CHINA DISCOVERY
BEHAVIOR AS UX MATERIALS
To gain a deeper understanding of how mobile devices fit into people’s daily lives, our research team conducted an extensive field study across seven major Chinese cities — Shenyang, Beijing, Xi'an, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Changsha, and Shenzhen. Over several weeks, we interviewed more than 50 participants and closely observed their routines as they commuted to work or school, managed household errands, and navigated public transportation. Before meeting with us, each participant completed a diary assignment, documenting their daily activities and noteworthy moments, which provided rich contextual detail for our discussions.
During the field study, the research team was divided into smaller groups, each dedicated to a specific city. In my group, I also teamed up with our Design Director, and took on both roles: UXR designer and Chinese-to-English interpreter. This dual responsibilities allowed me to shape the research design, synthesize insights, and ensure clear communication between the participants and our English-speaking stakeholders, ultimately contributing to more nuanced and actionable findings.
Period: May 2016 - January 2017
Role: UX Research Staff Designer, and manage cross-functional collaboration with product managers, hardware and software engineers, and designers.
I work with the team over planning, execution, and synthesis of user research initiatives, ensuring that field studies run smoothly and generate meaningful insights. Key responsibilities include guiding the research team in participant interviews, facilitating user observations, and translating findings into actionable design recommendations.
Challenge: Optimize next-generation of Motorola smartphone, portable device interaction and wearable device through in-context, user-centered research
Strategy: We followed participants through their daily routines, taking detailed field notes on how devices were integrated into their lives. This method surfaced organic insights about multi-tasking, social influences, and context-driven usage. Before face-to-face sessions, participants maintained simple diaries documenting their daily mobile activities, challenges, and noteworthy interactions. These diaries primed both participants and researchers, providing baseline data and conversation starters. The outcome was a set of rich, actionable insights that could guide product decisions, inform localization strategies, and help shape a smartphone experience tailored to the nuanced expectations of China’s dynamic user base.
Research goals:
Understand how real-life conditions affect users’ mobile devices usage and adoption.
Uncover mental models and expectations around mobile and other electronic devices interactions.
Identify opportunities for the new smartphone innovation.
Validate assumptions about hardware constraints (e.g., sensor accuracy, battery life) affecting user experience.
PROJECT BACKGROUND
(Source: N.Z.Photography/Shutterstock)
In 2016, Motorola, under Lenovo's ownership, aimed to re-establish its presence in the competitive Chinese smartphone market. The company's strategy was to focus on a few key areas:
Product Proposition:
Premium Experience at Mid-Range Prices: Motorola aimed to offer high-quality smartphones with premium features, such as excellent cameras, pure Android experiences, and stylish designs, at competitive mid-range prices.
Nostalgia and Brand Heritage: Leveraging its iconic brand name and nostalgic appeal, Motorola sought to attract consumers who valued quality and a unique user experience.
Software Differentiation: The company emphasized its commitment to providing timely software updates and a clean, bloatware-free Android experience.
Motorola continues to adapt its product offerings to align with consumer preferences in China, aiming to enhance its market share through a combination of innovative technology and strategic pricing. For this “China Discovery” initiative, we formed a dedicated user research team composed of experienced designers and researchers. Each day, this team focused on a single participant—observing, interacting, and gathering insights from early morning through late evening. By immersing ourselves in the participant’s everyday routines and contexts, we were able to uncover rich, behaviorally grounded insights that directly informed our design strategies and product decisions.
Participant Selection & Representation
We partnered with an external recruitment agency to identify and schedule participants according to our defined selection criteria. This process ensured a diverse mix of users, ranging from light to heavy tech adopters, and considered factors such as gender, smartphone brands, household income, and other mindset-influencing attributes. By carefully balancing these variables, we aimed to capture a broad range of perspectives and behaviors surrounding mobile device usage.
CONTEXTUAL RESEARCH & SHADOWING
Homework
In order to capture authentic, in-the-wild user behaviors with the mobile devices, we have in-depth interviews to delve into user attitudes, clarify ambiguous behaviors observed in the field, and understand mental models, first hand to see in users’ daily routines, and diaries for longitudinal understanding. We formed a dedicated user research team composed of experienced designers and researchers. Each day, this team focused on a single participant — observing, interacting, and gathering insights from early morning through late evening. By immersing ourselves in the participant’s everyday routines and contexts, we were able to uncover rich, behaviorally grounded insights that directly informed our design strategies and product decisions.
Participants receive digital diary apps to record their daily activities, emotional states, and encounters with products or services. Writing prompts or simple frameworks (e.g., “What did you do today? How did your phone support or frustrate you?”) can guide entries.
Homework includes:
- Typical day description
- The main actor/actress
- The object in use
- The environment/location
- The main activity
- Special thoughts or feelings to share
- Things to complain
One of the participants’ typical day
We also ask participants to take photos with their smartphones, as well as the screenshots, where we can see what apps they use, how they group the apps, and how they name the groups. Visual evidence supplements observational data and helps us see through the participant’s own lens.
Gaining direct access to participants’ smartphone screenshots offers a unique lens into their digital ecosystems — a privilege that can yield valuable, unfiltered insights. These screens reflect genuine behaviors, from the assortment and arrangement of installed apps to the groups they’ve joined and the public accounts they follow on WeChat. By analyzing these elements, we can develop a more nuanced understanding of their interests, habits, and preferences.
However, these screenshots alone cannot fully explain the reasoning or intentions behind each user’s choices. To uncover the “why” beneath the “what,” we move beyond digital artifacts and engage directly with participants. By meeting them face-to-face, observing their daily routines, and gathering contextual data, we gain the firsthand knowledge required to truly understand their motivations. This closer contact allows us to refine our insights and ultimately design experiences that resonate more deeply with users’ real-world needs.
CLOSE-UP observation
We conduct immediate debrief sessions after each interview or shadowing activity to capture fresh impressions, refine interview questions for subsequent participants, and identify emerging patterns early. Sometimes we follow a student to go to the campus in the morning, and meet up a junior manager who just leaves his office on his way home in the early evening. Being the user is one of the most exciting things when in this kind of the research activity, where we can be equipped with all our senses to be empathetic towards the user.
Participants may not reveal much detail until we meet and engage with them directly. Their willingness to share — and their ability to recall specific usage patterns — can vary significantly. Below are some of the key insights we gathered from speaking in person with Miss Chen, who provided valuable context on her smartphone use:
Highly concerned about privacy
Frequently backs up her data
Regularly transfers files between her computer and smartphone
Enjoys online shopping
Rarely downloads images from the internet
Checks WeChat messages from her child’s school community
Manages personal expenses separately from her husband’s
Each of her habits and preferences reflects underlying motivations unique to her individual context. By meeting with Miss Chen in person, we uncovered several intriguing insights that not only bring meaning to the photographs we collected but also serve as valuable behavioral patterns to inform future design decisions.
Key insights & findings
Behavior patterns
We documented every observation in detailed field notes, capturing how mobile devices naturally integrated into participants’ daily lives. This approach revealed authentic insights about multitasking, social dynamics, and context-driven usage. We then combined participant diaries with interviews, using a balance of open-ended questions and targeted probes to deepen our understanding. After each session, the research teams held immediate debriefs to record initial impressions, refine subsequent interview questions, and identify emerging themes early in the process.
Identifying patterns across different cities became a key focus in our synthesis, as we compared and contrasted user behaviors to uncover recurring themes. In this “China Discovery” initiative, our research team surfaced three core behavioral patterns — Planning to Sharing, Gesture-Based features, and Wearable Device concepts — each reflecting critical insights drawn from observed interactions and direct participant feedback.
1) Planning to Sharing
From our in-depth interviews, one of the most prominent findings was that many participants seek ways to enhance their overall productivity — ranging from quick, straightforward tasks to more complex, repetitive routines. They expressed a desire for smartphones that could anticipate their needs, reducing the time, effort, and cognitive load required to manage battery life, storage, and other resources. Essentially, users envision devices capable of taking proactive steps to streamline their experiences, minimizing the need for constant manual intervention.
In parallel, for each proposed concept derived from the identified behavioral patterns — such as our first example, 'Planning to Sharing' — we apply three key evaluation criteria: Business value, Technical Feasibility, and User Experience. Assessing each concept against these benchmarks enables us to gauge its potential value for end users and ensure alignment with broader business objectives. Below it shows the spectrum from development-wise thinking to UX-driven mindset to visually present the degree of the ideas proposed.
From left to right, the scale refers to more development wise to more user experience wise.
2) Gesture-Based features
Smartphones rarely leave their users’ sides. Many participants interact with their devices continuously — even while cooking dinner — demonstrating effortless navigation of their screens alongside other wearable technologies. At the same time, privacy concerns and the use of multiple devices are common as individuals manage how they appear to others.
These usage patterns influence key product choices: for example, battery life becomes a significant factor in selecting a phone. Likewise, taking screenshots rather than saving or downloading large files helps conserve storage, illustrating practical adaptations in daily device use.
From left to right, the scale refers to more development wise to more user experience wise.
3) Wearable Device
Our observations and participant feedback indicated that nearly all users owned multiple wearable devices—some for personal use, others shared with family members. Many of these gadgets were limited to a single function, forcing frequent switching between devices.
In our brainstorming sessions, we explored new concepts that would enable wearables to take on more dynamic roles—acting as reporters, navigators, personal assistants, connectors, and caretakers—ultimately freeing users’ hands and allowing them to engage more deeply with their surroundings.
From left to right, the scale refers to more development wise to more user experience wise.
Collaboration & Reflection
The “China Discovery” project provided a strategic vision for designing our next Moto smartphone to resonate with the local market. We assembled a cross-functional team — encompassing UXR, UX, UI, industrial designers, senior engineers, and product managers — to travel through major Chinese cities. To immerse ourselves in authentic user contexts, we relied on various modes of transportation — buses, subways, and occasionally participant-driven cars that took us far beyond the city center.
Lessons Learned:
What I learned as a UX researcher and ideator:
The importance of understanding real-world contexts before finalizing interaction models.
How early stakeholder alignment can accelerate product changes.
How to be more inclusive in participant recruitment to reflect user diversity and background
Each evening, the entire team reconvened to synthesize the day’s findings, translating firsthand observations into actionable insights. Midway through the research, we held dedicated brainstorming sessions, thoroughly analyzing emerging user behaviors and perspectives. These collective insights informed product decisions and helped shape a smartphone experience that local users would genuinely value and embrace.
MOTO SERIES Before & after the research
One of our key responsibilities and objectives is to translate our research insights into a forward-looking vision — one that shapes future feature refinements and anticipates next-generation interaction models. As we apply these findings, Motorola is also preparing to introduce Moto Mods, a groundbreaking modular concept that aligns with our commitment to innovation and user-centric design.
Key Moto Mods include:
JBL SoundBoost Speaker: Provides high-quality stereo sound with a built-in kickstand for hands-free use. It has an internal battery, ensuring it doesn't drain the phone's power.
Hasselblad True Zoom Camera: Offers 10x optical zoom and a Xenon flash, transforming the phone into a more versatile camera.
Moto Insta-Share Projector: Turns the phone into a portable projector, capable of displaying up to a 70-inch screen on any flat surface.
Moto Power Pack: Extends battery life by adding extra capacity, ensuring longer usage without recharging.
Moto Style Shells: Allow users to customize the phone's appearance with different designs and materials.
Initially, we were captivated by the potential of Moto Mods — their modular design felt like more than just an innovation. However, through in-depth interviews and careful analysis of participants’ unstated needs, we uncovered a crucial insight: these add-on modules introduced additional cognitive and physical burdens. Users had to think about which Mod to attach, carry multiple components, and adapt their routines accordingly, ultimately complicating rather than enhancing their mobile experience.
While Moto Mods pushed the boundaries of what a smartphone could be, they did not achieve wide adoption. In response, Motorola refocused on features that better aligned with user preferences and market expectations — improving camera capabilities, extending battery life, and offering strong value. After the Moto Mods phase, the company refined its core smartphone portfolio: the Moto G series delivered exceptional value, the Moto E series served budget-conscious customers, and the Motorola Edge series provided a more premium, design-driven experience. Throughout this evolution, regional differences — particularly in the Chinese market—influenced both product strategy and marketing, reinforcing the importance of localized user insights.
This journey exemplifies how user research and continuous feedback loops can guide strategic pivots, ensuring that product decisions remain rooted in genuine user needs. We as a team to listen deeply, challenge assumptions, and translate nuanced user behaviors into product strategies that resonate globally — ultimately elevating both the user experience and the brand’s market position.