Alibaba is China’s biggest IT corporation. It’s finance flow for all its enterprises combined is comparable to GDP of nations. It may not be the highest but still comparable if placed in the rankings. Being able to enter their premise is indeed a privilege.
This special day, it was a visit to Alibaba’s UED. It is a department that does focus studies on its popular apps to improve the user experiential design. Its main aim is to do a research on app users via means of quantitative and qualitative research. This research will then aid UX designers to design clean, sleek, attractive and user 9friendly apps for all its users. Its vision is to create the next big thing, not just for apps but anything that can incorporate good design to propel Alibaba into the future for the next 5 to 10 years.
Through a short workshop, we learnt from key professionals in that department on how to solve any design problem that can exist in our society. We learnt to first define the scope of our problem, be it a trip to consult the doctor or a trip to the library. From there, we find all the problems that could occur from the start to the end of the process by gathering all the user profile data and information of his/her journey. Next, we try to design a simple device to solve an almagation of problems that we defined just now.
It may all sound simple but it is the process that we went through that look simple on the surface but required much thought to interpret human behaviour and to come up with a feasible product to solve the problem.
It has been unforgettable experience. If given more time and the chance to do this Alibaba UED ALP Theme Project, it would definitely be an awesome chance to learn such useful design process and work on UX design. However, I committed to Theme D Fitting Robot. Hmm. Maybe apply for a Alibaba UED internship? Who knows? Maybe next time.
