Conclusion: User studies have found that Chinese people rely so much on wechat mainly because: 1) its powerful integration ability has attracted a number of convenient and practical features; 2) A simple and unified user interface. Despite the hype, wechat still uses a traditional graphical user interface to interact, rather than a “conversational user interface.”
In the Western world, big Internet companies have declared “conversational user interfaces” and chatbots to be the next big thing in technology, and Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft have all started deploying them to push things forward. Even Taco Bell has a machine program called TacoBot that allows users to order and customize their tacos in a natural-language user interface.
Much of the hype stems from anxiety over the success of wechat, which had 700 million users as of April 2016. Wechat has been touted as a model for conversational user interfaces. In this article, we will report the results of a study on wechat users in China. The study aims to reveal the clingy nature of wechat, as well as when and why users prefer it to regular mobile websites and apps.
Wechat: Collect what you think
As the name suggests, wechat was launched by Tencent in 2011 as a mobile instant messaging (IM) app. Wechat soon added many other features, and today it is no longer a simple messaging app, but covers:
1. Payment services. So far, 200 million users have linked their bank accounts to their wechat accounts. This allowed rapid transfers of money between users, resulting in a staggering 8 billion red packets during the 2016 Spring Festival. In addition, this ability also greatly promotes online and offline payment.
2, help enterprises online exposure platform. Compared with the creation and maintenance of an interactive website, the public account as a micro website supported by wechat, itself is very easy to create, especially convenient for small enterprises. At present, the number of public accounts has reached as many as 10 million.
3. E-commerce platform. It is very convenient because of the integration of payment services.
Social networking. Moments is similar to Facebook’s wall, where friends can post messages in a variety of formats, such as text, voice, pictures, stickers and videos. In addition, friends can exchange plain text, voice, pictures, stickers, videos, hyperlinks, contact names and documents through the chat interface.
5. Other social services like “People nearby.”
6. Games.
7. Extensive third-party services. This includes taking a taxi, booking train/plane tickets, buying movie tickets and paying utilities.
8. Integration with the physical world. For example, QR codes are widely used to quickly access public accounts and exchange information (such as contact information). There are even plush toys connected to wechat.
The plush toy for children allows children to exchange voice messages with their parents
Statistics show that Chinese people already spend a third of their time on wechat. No wonder western companies want to act.
In any case, wechat’s core strength in user experience lies not in its chat service, but in its integration of multiple user experiences. While each individual service is good, it is not necessarily better than those provided by other companies. In fact, our user test results show that wechat has many usability issues in many aspects. But we’re more interested in how these services complement each other. Most importantly, these advantages are not the result of a superior, simple, conversational user interface, but are often provided by a streamlined graphical user interface.
Wechat is like a portal that points to a large number of services. Its explosive evolution seems to be rooted in two different aspects:
1) Both the original instant messaging service and the later payment service have grasped users’ pain points and cultivated huge users.
2) China lacks mobile-optimized websites and services.
The first has helped wechat attract legions of users and provide them with a convenient alternative to credit cards (a less common method of payment in China). The second provides users with an extremely convenient (and often unique) way to access a business or service online.
We asked our Chinese participants to draw their mental models of wechat, and as you can see from the graph below, many users consider the smooth payment system and the official account system to be more core than the chat service.
A mental model of wechat drawn by two participants
Second, user research
We conducted two rounds of user research in China:
1. Journalistic research. Twelve participants recorded their use of wechat over a seven-day period.
1) They send us a wechat message whenever they use a special wechat function.
2) At the end of each day, they have to complete two questionnaires: one is about their use of basic functions of wechat, and the other is about their use of special functions. We defined the basic functions as sending messages, chatting with friends, checking moments and reading articles on official accounts. All other functions come down to special functions, including interacting with public accounts, Posting messages on moments of friends, using wechat Pay, scanning QR codes and buying goods.
2. Usability testing. Using the method of thinking aloud, 14 participants were asked to use wechat and other apps to complete assigned goals and tasks during a 90-minute session. After the conference, most users sketched out their mental models of wechat.
About half of the participants are from Beijing, a first-tier city with 21 million residents, and the other half are in Tangshan, a traditional industrial city and third-tier city with 7 million residents. In general, geographical location does not affect the results of usability tests. However, in this case, market research has shown that wechat penetration in Chinese cities is different: 93% penetration in first-tier cities, while only 43% in third-tier cities. Localization services, such as using wechat official accounts and payment tools for offline purchases, also differ between the two types of cities.
In addition, the participants were evenly split between iPhone and Android devices.
The following examples show some of the tasks given to users in this usability test:
I plan to go to Beidaihe next Tuesday. Please use wechat to find the right train ticket.
2) Please use wechat to check the current traffic congestion in Sanlitun.
3) Your friend recommended jack’s Crayfish to you. Please order some crayfish and send them to our test place, but stop before finishing the purchase.
Iii. Rules of wechat Payment
In the journal-style study, payment alone accounted for 32% of the usage content recorded by users, which undoubtedly established its core position in all wechat services. Over those seven days, on average, each participant contributed six payments — almost once a day. Most of the payments are made in offline transactions, and only a few are actually purchased on e-commerce platforms.
Wechat Pay is object-oriented
The main reason for the popularity of wechat Payment is its smooth user experience process and the penetration and opening under the commercial/social attributes. As one participant said, “When I use wechat to pay, I just need to take out my phone — no card, no signature, no cash, no change — everything is so convenient!”
The next two most commonly used functions are Moments (16 percent) and official accounts (10 percent). The rest of the functionality takes up 42%.
Fourth, integrate user experience and maintain consistency
What makes wechat a winner? It’s the ability to integrate: it brings a lot of functionality together and works on top of it. Once users subscribe to a public account, they can receive content pushed by that account. They can also go to the account’s home page to find more information and related content about the account subject, buy products or send money to the account subject. Therefore, subscribing to a public account allows users to easily establish a connection with the account body inside wechat.
Palace Museum Official account: Users can select tabs at the bottom of the page. Each TAB will open a sub-menu, one of which will open a list of articles about the Palace Museum, and another will open a wechat page designed for the Palace Museum. (However, the Museum’s website, which is available through a mobile browser, isn’t optimized for mobile.)
Such services on wechat are often not available on other mobile channels — the Palace Museum, for example, has not optimized its website for mobile devices that can be accessed through mobile browsers. As a result, many users prefer to interact with the entity (company) behind the account in wechat rather than risk going to a different channel with a poor user experience, because wechat provides a consistent and relatively predictable user interface that ensures the quality of the user experience.
A mobile browser on the Palace Museum’s official website reveals that it is not optimized for mobile access
For companies, wechat is an inexpensive way to get exposure on mobile. The integration of wechat allows them to provide users with a standard and consistent user experience. Because most account pages look the same — they’re all pages that follow the same design pattern — there’s no pressure on users to move back and forth between accounts.
5. Wechat Vs traditional websites
Although mobile websites may not be hot enough in China right now (many websites are not mobile compatible), wechat and regular websites will most likely continue to co-exist, as each has its own advantages and disadvantages. Our users also don’t expect the wechat official account to cover all their needs, but they see it as a convenient entry point to access common functions.
Our testers say they prefer to use official accounts in wechat for the following reasons:
1) Easy access. Wechat is an app that mainly uses QR code scanning, eliminating costly typing — especially unfriendly to older users.
2) Easy interaction. As discussed above, more public accounts are more interactive — you know where to click and how to use them because different public accounts are based on the same basic style.
3) Reach out to small businesses. Many (such as a fruit store, craft shop, interest-based organization) are unlikely to invest in a real website.
4) Special discounts. Followers of an official account can often receive promotional messages or exclusive events.
5) Information updates frequently. For why an enterprise website can not, but users will perceive that the enterprise website is more static, and the wechat public number is frequently updated.
Despite the advantages of wechat official accounts, users tend to still use traditional websites for the following reasons:
1) Provide more complex and diverse functions, free from the constraints of wechat style design.
2) Spam: Public accounts push too many articles, which can easily be annoying, and some accounts abuse users’ trust to promote ads.
3) Closed system: wechat blocks high-frequency services such as Taobao, a major e-commerce site, and music services.
4) Compromised account discoverability: Often, different accounts will use similar names, some of which may belong to legitimate companies, while others may be scammers trying to impersonate the former. To make matters worse, the same company may have different public accounts (such as a service account and a subscription account), the account itself may have different permissions (such as a service account that supports wechat Pay, but a subscription account that does not), and users may have to struggle to find the right account.
5) Trust problem: Some articles on wechat may spread false information.
Left: wechat inside search results of the Palace Museum; Right: search results for Xu Xian in wechat. The check mark on the right of the account indicates that the account has been authenticated by wechat. But the tag doesn’t help users identify the account they’re looking for, because search results can be filled with verified accounts. Some accounts may belong to the same company but have different functions, while others may be masquerading as other accounts using familiar brand names. Users may be able to tell the difference between right and wrong by looking at their account information or history, but this is obviously time consuming
Some of the above problems are similar to those users encounter with traditional search engines, while others are specific to wechat itself, especially the unique difference between subscription and service accounts, which actually breaks the integration model established by wechat for different services, but seems to be a legacy of wechat.
6. The usability of wechat
Our user tests revealed a number of usability issues with wechat itself and the public accounts involved. While this is not surprising, since perfect user interfaces have not yet been built, the results should serve as a warning to tech enthusiasts who believe that migrating to a new platform or embracing a new interaction style will create a superior user experience. Any design still needs to be polished to fit the actual needs of users, rather than the internal assumptions of what the company wants them to do. Let’s start with two examples:
1. Team Maker allows users to create group activities. The creation page required the user to enter an activity name, but 10 of the 14 participants skipped this part and went straight to step 2 to enter the activity time.
Team Maker’s public account: Most test users ignored the “activity title (required)” prompt at the top of the input field
This problem is caused by a combination of several design issues:
1) Influenced by pictures, “advertising blind spots” may cause users to ignore the top information.
2) The prompt message is displayed as a placeholder text in the input field, which is not easy to identify and read compared with the single label text.
3) The title field is not stytically aligned with the other input fields and looks like a static title rather than a part of the form.
4) The prompt message of the activity title uses a low contrast text, especially when compared with the bright color prompt of the time domain.
5) For form items, users may have a self-interested preference to complete items that are related to their own needs (activity time) and ignore those items that are system requirements (activity title).
2. City Heat Map is a function of wechat that allows you to view road congestion at selected locations. This feature is in the wallet → city services → city heat map directory. Users participating in the test had a hard time finding it. Such navigation paths exceed user expectations, and users suffer from an impenetrable information structure and imperceptible naming conventions.
In fact, these issues aren’t specific to wechat, and we’ve seen them many times in past usability studies. New platforms still have the same usability issues, because usability is determined by what people think and what people really want, not by technology.
7. Text-based interaction limits usage
Wechat supports two different types of interaction between users and public accounts:
1, text-based: users can type a number or keyword into the public account to receive an instant reply message from the public account. (This could be an automated response or generated by a dedicated operations staff).
2. Menu/link based: The user can select a link embedded in the text message or select it using the menu button at the bottom.
Sometimes, both methods work for a public account, but in some cases, only basic text interaction is supported.
The Official account of the Palace Museum: Users can respond with numbers from 0 to 6 to interact with the main account, or click the menu button in the lower left corner of the page and select the corresponding menu to interact. In some pages (not in this case), the number option in the text message is itself a clickable link. (In fact, most of our test users tried this and were disappointed.)
During our journalistic research and usability testing sessions, we noticed that the use of text interaction pages was limited. This is especially true when some users respond to the first message they receive after subscribing to an account. They also occasionally send a keyword hoping to receive a relevant match. However, most users prefer menu-based interaction to laborious text interaction. When the menu bar at the bottom of a public account is available, users rely on it as a more convenient means of interaction. They also try clicking on the number options in chat messages as a faster way to select.
Our initial interest in the study of wechat was simply to better understand its conversational text interface. The beauty of this natural user interface is that it allows users to simply express their goals, then sit back and wait for the application to do it for them. In a sense, this design seems close to the ultimate goal of usability — zero cost to the user — by eliminating the need for any clicks after the user has typed in the request in the first place. (This design assumes that users are able to create goals — an assumption that doesn’t always hold, since users don’t always know how much space to search for.)
We did not find any evidence of sophisticated language comprehension in wechat. (The practice of having people respond to individual user requests is unlikely to scale in the long run and is outside the scope of our study). Compared to a real conversational text interface, we have found such a system, it proves that the network of scientists interested in some kind of imitation of mobile network world evolution – a historic world, such as digital menus and keyword input simple interaction with more complex based on user interface menu. These later methods are preferred by wechat users for their lower interaction costs, however, at this point, they haven’t completely erased the interface of the chat window.
Conclusion: Wechat integration creates convenience
If a conversational user interface isn’t one of wechat’s strengths, what’s the secret behind its success? When we asked participants what they liked most about wechat, the most common thing they mentioned was its convenience.
The convenience of wechat is shown in the following aspects:
1) Provides a wide variety of services and functions.
2) Integrate these functions and services with themselves, especially wechat Pay and QR code scanning, which are appropriately combined with the application scenarios of the physical world.
3) Maintain a simple and consistent interaction experience between different public accounts — in sharp contrast to those traditional plague websites.
As a mobile service, wechat’s integration and simplicity are particularly important. User interfaces on mobile devices are bound to be harder to use because of screen size limitations and error-prone touch input. A simple interaction style that provides users with a seamless user journey is critical when designing for mobile.
In terms of different aspects of wechat usability, some respondents saw it as a major advantage (after convenience) while others saw it as a negative. In terms of usability, no user interface can be completely faultless or completely useless. Although there are many good points in the interface design of wechat, there are still some areas that definitely need to be improved.
Participants’ preferences and dissatisfaction with wechat
The interaction between usability and convenience points to one of the most obvious contrasts in our field — usability and user experience. While usability is appropriate for a well-designed user interface, it is not enough for a great user experience. Users need functional features to meet their actual needs, not those imagined by designers. When a system is convenient, it goes beyond usability and succeeds by being useful and simplifying previously complex tasks.
Wechat does all of these things, and that’s why it’s successful, not because it created a chat program or used a conversational user interface.
Translation: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/wechat-integrated-ux/?ref=mybridge.co