing user interactions for Foxmail, I complicated everything. Here is how Allen Zhang described WeChat to us:īefore perceiving WeChat as a commercial product, I’d rather picture it first as an impressive work of art. In contrast, the grand design starts with a concept, a vision in the mind’s eye of the creator, and it holds onto that concept for as long as possible. Design thinking seeks to create practical, user-oriented solutions: it is about pulling together what’s desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable. Creating a work of art, not a commercial product. Our study of WeChat revealed four key components of the grand design approach to innovation that other innovators might consider when developing ideas.ġ. Think, for example, of Steve Jobs’ classic inventions, such as the iPod and the iPhone, Masaru Ibuka’s Sony Walkman, or Elon Musk’s Hyperloop. We argue that the grand design approach to innovation – where a new product or service emerges fully-formed in the mind’s eye of the innovator before it is developed and commercialized – can be more effective than design thinking under certain circumstances, most notably when a market is in its early formative stage of development. This user-centric perspective has made design thinking hugely popular, but some consultants and academics have argued that it is too structured, too prescriptive, and results in incremental or conservative outputs. Design thinking has been defined as a non-linear, iterative process which seeks to understand users, challenge assumptions, redefine problems and create innovative solutions to prototype and test. The grand design logic is markedly different from the now-standard design thinking approach to innovation that was popularized by design firm IDEO in the 1990s. He personally led the entire development effort of WeChat, taking responsibility for the overall look and feel of the product, as well as overseeing the coding teams. It was built on the vision – or grand design – of Allen Zhang, a senior executive at Chinese tech company Tencent, who saw an opportunity in 2010 to create an entirely new product for the mobile era. Our research suggests that WeChat’s success wasn’t achieved through technological superiority. What we’ve found that is WeChat isn’t just a Chinese success story – it offers insights to innovators everywhere. We recently conducted an in-depth study of WeChat, through exclusive interviews with 15 executives, including founder Allen Zhang. Many observers rate WeChat as offering a superior user experience than its western counterparts today, and its innovative features are now being copied by others. But WeChat didn’t get an easy ride: it had to fend off dozens of domestic competitors when it was launched, and it had to keep innovating to stay ahead.
Wechat logo pdf software#
Many westerners are skeptical about successful Chinese software companies like WeChat: there is a perception that they have succeeded through copycat strategies, and have benefited from Facebook and Google being blocked from operating in the country. And it provides integrated services for upwardly-mobile Chinese users, by offering taxi, restaurant, movie-booking and retail apps all within its platform. It is the leader in mobile payments, with more than 800 million users of WeChat Pay. WeChat users send more than 45 billion messages a day. With more than a billion daily active users, it is the default option for social networking and chat. WeChat, the messaging app, dominates daily life in China.
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