To Mediawill
UX Planning Team - Byun Chan-su
There is not yet a UX team, but after hearing the design director's vision for the future,
I am Byun Chan-su, who joined the design team rather than the planning team.
Although it was only for a short time, after experiencing the overall atmosphere and workflow of the company,
I wanted to share a few thoughts and possible improvements.
The first task of a media company is the production of content.
That content may come from the eyes of consumers, from the writing of experts,
or from public media that covers social issues.
What matters is that there must be a space where such content can be posted and established.(1)
Of course, that space should have as few access restrictions as possible.
These things also need to be considered.(2)
(1) refers to the fundamentals of web service.
(2) becomes the shape of an application when those user-centered issues are solved in technical or human-centered ways.
[Operating Plan for Cocofun]
A quick review: confusion about roles and direction, and pages that feel like bundles of flyers...
First, personas are needed in order to understand the direction of the business.
Use the existing Coco character as a persona, give her an individual story, and build an overall direction and strategy.
At Cocofun, the major role of the persona is to support existing consumer analysis(3), as well as future strategy, direction, and design concept setting(4).
(3) Create characters that fit different ages and styles, use them in page design according to each type of content, communicate with consumers through them, and use things like voting to analyze consumer types.
(4) By describing customers in a multidimensional way through personas, planning and design can gain a basis for judging their validity.
Note: marketers are interested in what messages have strong delivery to customers, whereas design has used personas as documents for obtaining information about customer needs, such as user goals, scenarios, and tasks. Through personas, planning and design teams can describe user needs more effectively and more easily.
The previous Cocofun site was covered in ads.
Even the content sections that did exist were mostly instance-like information pulled in from outside.
On the current Cocofun site, even that content portion has been reduced or merged.
A bigger problem than that is whether making coupons the core is really meant to provide useful coupons,
or whether the number of pages and coupon types were expanded simply to generate ad revenue.
We, too, are consumers; we cannot step outside that boundary.
No matter how sweet the words are, if something is not needed, it gets thrown away.
And web services are very far from the idea of offline Cocofun flyer promotion.
Even an information site run by five people can make hundreds of millions of won per month if it is done well. That is how attractive web business is.
At the same time, it is also a place where a brand image built over years can be ruined in less than a month.
What matters is sincerity. What kind of company are we, what do we do, and what can we provide?(5)
Most employees instead ask what they can do for the company and what they can provide to it.
That is why companies fail. They waste energy on internal politics, fall behind, and collapse.
The question should be directed toward the customer. If it is, many things become surprisingly simple.
Because everyone is busy, many important tasks keep getting pushed back every week by urgent internal political matters.
What is the September Cocofun renewal schedule for? Is it an opening for the sake of service, or just because a date was already announced through the media?
Is registering for meta services meant to generate revenue? To satisfy advertisers? To increase traffic for this month?
Every investment should have meaning and results relative to the investment made.
(For reference, the exposure from this meta-service push and the Facebook campaign may later turn into a political issue requiring major cleanup.)
Work that exists only to meet a schedule should be avoided everywhere and in every kind of task.
A beginning should be careful, and a careful beginning should be seen through to the end. But if the start itself was wrong, then instead of complaining while pushing ahead, I believe the courageous choice for everyone is to accept the cost and responsibility, clean it up immediately, and find an alternative.
[Proposal 1. Improve existing online/offline deliverables]
Take the existing A4-sized monthly Cocofun handout, divide it into four parts, and make it B4-sized with note/diary functionality added.
(1) A Coco Note would no longer be a flyer that is simply read and thrown away. It could become something worth keeping from time to time, something useful for managing schedules and personal expenses at the same time, something that introduces my offline posting online to improve personal branding and editorial skill, and ultimately a Cocofun tool that supports cultural life, manages online/offline schedules, and helps brand the user.
It might still end up being used as a simple memo pad, but with a little more thought, Coco Note could gather various notes of the day such as stories or cafe visits and even turn them into a Cococafe book.
(1) This is the process of turning a flyer into a service, and it is the beginning of considering the consumer. (2) Rather than a one-way information service led and intended by the provider, consumer-driven content production can reduce low-value internal manual work and allow that time to be spent on content quality and communication with consumers. On a larger scale, it can raise Cocofun's brand value, attract subscribers and advertisers, secure content, and build an ecosystem that consumers themselves help create at minimal cost.
