Hanqing Yang

2026-05-26

I have realized that I rely too much on an engineering-oriented way of thinking in product design: What pain points do users have? At which step in the overall workflow do users need help?

However, recent examples have shown me that products often also need to deal with many sociological issues. Once the user base reaches a certain scale, will there be users who think “creatively” enough to step outside the intended product design and exploit its loopholes?

Or perhaps this is actually a pain point I failed to account for. It does exist, but only appears in low-probability scenarios. When designing a product, we should try to anticipate such cases as much as possible—or, once they occur, close the loopholes quickly.

This also makes it necessary to include different types of users in testing, because every user has different habits. In short, this feels a bit like solving sociological problems, rather than simply using product and engineering solutions to address practical difficulties.

2026-05-25

A reflection on “taste”:

The criteria for selection today should perhaps shift toward something more intuitive: a judgment of quality, a sense of what is good or bad, and an aesthetic understanding of things.

This is because comprehensive and detailed data analysis reports are already something LLMs can produce. I practice and rely on this heavily every day. But for a product, which part of a report truly matters—and whether that importance is enough to make the product “worth trying”—depends heavily on intuition. It depends on how many good and bad projects one has seen, on understanding why past projects succeeded or failed, and on being able to generalize whether those successes and failures are replicable or avoidable.

Aesthetic judgment gives us a way to ask: Was this success “elegant”? Was it an individual’s sudden rise through a low-probability event, or a team’s step-by-step execution? Is it a good business, or merely speculation? Is it based on long-term thinking, or just a temporary trend? Perhaps even that is not precise enough—the better question may be whether a temporary trend can be transformed into a long-term consideration.