After the new version of wechat was released, 500 million people joked about it every day, and 100 million people taught me how to make products.
With this self-deprecating sentence, Zhang Xiaolong finally appeared in the wechat night tonight. In the morning, because there was no Zhang Xiaolong, the wechat open class Pro version was a little dull, and instantly boiled up.
Wechat Open Classes are becoming more like Apple’s WWDC, a big Party that connects wechat, developers and users.
This big Party is often different because of Zhang xiaolong’s philosophical thinking about products.
Wechat is undoubtedly one of the greatest products of the mobile Internet. Its greatness lies not only in the large number of users, but also in its respect for users. In the past eight years, it has been able to implement “do not disturb users” throughout.
This national app, which lives more than 1 billion a month, has changed and carried the lives of countless Chinese, so much so that wechat’s emoticons can become a new dimension dividing generations.
Because of this, every major update of wechat can become a screenca-level event, such as the recent update of wechat 7.0, the opening animation of a sentence “because you see, so there”, will also trigger thousands of interpretations
But Zhang xiaolong said that at least 800 million people do not understand this sentence, and no one has a better say in both the text and the product concept of wechat than Zhang.
In addition to the explanation of wechat 7.0, we also covered the values of wechat, the history of wechat, the driving force of wechat and so on.
What is a good product
Zhang Xiaolong wants to tell everyone what a good product is on wechat night. Does it have a lot of users, or is it addictive?
‘When I used an iPhone, I would wonder where Jobs got the inspiration to make such a good product,’ Mr. Zhang said. Later found that Apple a lot of design ideas, from Braun company designer Ramsi.
▲ Dieter Ramsay, master designer
RAMS proposed ten principles for design:
Good design is innovative good design is practical good design is beautiful good design is easy to use good design is modest good design is honest good design is durable good design attaches importance to every detail good design is environmentally friendly good design is minimalist
Zhang Xiaolong believes that these design concepts can be applied to products. Wechat follows these ideas, and that’s why it looks different.
‘Restraint is not in our lexicon,’ Mr. Zhang said.
Some product managers need to capture traffic and cash, so their job and KPIs change and they’re not doing a good job.
In addition to mentioning Apple, Zhang also thanked Microsoft. Because Microsoft taught him what a good product was through some products.
Zhang xiaolong felt that he knew what a good product was in the Web era, so he would know what a good product was in the mobile Internet era.
Zhang Xiaolong also understands everybody very much, see advertisement to see a habit at ordinary times, suddenly have no advertisement to see meeting very uncomfortable. He also explained why there would be no ads on wechat’s opening screen.
Users are spending more and more time on wechat, even more than in face-to-face communication with close friends. So wechat may be your best friend, and users certainly don’t want to see an AD every day when chatting with a good friend.
One of the big changes in wechat 7.0 is that the UI is white. Every major redesign of wechat has many users expressing discomfort. ‘Of course, we won’t decide whether to change according to the votes of our users,’ Mr. Zhang said. ‘We’ll decide for ourselves.’
During the internal test of wechat 7.0, he kept switching between the two versions, and when he refused to switch back, he felt that users could accept the new version of wechat.
Wechat started with an email
There are always a lot of rumors on the Internet. Some say the origin of wechat is an email, while others say Zhang xiaolong visited a temple to meditate. In the “wechat night” scene, Zhang Xiaolong admitted one rumor, denied another.
Zhang xiaolong has never been to Longquan Temple, but the origin of wechat is indeed an email. One day eight years ago, Zhang xiaolong sent Ma an email suggesting Tencent build a social software. Although in Zhang xiaolong’s original vision, this is a communication product for a few people.
Now speaking of this email, Zhang xiaolong himself will even be a little afraid. If he had gone out and played pool that day, he would not have the product now. Even if another team had made wechat, it would not be wechat now.
“The whole process started an hour or two, and then one of the wrong nerves wrote this email and it just started.” As a programmer, Zhang believes that the right idea comes to mind at the right time, but it’s not waiting to make a good product.
At that time, the original team of wechat was still working on QQ mailbox, and they also focused on polishing the sub-function of QQ mailbox — reading space.
In the reading space, Zhang xiaolong tried many new ideas. Back then blogging was very popular and users could subscribe to blogs and articles in the Reading space. In addition to the subscription, Readspace also has a broadcast where you can write a micro-blog-like text. However, the reading space is only a sub-function of QQ mailbox, which also leads to the limited number of users of the reading space.
After sending that letter “change fate” of the mail, Zhang Xiaolong pulled up is doing QQ mailbox mobile phone version – in the hands of the mail team began to develop wechat. Within two days, the team had produced the first initial build. This is the origin of wechat, at the beginning, it was considered as a communication tool for the few.
Until now, zhang Xiaolong occasionally saw the 10th day of the birth of wechat registered users, will feel very amazing, because the initial wechat users are very few. In fact, wechat had very few users for half a year. Even so, the team was adamant: “If a product doesn’t have a natural growth curve, you shouldn’t market it.”
The substitution of wechat and SMS makes the team afraid to get friends from mobile phone contacts. They later chose to acquire friends from QQ, but the team also didn’t want wechat to be another QQ, they just wanted QQ to be one of the sources of users.
In Zhang xiaolong’s opinion, not importing in batches and not promoting it before natural growth are two things wechat did right. Although it took a long time for wechat to take off, it was very healthy when it took off.
Zhang admits he was lucky to go from zero to one billion users with a product like this.
The driving force behind wechat
What was the original intention of wechat? Zhang said it was the first time he had used the word, but he used “prime mover” instead. What is the motive force of doing something? Zhang xiaolong thinks it is a hope in his heart, which means to do it no matter how many difficulties are overcome.
Then what is the driving force of wechat? Zhang Xiaolong summarizes it as two points:
1. Wechat, as a tool, is made into a tool product advancing with The Times.
This episode isn’t the first time Zhang has emphasized wechat’s instrumental nature. In the wechat open class in 2016, he said that “any product is just a tool”, and in 2017, he stressed that “a good tool should have a strong attribute, which is to improve efficiency and run out of time.” “In 2018, he said,” wechat should be the best tool on the Internet.”
At Tencent staff meeting not long ago, Zhang Xiaolong mentioned again:
Wechat is a tool, not a platform, only the tool is the most friendly to users, is really meaningful to users.
Zhang xiaolong confessed his paranoia and love for tools. He recalled that he felt a strong sense of achievement when he finished Writing Foxmail by himself when he graduated. He believes that making tools is a challenge and a difficult thing to do.
However, Zhang xiaolong also said that many people do not think that way now, and that most users in China are forced to accept abnormal user experience, such as the open screen advertising is normal.
Spam is not scary, not knowing it is spam is scary.
Zhang believes that a good tool should be like a user’s old friend, and he doesn’t want to jeopardize that relationship.
But because the Internet is particularly fast iteration speed, wechat must also change, Zhang Xiaolong mentioned that wechat has a slogan: wechat is a way of life.
Why one is not one, Zhang xiaolong’s answer made the audience laugh — if “one” seems ordinary, “one” seems special. In fact, this is a kind of intuition.
Zhang Xiaolong later explained that although wechat is a communication tool, but he wanted to put wechat deep into a person’s life, wechat made a series of breakthroughs, not a functional breakthrough, but a breakthrough in lifestyle.
Because wechat was born in the era of smart phones, it can do many things that cannot be done in the ERA of PC, which means that it is bound to run through a person’s life, and now it has really changed the lives of more than 1 billion people.
2. Give value to the creator
As for the second driving force, Zhang xiaolong explained it with the example of wechat public account. He mentioned that after wechat replaced SMS, he found that if it only replaced SMS, how to receive service notifications more efficiently would become a blank market.
Zhang Xiaolong Apple can think of the need for a kind of ability to avoid the harassment of spam, and the user side and the service side of the link, so the idea of the public account.
Ma huateng still has doubts about this, can this avoid the emergence of junk information? Zhang Xiaolong replied:
Spam goes away, because it’s what users subscribe to.
Therefore, the premise of the public platform is to help what kind of people to solve what problems, to help those who have good services to reach his potential users, so that users can connect to them more easily. If there is no such starting point, it will become a platform for traffic distribution. Wechat does not want to just pursue its own interests.
Zhang Xiaolong summed up the driving force behind this, is to let the value of the people who create value.
For example, if a blind masseur attracts customers through public accounts and mini-programs, it is no longer necessary to rely on a fixed location for service. Blind masseurs have been creating value, but without these tools, their value cannot be reflected to a greater extent.
Zhang Xiaolong said, not only the public number, wechat ecology of different products, like small programs and small games, the driving force behind is the same, a lot of people worry about some operations with wechat rules conflict, in fact, all the actions of wechat are around this driving force.
However, there are some phenomena in the Internet that Zhang Xiaolong cannot understand. He mentioned that the goal of many apps is to compete for the user market, which is against common sense.
He believes that the mission of technology and the Internet is to help people become more efficient, not to waste time on your apps. Information tools, for example, should help users get the most useful information in the shortest time.
Mr. Zhang emphasized that he doesn’t measure the value of an app by length of stay, and that a wechat launch page that used to quote “put down the phone” hasn’t changed that view.
Applets are still being perfected
Three years ago, we didn’t know what applets were. It was still an app.
Now major Internet companies are making small programs, and maybe even some of the code interface is the same as wechat. Mr. Zhang doesn’t see any of this as a threat and isn’t worried about the competition.
Because each company’s ability and personality are different, the driving force will be different. And the driving force of wechat small program is completely different from others.
Zhang also said that they will not monopolize the traffic of the head, and that even tenct-invested companies need to follow the rules of the platform for healthy development of the ecosystem. Maybe they didn’t do a good enough job in this aspect before. In the future, wechat will invest more manpower and resources to treat everyone equally.
The small program has not done a good announcement, in fact, this is not the style of wechat. The reason to do so is to give yourself a pressure.
If we don’t publicize it, we’ll get out of the way.
Zhang Xiaolong’s team also had a special discussion: how many kinds of small procedures can die? They find small programs hard, but they have to do them.
Why are applets the future? Because compared to apps and web pages, applets are the friendliest Internet experience of the age.
It takes a lot of patience to make a mini program, and wechat has spent three years cultivating it. Zhang xiaolong doesn’t want people to see it as a traffic bonus, but as a place where creation can show value, where users can slowly come in and use small programs.
He also admitted that today’s small program has not been very successful, but is still in a gradual process of improvement.
The use of small programs, offline is scanning code, online is social and search. Now social is there, but search is still there.
That’s the difference between applets and apps. Apps cannot search for content data, and each app is not connected. On wechat, you can search directly to the contents of the small program.
There is a concern: whether the small program can send a notice? Zhang xiaolong said they are still working on this feature.
Zhang Xiaolong: I am not satisfied with small games
“I don’t care if we don’t make small games a platform for ordinary people to be creative.” Zhang Xiaolong in Tencent annual meeting comments on small games this sentence is still pressing in many people’s hearts, so many people are uneasy.
Who knows, on wechat night, he chose to keep firing. Zhang Xiaolong bluntly, to the result that small game makes at present, he is not satisfied actually. He does not deny the commercial value of small games, admitting that “small games have come this far, from a business point of view, and revenues from gaming platforms have exceeded expectations.”
But that’s not the driving force behind mini-games. “Our understanding of mini-games is different from the outside world’s understanding of mini-games,” Zhang said. The outside world thinks that the game set on the shell of a small game became a small game. However, for the wechat team, small games should be a platform for creativity, which can carry all kinds of creativity.
Users used to write novellas, short stories, but now they don’t. Although novels are no longer written, people’s creativity has not disappeared. Zhang xiaolong prefers the mini-game to be like a novel, where users can experience various plots once they enter the mini-game. Zhang xiaolong even hopes that primary school students can develop a small game, which will be a world imagined by primary school students, his classmates can play.
While more and more game practitioners enter mini-games, Zhang xiaolong hopes that more developers who have never played games will enter mini-games. In his view, developers who have already tried making games are limited in their ideas. On the other hand, people who have no experience with game design are more likely to bring something new to the audience.
Of course, wechat will give creators their due because “only when creativity is rewarded is the platform valuable.”
Zhang Xiaolong hopes that small games and creative connection of the heart so ardent, the difference in the small games directly renamed as “creative small games.” For Zhang xiaolong, he has always hoped that the micro channel platform games are refreshing, not three consecutive elimination.
How about the effect of wechat public account revision?
When Zhang Xiaolong gave a speech on the stage, countless public accounts were on the scene or in front of the screen crazy code words, such as I am writing this article, Zhang Xiaolong scene of a joke let us very “piercing” :
It wasn’t really for you at the beginning.
Zhang xiaolong said that many people seem to have passed the bonus period of wechat public accounts, but dividends have never been a consideration of wechat.
He briefly reviewed the development history of the wechat official account, noting that in the early days 70 to 80 percent of the readers of the official account came from moments, but this has changed over the years. First, there are more channels for users to access information, and many of the contents of public accounts are not sustainable, which will reduce user stickiness.
In recent years, there has been a clamour about the decrease of the opening rate of the official account. The official account also made a lot of changes last year, from the revision of “information flow”, to the change of “like” to “good-looking”, and the social communication and content communication are highly bound together.
According to Zhang xiaolong, social recommendation is the best way to get information. As Fan said in a previous article:
Nowadays, recommendation algorithms are everywhere on the Internet, but even when data and algorithms determine and dominate what users see, wechat still believes in the meaning of people and advocates the active connection between people and people and content.
As for the revision of the public account, which is considered as “information flow”, Zhang Xiaolong said that everyone likes to label things simply and treat the downward display as information flow. Like email and putting all the files together is a stream of information? It’s just a bunch of folders on display.
Zhang xiaolong said he doesn’t think about what information flow is, but what reasonable way to present information.
That these revision effect how exactly how, this is more than 20 million public accounts behind the operators concerned. Zhang xiaolong said the effect of the revision is not obvious, but while it is not significantly better, it is not worse.
Zhang Xiaolong also mentioned that the revision of the public account can only improve the user’s reading efficiency, but there will be no change in the quality and attractiveness of the content, no good content to do more revision is useless.
Good content is essential.
Zhang xiaolong believes that the responsibility of a good platform is to form a mechanism to encourage more people to create good content, such as wechat’s recently launched complaint sharing mechanism. Therefore, how to encourage public accounts to produce more high-quality content is the biggest challenge for the next step.
Zhang xiaolong said that there are still a lot of things that can be done on the official account, and wechat has also done a lot. For example, the official account app was launched last year. The original intention was to let more people participate in writing articles, but it did not achieve this goal in the end, but the general direction is still to attract more people to create articles.
Checking moments is a daily social task
Zhang xiaolong didn’t explain what social networking is for everyone to understand, but he did share his understanding of its origins.
When humans became social animals, the greatest need of social interaction was for individuals not to be excluded from a group, so individuals would brag. Now we send circle of friends, in fact, is the continuation of the ancient habit.
So what is the nature of communication? Zhang Xiaolong believes that it is a process of imposing one’s own personality on the other party. It is also an imagination of sociability.
Hair circle of friends, is to set their own person through the circle of friends, stuffed into the head of all the friends in the process. Each carefully selected circle of friends is to promote their own personal design.
The more their shortcomings, the more you want to send a circle of friends to strengthen it.
Most people have a hard time writing a long and beautiful text, but taking a photograph is easier. However, moments record the real status of each person, so in version 7.0, there was a feature to send video feed.
Zhang Xiaolong announced the data of circle of friends:
750 million people use moments every day, with each person opening moments 10 times a day, or 10 billion times in total. 100 million people set up moments to be visible for three days.
Checking moments has become a social task that every wechat user needs to complete every day. It carries the online social networking of Chinese people and is also the most efficient social networking tool.
Why are more and more people using wechat moments over the years? Because people’s social habits and needs have not changed.
Offline socializing is inefficient because people need to cross time and space to do it. It is like a square you walk through every day, and each friend circle is like a group of people gathered together. Every day after scrolling through moments, just like walking through the square, you have completed social networking.
It’s such a powerful social tool that it’s hard to live without. However, moments is an open square, and when more and more friends are made, the pressure on moments will be great.
Some people make their friends visible in three days because of social pressure. The three-day access button is also the most widely used on wechat, with about 100 million users making it available on moments. According to Zhang, being visible for three days does not reduce the frequency of Posting on wechat moments, as social feedback is limited, which makes people more brave to post on wechat moments.
As the number of people entering the circle of friends continues to grow, Zhang Xiaolong has also made a “what if” assumption for his products. If he could redesign his moments, Zhang would separate them from his personal album. If there is a photo album, it has to be private. In Zhang xiaolong’s opinion, moments and albums are two independent things that are just accidentally mixed together.
The opposite of the circle of friends, so be it
Zhang Xiaolong thinks Twitter is a great product, which has influenced the form of many products later, such as weibo.
Tencent also has a micro blog, which has a prompt in the input box that asks “What are you thinking?” This is the essential difference between wechat and other applications. Because wechat is a mobile app, it follows the user. When you use a computer, you just look at the screen. As an example of this, Zhang xiaolong said “shake” would not appear in the computer because the user could not shake the computer.
“People are the reactors of the environment. The environment is what you think.” When you’re in front of a computer, the computer is your environment, but when you hold your phone, your phone is your environment, this is the real environment.
You’re not remembering, you’re experiencing. This is also the difference between the circle of friends and the previous text recording, the mobile phone terminal can take photos to record, rather than memories.
Share so many moments of friends, in fact, in order to draw out the video dynamic. In Zhang xiaolong’s view, in the coming years, people will still have to do with the circle of friends, but the circle of friends may not represent the future trend. In the future, there may need to be an easier way to get feedback and a more courageous way for users to express themselves.
At the time of the video dynamic release, someone said that wechat also began to make videos. Zhang xiaolong does not agree with this. In his opinion, video is only a carrier, while wechat is a social network. You don’t shoot a lot of videos to document your life, because videos aren’t what users want. Users won’t look at video images on their phones repeatedly, because recording and shooting isn’t a requirement. Users will take photos and record because sharing is meaningful.
What wechat is trying to do is to allow people to record what they are experiencing, what is happening. Video feeds have emerged as a better social model.
Zhang Xiaolong bluntly, wechat does not have the ability to change, cultivate users’ habits. What they have the power to do is to make social feedback available to users through social design. Video dynamic is the opposite of moments, it should be real, not necessarily beautiful, but real.
A careful user might have noticed that the button to complete a live video Posting is not publish, not finish, but “That’s it.” Because the video feed is supposed to be real, period.
As for the video dynamic product, Zhang Xiaolong believes that its ultimate trend is to allow users to record something of their own world under the least pressure, and users have enough motivation to do it. Therefore, wechat will make more revisions for the video dynamic in the future, so that more people can show their true side and gain recognition from others.
Wechat will also give the video feed more patience and make it an ecology. In Zhang xiaolong’s view, video will replace photos as the carrier of more adoption in the future.
“I don’t think a good product needs so much explaining,” Zhang said. However, the speech, originally scheduled for two hours, eventually extended to more than four hours, Zhang Xiaolong also joked:
So I’ve explained all this, which means we’re really not good enough.
But across the Internet, it’s hard to find many social products that do better than wechat.
Authors: Shen Xingyou, Li Chaofan, Leng Sizhen