UX Day is a gathering of UX professionals in Shanghai for an all day project and lecture series. I was a mentor there and ran one group.
Our Project:
The Shanghai marriage market - a completely unique insititution that is owned by no one and yet everyone follows the rules. The market is created by worried mothers and fathers that their children aren't going to marry the correct person or the children (in their 20's and lonely 30's) are too busy to meet someone. So, the kids rely on their parents to meet someone with the proper characteristics. Priorities are gender, age, height, weight, home ownershop and car ownership. Phone number to contact the PARENT is included.
Oddly enough, there are almost zero photos shown on the simple, white A4 papers. The parents carefully guard the photos of their son or daughter. After the vitals above have been approved, the parents agree to show photos on the count of three. A crowd has usually gathered and are cheering the negotiation.
Our task was how to innovate in this space.
The Shanghai marriage market - a completely unique insititution that is owned by no one and yet everyone follows the rules. The market is created by worried mothers and fathers that their children aren't going to marry the correct person or the children (in their 20's and lonely 30's) are too busy to meet someone. So, the kids rely on their parents to meet someone with the proper characteristics. Priorities are gender, age, height, weight, home ownershop and car ownership. Phone number to contact the PARENT is included.
Oddly enough, there are almost zero photos shown on the simple, white A4 papers. The parents carefully guard the photos of their son or daughter. After the vitals above have been approved, the parents agree to show photos on the count of three. A crowd has usually gathered and are cheering the negotiation.
Our task was how to innovate in this space.
Our process included a site visit, user interviews, persona development, user workspace analysis, unified design constraints (the elderly parents had a very limited set of tools to work with), card sorting, theme development and prototyped solutions.
Personally, I was quite proud of our team as the members deftly avoided the trap of the app - many of the groups attempted to develop software based solutions for a very low tech crowd. We presented a revised graphic and paper construction language to communicate more, be more useful, with increased visibility/improved reading angle.
