How I Met UX Design

Customer service is way more than “how can I help you?”

I still remember how excited but baffled I was when LinkedIn offered me a job titled「marketing operations specialist」last year. Just graduated from a liberal arts college with International Relations major, I was totally fresh off the boat. With no experience on computer science and IT industry, I didn’t even know what “operations” exactly mean. So I asked my manager and here was the answer:

“PMs and designers seed a product; engineers grow it; and operations feed it. You’re gonna make users feel at home in our product.”

Feel at home, huh? Sounds like a no-brainer. Look, every website and APP has a warm, friendly, sometimes flattering on-boarding page shouting out “WELCOME HOME!!” I didn’t see any tasks that remain unsolved and really need me.

But there they were, plenty.

Founded in 2014, LinkedIn China has been practiced a By-Product strategy in which they developed a new product while keeping the original one, LinkedIn, on growing. That new product, Chitu, is functionally similar with LinkedIn but more localized for Chinese users in terms of UI/UX, such as Chinese interface, cute cartoon icon and mobile registration, etc.

By the time I joined LinkedIn, Chitu was just launched with only 2 operations, me and my boss. So I took over almost everything that would make users “feel at home”, including:

1. Hunting potential users(since Chitu limited registration during the first month with invitation only) and inviting them into a “product feedback” WeChat group. As group admin, it’s my responsibility to keep these potential users active. Therefore, as long as I was awake, I was the POC for answering every question thrown out in that group, collecting product feedback, and sharing company/ product/ industry news to drive engagement.
2. Taking care of a customer service account, namely “Chitu Assistant”. Even though my colleagues from customer service team had filtered out non-sense messages, there were still 1000+ questions and bug reports per day waiting for me to reply .

Working as Chitu Assistant for 6 months, I met all kinds of anxious, upset, and rude users describing simple product issues with exaggerating words. Magically, I’ve observed a “quantitative to qualitative” change happening in my mindset. In the first few weeks, I felt equally astonished when “Oh gosh why my profile pic all of sudden turned into someone else’s ?!!” While reporting and debugging more and more product issues, I was able to skip detailed & useless description, pick up key information, define root cause, and find the right guy to solve. In the case of “profile pic”, I would be collected, composed and confident to answer:

“Cache problem.I’ll go check with our Front-end and Server Engineers.”

For me, customer service is way more than just picking up phone calls and collecting feedback. There are many takeaways that I learnt from this experience:

1. Due to various persona and scenarios, users can make any possible and “impossible” errors.
2. Almost 99% of users who make “impossible” errors will insist themselves doing correctly.
3. Users barely read FAQs.
4. Neither do they pay any attention to secondary wordings in campaign banners or any other html 5 pages.
5. Improvements built from users’ feedback are proven to be more effective in lifting engagement and click through rate(CTR).

In short,

Users make errors. But it’s not users’ fault, it’s product’s.

In January 2016, I left Chitu team and started to work on product marketing for LinkedIn, thus ended my 6-month customer service experience. I shall thank this experience for pushing me out to the very front end of a product. Communicating with users and listening to their first-hand feedback, I was literally taking usability test every single day. And the test results I received, those helpful takeaways above, keep guiding me to plan successful marketing campaigns and to design user-centered products in the future.