February 2020 | Case study of our Shanghai office about the intensive design partnership (2015-2019) with the team of YI Technology, the fiercest competitor of Go Pro and one of the future giants in the video and imaging world.

How do you deal with high customer expectations?

‍Whentechnological progress and the latest design trends come together in an ambitious Chinese company whose vision is to become a global player, China becomes the place-to-be for a global design agency.

For us, this was an opportunity to embrace dramatic change and new design experiences, but also a time when we had to maintain the rigor of our design and ensure our standards and methods.

The challenge at YI: As a young, dynamic and relatively small company in the Pudong Economic Zone in Shanghai, YI was not yet a household Chinese name, let alone a global player, at a time when Go Pro was ubiquitous and Sony was on the rise. Its early beginnings in video and image editing were not yet successful enough to challenge the "big boys".

The design of their products lacked a clear and innovative design language and the brand image was suffering from an identity crisis, meaning that technical developments were stagnating due to a lack of acceptance. They needed a new impetus and looked outside their company for a design partner who understood their complex and ambitious requirements and could translate them into a new and unique product family portfolio. This is where WILDDESIGN came into play.

"Full of action" with the sports camera

Big ambitions become concrete product goals

So WILDDESIGN China and YI joined forces at the end of 2014 to tackle this task (at that time the brand was still operating under the name Xiaoyi, which means "little ants"). During the first meetings, our design team started to break down the goals and visualize them in technology roadmaps and NPD (New Product Development) priority lists. We tried to develop an understanding of how design can be placed within an organization of developers, engineers and sales people.

We coordinated these increasingly concrete ideas in regular milestone meetings. Once the various approaches had stabilized and a number of initial projects had been tackled, Yi commissioned WILDDESIGN to complete the design of the company's first action camera. This marked an important milestone and laid the foundation for future success. After three and a half years of design partnership, YI has transformed itself into an established consumer brand for video and photo systems. With the world's first 4K action camera - which records in 60 FPS (frames per second) - Yi is now heating up the global competition. A small work of art that customers soon dubbed the "Go-Pro killer".

Three more successful models of their action camera followed, as well as a whole range of niche products and special accessories. The team at WILDDESIGN Shanghai is proud to have helped YI become a major global player and market leader in this field - so much so that their new slogan "See Everything" fits the brand's mission perfectly.

Design & engineering and testing, testing, testing...

‍Actioncamera users have diverse needs and each with an individual "thrill factor" - from the steady "uphill" jogger to the crazy "downhill" cyclist. Designing a camera that can withstand such demands, capture beautifully sharp and stunning video and be housed in protective and functional accessories is a challenge that can push even the most methodical and meticulous design process to its limits.

With users demanding ever smarter features to capture spectacular footage, the end of technical development is nowhere in sight. Fortunately, WILDDESIGN was able to work closely with YI's software and hardware engineers. This enabled the analysis of functional prototypes and all important real user needs and paved the way for the refinement of future development processes.

Intuitive security within our four walls

Our private home is our sanctuary. It is worth protecting in a truly intelligent way. A living place with precious treasures that we have created and collected over the course of our lives. But in our fast-paced world, we can't always guarantee full attention. YI capitalized on this idea early on and commissioned WILDDESIGN to develop the next generation of their smart home cameras in early 2015.

With a range of intelligent functions such as emergency photos of unrecognized guests, detecting break-ins, monitoring a small child - and whether Cooper the dog is bullying Jimbo the cat - a camera was to be developed that could record all of this in full HD.

Combined with the encrypted YI cloud and an intuitive mobile app experience, the user is always kept up to date. In the final design, we were able to intelligently pack all these features into a sleek, portable and attractive product. It offers the family a discreet and remote-controlled experience that they can feel safe with.

A large product family with a uniform design language

Given YI's rapid growth and increasing product diversity, it was important for WILDDESIGN to create a strong and coherent corporate identity from the outset. As a Chinese brand with big global ambitions, there was a clear intention to compete with the top international players through distinctive industrial design and smart technological features.

In addition, Yi was able to take advantage of lower manufacturing costs without sacrificing quality to ensure it offered the same, if not better, experience for a fraction of the competitor's price. The rapid shift in product development to next-generation models meant that WILDDESIGN needed to reformulate the design language into technology roadmaps to ensure that the process of product management could continue smoothly through YI's future growth.