How to Quickly Master a New Business Domain as a Designer

When entering a new business area, designers often struggle to provide suitable solutions if they rely solely on past experience; understanding the industry, product, and users is essential for effective design.

1. Review Industry Reports

Start with a macro view by reading industry reports to grasp market status, policies, trends, vertical tracks, key companies, financing, and product progress. Recommended sources include:

IT Juzi – a structured database of IT companies and business information.

iResearch – free high‑quality reports on new retail, big data, enterprise consulting, investment, etc.

2. Follow Industry News

Gain a mid‑level perspective by reading up‑to‑date news and commentary from portals, public accounts, blogs, and forums. Useful sites are:

36Kr – fast, comprehensive tech, finance, and internet news.

Huxiu – deep, incisive commercial insights on innovation and entrepreneurship.

Chuangyebang – professional, high‑depth information for entrepreneurs.

3. Experience Competitors

Analyze similar products to understand their market position, strengths, and weaknesses, then extract valuable ideas for future product iterations.

4. Understand Product History

Talk with product managers, review past product documents, meeting minutes, and design files (e.g., Sketch) to learn the product’s origin, vision, evolution, and design decisions.

5. Identify Target Users

Clarify user demographics, behaviors, and scenarios; recognize how users currently solve problems to anticipate their expectations for new solutions. Consider usage contexts, such as screen resolution and workflow for real‑estate agents using a sales backend.

6. Experience the Product

Use the product from different role perspectives (e.g., sales rep, manager, admin) to avoid designer‑centric bias and to capture pain points, taking screenshots and notes for later iteration.

7. Map Business Processes

For complex B2B products, dissect the workflow by examining professional terminology and role‑based processes. Example terms in a real‑estate sales system include:

Public client pool – a group of customers visible to all agents.

Private client – customers managed by a single agent.

Leads – basic customer information gathered from campaigns, later converted through follow‑up.

Analyze workflows by identifying roles, collaboration, work scenes, and operation paths to understand the end‑to‑end product flow.

By following these steps—starting broad with industry research, then narrowing to product specifics and user experience—designers can quickly acquire the necessary business knowledge to create impactful designs.