By Frank Yu
A former colleague of mine gave me an opportunity to speak before his class about any topic of my choosing in his industrial engineering class at China's version of MIT, Tsinghua University. I'm sure many of his students have learned about some of the latest developments in technical and engineering excellence so I wanted to talk to them about more than just project management or resource budgeting. I thought long and hard and I decided to introduce them to the concepts of scenarios and personas. It's a way of looking at the big picture while still targeting a small manageable portion that one can effect.

From my experience working with developers, designers and management, one of the strongest tools that we have which few people currently use or involves the application of scenarios and personas in the planning and research phase of new projects. Although China has many talented and intelligent engineers, few are asked to undertake the process of understanding their end users and finding the rationale and solution for solving their problems. At times, projects are undertaken because another company has successfully made some gains in a particular product and making a better version of it seems like a sure thing or because the technology seems to be so exciting that there must surely be a market for it.

By approaching product development using scenarios and personas, everyone on a project can be focused on what they are trying to deliver and tailor an appropriate level of complexity and functionality into the product not aimed at the savvy engineer building it or the talented designer who came up with the idea but for the final consumer who may not be as savvy or talented as the people creating it.

Scenarios are little stories that help designers understand what problems that the user has that needs to be solved. They do not have to be real stories but they do need to be plausible situations that occur in real life that requires a solution. Personas are representative fictional characters in that story that represent not one person but really a composite of many people with similar characteristics. They are no one and everyone at the same time.

Here is an example of a persona and a possible scenario for Chinese users. Shi Chen is the persona of a 25 year old male. He is a college graduate in marketing and has had some computer science from his university in Wuhan. He is single but he is saving up to buy his own flat in Beijing, where he currently works, so that he may marry and live with his college sweet heart Lui Jin perhaps in the more affordable new developments beyond the 4th ring road. He works for a small MNC advertising agency in Guo Ma within CBD and currently takes a bus to work from Haidian where he lives, it takes almost an hour to get to work. A car is out of the question for now due to his need to save for a flat, lack of parking at Guo Ma and the terrible traffic that he would encounter if he did drive.

The scenario that we have is that Shi Chen has about an hour of commute time inside a bus in both directions of the day. During these 2 hours, he uses his mobile phone to call and SMS his friends and colleagues but nothing else.

If one were an inventor or entrepreneur, what kind of services or gadgets would you develop to service Shi Chen's needs during his daily commute? Some sort of e-mail or web browsing service? A portable eBook Reader? An MP3/Game player with communication abilities? The possibilities are quite wide but we can even picture Shi Chen on that crowded bus. From this we can surmise that we may need the following: We see that we need the ability to use headphones so as not to disturb others, the ability to operate with one hand since he needs the other hand to hold on. We also see that he needs at least two or four hours of battery life and if crowded, a way to shield or protect his data from people looking over his shoulders.

We can calculate what his salary may be and subtract the cost of saving for a flat to arrive at his possible potential disposable income to give us an indication on pricing services and products. We know that he really needs to check his e-mail early in the morning and most of all, he needs to make sure that his data can then be synched with his laptop that he is carrying but cannot deploy on a crowded bus. Using all these elements, we can develop a clear picture of the kind of product and features would suit his needs. If we were to develop a product for his fiancee Lui Jin, we would take other features into consideration such as size and weight and even color when developing the product. For her, music is more important than e-mail so a product would take this into account if we were building it for her by ensuring we have stereo headphone out jacks as well as a smaller and perhaps more feminine form factor.

As I explained to the class in Tsinghua, you make assumptions on material costs and construction costs based on real world data. Take that extra step to make assumptions about your user and their needs based on market research and profiles of what their lifestyle and needs are as well. It may not be perfect, but at least you have some framework and metric to describe to others and to your team on who or what you are building for.

One caveat that I did add is that China and Chinese personas are quite under-researched at this time. Even the persona and scenario above is more detailed than some of the market research that I've seen on Chinese consumers. What are the implications of the one child policy to consumer needs in the next decade for China? How will a generation that has grown up on Internet Access and blackmarket IP feel about having to pay for IP in the future? As China becomes more urbanized, what kind of lifestyles and housing patterns will we see in these families in the next few years. Will education for the children of middle class Chinese be entrusted to the state or will private schools proliferate? Some scenarios are more plausible than others but sometimes getting the scenario correct is not the key, rather the process of collection, analysis and discussion is really where the real strength of scenarios lie.

All these are possible scenarios and persons waiting to be explored and researched in China. Frankly, most of the Personas and Scenarios that I have seen are for North America Europe only with scant and obsolete data pertaining to China.

Perhaps the first step in trying to transition away from an OEM manufacturing industry for China is to first understand the domestic market needs, services and customers of China and recognize that they are not just Chinese versions of North American or even South East Asian users. I hope that maybe one of those students that I spoke to at Tsinghau will become the Faith Popcorn, Tom Peters or Seth Godin of China and become fabulously wealthy and perhaps ask me to be a consultant in my retirement.

About the author:
Frank Yu is a Program Manager at Microsoft Research Asia's Advanced Technology Center. A Harvard graduate, Frank has worked in Hong Kong, Singapore and now Beijing for 8 years in the field of technology and banking. Views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not those of Microsoft Corporation. Frank can be contacted at [email protected]