Design startups in India

A 3 part introduction on the relevance of UX for innovation

It’s been raining startups here in India! Big news, big exits, lots of action lately. And two specific topics have been particularly louder than others. One, our tech community has been heavily musing how we put our people and skills on the global platform. And two, there’s been a lot of discussion around bringing more product focus to our ecosystem. I imagine its highly unlikely that most of us are turning to UX to find answers for these questions. But these are precisely the kind of questions that Experience Design as a practice can offer insights into. Before we jump into topics on Design practices, ROI and experience stories from our startups in this column, I thought briefly exploring the question of relevance of UX to this community would help ground us all in the conversations we could have here over the coming months.

The Definition

Let’s start by getting the definition out of the way. There are tons of definitions of UX and models out there, but let’s keep this simple and in plain English. Experience Design is the process of designing products & services that mindfully influence (or cause) people to have different kinds of experiences. And it could be said that the human experience and interaction with those products comprise of 4 parts: usefulness (value I see), usability (ease of use), emotional appeal (how does it make me feel) and aspects leading to behavioral change (expectations the product & behavior change creates of other aspects of life). [1]

Simply put, Experience Design is concerned with the process of understanding experiences people have, their life, the contexts surrounding it & designing for it.

How can UX help?

Putting a community on the global map for their cutting edge innovation is no easy task and certainly requires much much more than Experience Design. That said, Innovation is increasingly turning into this unicorn — this search for the next big thing or the ultimate killer app. How can we mass manufacture a culture of innovation when innovation seems more like a catch-all term than a science that can be carefully crafted into a control experiment? How can we pivot an entire country and it’s youth from continuing to follow an engineering driven ‘outsourcing’ services culture? And of course, pivot and go where? How can we design for needs and contexts unique to our people while still managing to scale globally?