What is special about Jianshui Purple Pottery?

Jianshui

Jianshui refers to its origin, Jianshui County. It is located in Honghe Prefecture, Yunnan Province.

Zi

Purple. The common color of Jianshui Purple Pottery

Tao

Pottery. The material type of this traditional craft

#1 A Representative of Intangible Cultural Heritage

#2 Unique Manufacturing Crafts

#3 Typical Features of Pattern and Shape

How to link young consumer's preference with Jianshui Purple Pottery?

To enter the young market, we need to innovate products that young people would love and want to purchase. To answer this question, we adopted contextual inquiry and KANO analysis.

To find the possibility of combination, we recruited 5 young people aged 18-25, requiring them to share their most commonly used daily items, and the reason why they buy them, why they like them, and why keep using them. Collecting analysis of 33 items, We found:

1. Cup is popular among young people, as it combines practicality and collectability.

2. Young people prefer visual styles that highlight personal taste.

To identify what are the consumption preferences for young customers, we conducted KANO analysis to investigate young customers' opinions on 10 possible features.

Through questionnaire distribution, 44 young people aged 18 to 30 (excluding 1 invalid case) were surveyed on consumption preferences for intangible cultural heritage products.

The questionnaire showed high reliability (α = 0.949). Both functional (KMO = 0.810) and dysfunctional (KMO = 0.648) item sets demonstrated validity, with significant Bartlett's sphericity tests (p < 0.01).

The results showed:

1. low price is a Must-be feature;

2. users are more satisfied when the product performs better in manufacturing quality, durability, and practicality, or when the product contains more traditional cultural elements;

3. customization would be attractive to consumers;

4. users don't care about its aesthetic style, production method, contribution to cultural communication, or whether it have trendy cultural elements.

If finding one specific product that attracts young people is too hard, what about letting themselves create?

As we learned from the research that customization would be attractive to young people as a fun process to create something aligns with their unique personal taste, it can solve the challenge of innovating Jianshui Purple Pottery in a way that young people like--instead of defining it for our young customers, we let them define their own pottery.

The other design constrains include cost and quality. Research showed that for young customers, low price is a necessary feature, and that the better the practical value, the more willing they are to purchase. However, customization is usually much more expensive. Given the unique crafts of Jianshui Purple Pottery, such innovation was also harder.

Our solution is a co-creation platform that attracts user through IP co-branding and achieves low-price customization through digital manufacturing.

How might we establish a feasible co-creation workbench that can link to digital manufacturing directly?

To arrive at a feasible design solution, we need to figure out the constraints of the co-creation bench that both aligns with young preference and allows direct parameter transferring to digital manufacturing. Therefore, we explored the possibilities from two dimensions: pattern and shape.

We started by selecting approximately 150 appealing instances from Pinterest for both levels, and then categorized and summarized them. Finally, we created visual representations of how these styles would be applied to Jianshui Purple Pottery, concluding what types are better choices for innovating Jianshui Purple Pottery.

👍Flat drawings with striking subject, clear borders, high cultural values

👍Shape: Creative geometries that have strong parameterized feature

In the process of Lo-fi prototype iteration, we determined top navigation for C-side and side navigation for B-side. Top navigation can save space so that user's attention is focused on the content to the maximum degree. Side navigation is more visually prominent and faster to read, allowing staff to work efficiently.

Take all edge cases into consideration and build an organized system

In this project, I realized the heavy inconsistency problem resulted from absence of a clear system that structurally listed every edge case--in some situations, it took me much longer to figure out how the existing system works than designing a new one. Real-world problems can be very complex. In e-commerce settings, all the combinations of purchase options, order status and market strategies would be a great challenge, and our job is to make sure our design has taken every case into consideration.

Make fully-informed design decisions

Design decisions cannot be based on the UX designer's "intuition" on what would be good for the users. Our hypotheses should be supported by solid evidence, which includes drawing insightful conclusion from in-depth analysis of data, user's feedback, etc. As a D2C company, our strength is having direct access with users' data and feedbacks, which allows us to make sure we are spending our limited resources on the right thing.

Communicate with stakeholders using recognized priority tools

We can't always agree with each other in the process, but we can get on the same page using recognized tools. When we were defining the scope of design, the RICE model were helpful in combining every one's opinion from different aspects, and giving us a final score that the team would accept. The key in communication with stakeholders or teammates is similar: embrace broad perspectives, and decide by recognized evaluation.