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The article discusses three successful digital technology start-up companies in China, namely coffee company Saturnbird Coffee, sugar-free beverage company Yuan Qi Sen Lin (YQSL), and cosmetics company Perfect Diary. It particularly focuses upon the firms' product innovations in relation to consumer desires, use of social media, and the integration of the Chinese economy into the worldwide supply chain and global value chain.

The article focuses on the user-centered design (UCD) practice. User-Centered Design (UCD) is a multidisciplinary design approach based on the active involvement of users to improve the understanding of user and task requirements, and the iteration of design and evaluation. It is widely considered the key to product usefulness and usability, an effective approach to overcoming the limitations of traditional system-centered design. In the past, many of the UCD methods in the literature were found ineffective or impractical for a variety of reasons. However, the growing popularity of e-commerce has greatly bolstered the appeal of usability and UCD, as users can take their business elsewhere with just one mouse click. In the past, the lack of widespread UCD implementation was thought to be partly due to two common misconceptions: usability could not be measured, and development work did not have usability goals. A series of hierarchical regression analyses was conducted to examine organizational properties and characteristics of UCD processes as potential factors affecting UCD effectiveness.