ArtsBerry invited the Senior Designer behind Lark Suite to share her creative design ideas and process of the suite of office collaboration tools focusing on cloud-based file management and document and spreadsheet editing.
Lark is an enterprise collaboration platform developed by ByteDance (Parent Company of TikTok) and first released to the public in 2019. Lark Office Suite is called Chinese version of “Slack” and “Microsoft Teams.” It combines many essential collaboration tools in a single interconnected platform, including chat, calendar, content creation, and app management. Ms. He, the creative mind behind Lark, was the Senior Designer at ByteDance at the time, where she managed and mentored a design team of 6 product designers and led the design of 20+ products from the ground up. “The new design language I was involved, I believe, represents Lark’s focus on its key pillars of collaboration, communication, and innovation, which gives users an experience that evolves with them in the new digital age,” says Ms. He.
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As a Bytedance designer, Ms. He’s main responsibilities for this project include designing the newest version of Lark, creating the new design language, and exploring a new digital interface. In addition, Ms. He led the team to successfully improve user experience with higher SUS and NPS scores, taking users collaboration and communication with the new Lark design to the next level. Shortly after launch of the new design version that Ms. He led to release, Lark became No.3 in the Chinese office platform with 4.6 million monthly active users in 2021.
When we asked about the biggest obstacles she overcame during the design phase, Ms. He says, “Understanding users needs and correctly defining the design direction can be quite challenging. Therefore, I conducted 10+ usability testing and analyzed user research findings to better iterate the new design. By observing how users work and analyzing their pain points, requirements, and concerns, I led the team to successfully redesign the Lark Office Suite and explore a new version to solve the design challenges, which was well received by stakeholders.”
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In the end, ArtsBerry asks Ms. He to offer her advice for our designers who just started their career. She says, “As a new designer, you will meet many design challenges in your career path, don’t give up easily. Dig out user needs, find current pain points, identify the problem and explore the design solutions. Take user research seriously because all designs come from this. It would help if you also think globally to understand the users from different cultures, views, and experiences. Lastly, be curious and explore the world because life is the best teacher for a designer.”
Ms. Su He is currently Senior Designer at Microsoft where she is responsible for the design of Microsoft Azure Platform used by 80% of the Fortune 500 companies for their cloud computing needs.
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