Since it was founded in 2014, ZAOZUO’s color&material design is mostly based on fashion color trends and designers' experience. My role in the 3-month user research internship was to design and lead a research project to provide insights for the company’s future CMF design by understanding the company’s customers.

I firstly defined specific goals of the research project by collaboration with the design team. 

To understand:

Customers’ needs for home environment

Customers’ preference on home decoration style

Customers’ research process on determining furniture color

Customers’ requirements and preferences of colors when they purchase furniture

In a home visit I can see the customer’s real choices on furniture color and understand deeply about why the customer made those choices in the context where he/she is using the product everyday.

Select suitable customers and go to their home. Do observation as well as have deep conversation with the customer.

Provide the customer with a card with some prepared keywords and ask the customer to choose those that could describe the home environment he/she wants to create. Each keyword is related to a hue.

The co-creation session could help the participant better express their opinions and the researcher could get more insights by observing the customer’s behavior and be able to ask more related and valuable interview questions.

The participants first chose an apartment layout diagram that was similar to their home. Then they were asked to build their home by putting furniture cards on the layout diagram. For each type of furniture, cards with a series of colors were provided. The participants were asked to ignore all other factors and choose the furniture only based on color.

4 layout diagrams were provided which matched to 4 different budget levels.

Cards of 14 types of furniture were provided. Cards of each type of furniture cover a wide range of colors, selected in the ZAOZUO color system.

Real sales data could reflect customer’s actual choices on furniture color.

I analyzed the average daily sales of all retail channels for Zaozuo’s each category of furniture by color, hoping to see the performance of different colors on a furniture category. However, it’s really difficult to get rid of other affecting factors for the customer’s purchasing decision, like the furniture’s shape, price and so on. So another method was chosen.

Online survey was used to learn needs and preferences of the customer group and also as a way to validate qualitative findings. Also, the online survey worked as a way for me to find suitable qualitative research participants.

A carefully designed online questionnaire was distributed to a large customer group in a way that aimed to attract as many as customers to participate.

Pictures that show different home decoration styles.

Customers’ profiles

Customers’ needs for home environment

Customers’ preference on home decoration style

Customers’ research process on determining furniture color

Customers’ concerns on determining furniture color

Customers’ possible taste change on furniture color

Different factors’ weighing on customer’s furniture color decision

Customers’ requirements and preferences of colors when they purchase furniture

Customers’ view on fashion color trends

Customers’ impressions of ZAOZUO’s color system

Outcome of the research project effectively complemented the company‘s product color selection system by understanding users.