Allen Zhang on Good Products: Don’t Put an Ad on Your Best Friend’s Face

Allen Zhang’s Speech in Early 2016—Part 1 2015 was WeChat’s eighth year. In August 2015, its daily logins exceeded one billion, a major milestone. This may have been the first app in China’s history to reach the scale of one billion daily active users (DAU). We never announced it. From our perspective, perhaps it was simply a question of which day we would reach that number. It is better to let everyone have their own interpretation. For years, WeChat’s launch screen has shown a person standing before the Earth. When it first appeared, many people asked me why someone was standing in front of the Earth. In an even earlier version, the person stood before the Moon; that, too, left plenty of room for imagination. I believe everyone has their own understanding of it. Because we have no standard answer, every time you see that launch screen over the years, you may wonder: What is this person doing? Why is he standing before the Earth? A year later, your thoughts change a little; another year later, they change again. That is precisely why I think it is such a good launch screen. It leaves the imaginative space to users themselves. A billion users have a billion interpretations, and each can find something that moves them. So while many apps keep changing their launch screens, WeChat’s will not change, and I believe it will not change in the future either. (Robin: Hasn’t the Earth launch screen disappeared?) --- On Design Principles A friend said WeChat is an outlier in the internet industry. By outlier, he meant it is different from other products. I was both surprised and proud. Proud, because being an outlier means being different—and that is a good thing. Surprised, because WeChat has merely maintained the baseline for making a good product, yet that alone has made it different. That is because many products do not treat themselves as products or their users as users. WeChat does both. The ways WeChat differs from many other products show up in numerous places. For example, during Lunar New Year or other holidays, many apps turn their logos and interfaces red and yellow, like stir-fried tomatoes and eggs. WeChat does not. People may ask why we insist on this. Now that WeChat has reached one billion DAU, I would rather spend some time explaining more fully what we think about behind the scenes, starting with its origins and essence. Sometimes I really want to ask everyone: What makes a good product? Having lots of users? Being addictive? Or something else? Years ago, when we used iPhones, we would study why such good products had been designed. I remember a German product designer, Rams, setting out ten principles of good design. He was also someone Apple greatly admired. The first principle is that a good product is creative: it must be innovative. The second is that a good product is useful. The third is that a good product is beautiful. The fourth is that a good product is easy to use. The fifth is that a good product is understated and unobtrusive. The sixth is that a good product is honest. The seventh is that a good product lasts and does not become outdated over time. The eighth is that a good product overlooks no detail. The ninth is that it is environmentally friendly and wastes no resources. The tenth is as little design as possible—or less is more. I have actually shifted the concept here, replacing “design” with the more general “product.” Many people think these are design principles for hardware such as Apple’s products. Yet software interacts with users even more frequently: give one prompt and users do one thing; give a different prompt and they do another. At their core, both hardware and software products are tools. Principles for designing tools apply to both. I bring these up as good design principles because I think many products in the industry pay little attention to product design, or do not make it a goal. They are still merely piles of features or attempts to extract value from users. WeChat never runs holiday promotions or changes its logo, and many people call it “restrained.” But this is not really the result of restraint. It comes from consistently following good design principles, which keep us from doing things that damage the design’s aesthetics. I have observed that many product managers are misled by their companies as soon as they graduate. Their companies want traffic and monetization, so everyone’s key performance indicators (KPIs) become generating traffic and monetizing it. Once that is the goal, the purpose of their work is no longer to make the best product, but simply to acquire traffic by any means available. That is not the principle we advocate. We advocate using WeChat to make good products and share them with users. I am grateful for my own experience—from building Foxmail on my own in the PC era, to QQ Mail, to WeChat in the mobile era. Having worked on so many products, I know in my bones what makes a good product and what does not. Perhaps that is why I can intuitively maintain certain standards. Once I asked my colleagues: In the PC era, which page had the most page views (PV)? The answer was Internet Explorer’s 404 page. I asked why Microsoft did not put ads on that page. My colleagues could not answer. It is an interesting question. Yes, why would Microsoft leave such a high-traffic place without ads? Why does WeChat not put an ad on its launch screen? Think about it yourselves. WeChat has been around for eight years. Think about how much time you spend on it every day. Do you spend more time with your closest friends and family, or on WeChat? If WeChat were a person, it would have to be your best friend for you to be willing to give it so much time. So how could I bear to put an ad on your best friend’s face? Every time you met, you would have to finish watching the ad before lifting it away to speak to your friend. Interestingly, following principles also means there are many things we must insist on changing. That brings to mind the major changes to the user interface (UI) in WeChat 7.0. Many users complained and found it unfamiliar. Any major redesign causes dissatisfaction, because people are used to the interface they know and think it is the best. We cannot ask a billion people to vote on what is good; a vote would not produce the answer anyway. So how can change improve a design and make it better? That decision must follow good design principles. With WeChat 7.0, for example, we used it internally for a long time. I kept switching between the two versions. After using the new one for a while, I no longer wanted to return to the old one. Users may not accept it immediately, but I believe they will once they adapt. What matters is that we keep adapting our product to the times rather than refuse to change for fear of complaints. Especially with the UI, we can never satisfy everyone. But we can make the product increasingly beautiful, meeting or even guiding users’ current aesthetic expectations rather than falling behind the times. #本質2增長的本質 (Essence 2: The Essence of Growth) ---- Allen Zhang’s 210-minute speech is too long to share all at once, so I am splitting it into several posts. Personally, I think every entrepreneur and anyone building a product should read how Zhang, one of the best product builders in China’s internet industry, thinks about making a good product.