Before joining BearyChat and after in-depth communication, we finally determined a critical design principle:

Everything we do is based on information. Information can be roughly divided into conversations between team members, messages generated by third-party tools in operation, and documents accumulated. The mission of BearyChat is to organize, rearrange, and add more value to the information.

Based on this principle and commercial considerations, mainly encounter:

1. The design of paid version that is suitable for the market in China.
2. Strengthen the interaction model of the robot.
3. Create a new, friendly and valuable BearyChat.

Design Team

The Language of UX

Flowchart template we use.

When joined BearyChat, it had 15 employees, two teams based in Beijing and Shenzhen, and several members working remotely. The team wants to have more efficient communication. First did to synchronize everyone's design language for UX. It was combining previous experience and learning, a team common flowchart language to the output of the design to reduce the cost of communication.

The UML-based flowchart template language:

• Make the technical team explain the design requirements more intuitively and develop products based on the typical role of status and people experience.
• Make the design team show the technical logic to the designer more intuitively to understand and design the product correctly.

Design Strategy

Different with Slack

In addition, we are promoting the PRD template within the team. It can significantly reduce the reader's mental burden to a certain extent. In general, this is not just an electronic product developed by our designers, and the document is a product as well. BearyChat is an imitator of Slack in China to a large extent. The functions required for team communication software are roughly the same, but in terms of design, we put more effort and consideration into the Chinese peoples' experience.

Taking reminders as an example, the final product of Slack is a command-like tool. Considering that the popularity of QA in China is not high, we will use a pure interface approach. Its advantage is obvious, and the people's experience is intuitive. Moreover, because the use of the calendar is not high, added duplicate settings for the functions. People can create a reminder and send it to everyone to replace a fixed schedule in the calendar.

BearyChat provides a people interface for peoples to create reminders.

Free To Cost

A year before joining the team, BearyChat designed and developed products based on its completely free to use. By understanding the business strategy, start designing a payment strategy that fits the Chinese market.

Considering that the product is still in the growth period to grow the people base and after comparing other similar products, we significantly increase the number of messages and robots that free peoples can trace back in the free version.

In the design of team version, in addition to giving the standard full development messages traceback function and increasing the number of robots in the same type of product, based on our interviews with medium and large teams, and considering medium and large teams:

• The business is significant, and the requirements stricter. Their robots produce messages and stability requirements. We increased the number of robots available to paying people and provided SAL protocols.
• External communication is frequent, and information privacy requirements. The guest feature is the most crucial difference between us and similar products, so visitors are vastly different from ordinary people. Moreover, we have improved whether visitors can see the historical messages and the cancellation of channel messages.

In addition to the above two versions, almost all large enterprises in the Chinese market have their own independent OA systems, and they reject cloud services entirely due to security issues. We also have an enterprise version that provides private deployment and in-depth customization services in product design.

We consider the enterprise version the most important revenue source in business strategy. To quickly provide customization services in the enterprise version, technically, write code in a modular manner and required modularity in the design. Both the logic and the UI are as unrelated as possible between the modules. Allows corporate people to choose multiple modules to form products that are more in line with their business.

In Huawei and Manila Group's enterprise version customization requirements, we delivered products quickly and with high quality. It reflected the value of modular design and the correct use of business strategy.

Screenshot of BearyChat's price presentation page.

Design UX

New Version

After completing the phased feature of the paid version, while mimicking Slack, we also added many features based on the people's feedback, operational data, and internal opinions. Nevertheless, the overall software experience is not intuitive enough due to the lack of a big picture.

Screenshot of old BearyChat version.

Especially for the layout design, our requirements for modular design during the development process lead to the independence of the overall structure. We just stacked the new functions together according to whether they were similar. We decided to completely abandon the existing layout and redesign it based on our products' existing features and short-to-medium-term planning to solve this problem.

Topography Matter

The most significant change is that we completely changed the structure of the software, dividing the structure of the entire software into two:

1. We modify the navigation menu on the left into a hierarchical structure. Each function is designed as a business-based product module. It makes the people experience more friendly while providing a degree of customizable scalability.
2. The content area on the right is designed in the navigation menu. The content area always takes the dialog input box as the highest priority. We design it in this way because, in the existing products, all valuable information (whether a file, a people's collection, or even the contacts) is generated based on a conversation or the starting point of a conversation.

BearChat is based with three-column layout topography.

Humanized Robot

Through continuous communication with people, we learned that BearyChat's most significant advantage in the Chinese market is to support outstanding third-party services. A robot is an essential part of product design. In the past, chatbots often restructured messages generated by third-party platforms, sent them to the chat software, and opened a third-party platform page to perform subsequent interactions. This experience is very unintuitive. We launched a long-term plan called "Interactive Robots" to solve this problem.

• In the short-term plan, we will define some methods to interact with the robot. Chatbots can directly use interactive buttons such as input boxes or buttons in BearyChat's interface. It can be designed to give real-time feedback as well.
• In the medium to the long-term plan, we will design a robot market. People can upload their robots and make them available to other people for free or for a fee.