 Thank you so much everybody for being here and I hope you had some good coffee and I hope you're enjoying the conference. So today I'm here to talk about the business of UX and try and maybe talk through some of my experiences running, happening and dealing with a lot of business folks and talking about business day in and day out so let's maybe go through it and get into business and see what happens. Yeah, just to quickly introduce myself, I'm Rohan, I'm the founder of Happening Design, we're a global UX design studio. If you've seen my face around a couple of times at the conference that's also because I'm one of the co-chairs at UX India, I've been a co-chair for a while and it's an interesting time to be here, never done a keynote as a co-chair of UX India so this is definitely a first for me and I'm pretty excited about it. We are happening and if you've been here the last two days a lot of people have approached me and asked me what's happening so I've been trying to kind of talk to everybody about what we do and so on so it's a great opportunity for me to maybe just say it once and for all so yeah we are a global UX design studio and we create digital products and experiences for companies who are doing some very exciting stuff and yeah Happening is who we are so a bunch of things that we do basically to add more value to our clients in terms of UX design, research, brand design, front-end development and so on, quickly a little bit more talking about the impact we have a presence across the world largely in India and in North America and we've worked with some very exciting clients across a bunch of industries yeah some of the industries we've worked with and some of the clients largely across banking and financial insurance and retail and whatnot I won't bore you more with happening but let's talk about the business of UX that's why I'm here so today's talk today's my keynote is all about just giving some exposure into understanding the business side of things and understand the impact investing in UX brings especially if there are any business folks around here or UX designers who are getting into leadership positions this might be pretty useful for you so for the first and the most obvious question why should designers care about business goals and outcomes so as designers we already have a lot on our plate we talk to users we hear out their problems their pain points their needs we deal with developers we deal with marketers and we deal with what not and I'm now adding really one more thing on to your plate which is to deal with business folks as well but honestly I think this will be helpful this will help you improve your process and this will help you create some more impact first thing why you should be doing this is to be more business efficient if you're wondering most businesses out there the only thing that they care about would be to be more efficient that's why we keep hearing about layoffs and hiring and investments and what not so be business efficient the second thing is to drive business success so when I say business success there are a lot of business goals that the entire company aligns to and for each company success would mean a completely different thing so it helps to understand what is successful for your company and what does success mean for your company and it's not always about generating more revenue or more sales or engagement or whatever right there are companies that do some very interesting stuff where their goals will be completely different versus a company in the same industry which might have goals that are completely different basically right the third thing is to show some tangible evidence as UX designers I think we have a great superpower which is to visualize things envision things put things together in a very sort of a beautiful way and create experiences that really excite a lot of people so showing that and showing the process behind that is very important and lastly this something that I see many designers not doing but in our industry being a design studio in the consulting space it becomes extremely important for us especially when there are long-term engagements and bigger projects it's very very critical to show how your designs have made a positive impact on the company or on the business or the team that you're working with like I said could be anything but needs to be measured and needs to be shown to the respective people one thing before we kind of get talking too much in the business terms I would like to point out that good design is good business and this has been proven multiple times is not something new and you must have seen this code probably a dozen times so when I speak from the business side it doesn't mean that I'm asking you to get too much into the business side of things but keep in mind that we are all designers and we want to do good design but that also means that it's going to be good for the business so how do you do this right the first thing is obviously allow about alignment as designers your team or you might have a certain set of goals right that you would like to do with your designs you have particular process that you follow whenever you do research there are a set of things that you would like to achieve similarly when you create some wire frames there are certain things that you would like to achieve so it's important to embrace business goals and this there is there's a disconnect here because not many people get involved in this process where you don't understand or you don't get to see what the business goals are of a company so it's important to reach out and try and get yourself aligned to align to the direction where the company is headed a second thing is integrating them into your design process so don't keep your stakeholders in the dark involve them in the process talk to them about what you would like to do and how we would achieve it and how it is good for business the third thing which not many would like but it is to treat your stakeholders like you do your users so if you're one of those designers who doesn't do user research then this is bad news for you but if you are somebody who treats your users well and listens to them listens to what they have to say and empathizes with them it's extremely important to treat your stakeholders also in a similar way the last point is business back decision design decisions so obviously we have all heard of what design decisions are but when I say business back design decisions it is essentially I'm trying to say include your stakeholders in the process and have some business thinking behind the design decision that you take so if you're changing something that would affect a bunch of things in your flow it is important to measure or it is important to consider what is the impact that the business is going to have because of it and this is usually a back and forth discussion it never happens in at once but it's important to do that couple of things I would like to talk about which is very important as we go the metrics that you should actually care about and there's plenty if you just Google or I see so many people talking about AI so if you use AI you're gonna get a list of probably thousand metrics and you could probably create a thousand more but I would just like to touch upon this as we kind of go forward why do business stakeholders not value UX this is something I've been asked a lot and this is something that I have seen in the process myself when we talk to clients when we talk to prospects or when we speak with stakeholders in a particular company as well firstly there's no buy-in from the executives so that immediately is a big sort of a stepping stone in your entire process if you don't have a buy-in you're going to spend the entire time just fighting fighting fighting and trying to just bring everybody together and this buy-in doesn't happen magically there is a way to do things and I will talk about it as well but it is important to highlight what you bring on to the table and there will be people who don't understand what you bring on to the table but that effort is needed second is misalignment of goals it's happened to me a lot when somebody talks to me about a problem that they're facing with their business or their product I immediately have a thousand ideas I immediately know that these are the 10 things that I need to do to get to a point where I need to get to which would be success for me but to my client that is not success or to my customer that is not success high revenue like I said earlier might not be success for everybody right so it's important to understand the goals and their thinking the third thing is low stakeholder involvement in the process and this is something that we all do we do all the research we create something that's beautiful usable blah blah blah and we just go and present it to people that will not work that is not how our process is designed as well we need more involvement from the stakeholders and that's usually expensive when you get more and more people involved but decide at least 10 minutes of their time for a small thing might really help and might really help you align with where they are headed poor communication I think we are good at communication I believe at least as designers but if you're not able to communicate that is definitely a step back for you so find ways to be more communicative through your decks or presentations prototypes sketches whatever it may be you don't know how or what to measure these are two completely different problems you can measure something but it could be a wrong metric for you and in many cases it's a trial and error but nevertheless it is important to know what you want to measure how you want to do it let me now talk a small problem from the stakeholder side in a lot of cases when they invest in a big design team or when they invest in putting together a design team to do a specific thing they expect instant results so it's important to manage expectations it's important to be upfront about what you're going to deliver and how you're going to do it lastly stakeholders are clueless and unwilling to experiment this is again an educational process that you need to take them through but this is something as designers unfortunately the process is still not known to many business folks or many operational folks or many finance folks so it's important to talk about what you're doing however ridiculous that might be question so how do you make your business stakeholders happy plenty of ways but let me talk about the design aspect of making your stakeholders happy it is basically this is my believe that bringing together user satisfaction with business success will most likely make your stakeholders happy and this is something that I've observed in a lot of the projects that I have done and my studio has done the next point and the most important point is showing the return of investment and if you just Google this or if you try and read up more about this this is probably one of the first things that you will see the return of investment UX design is hundred dollars for every one dollar invested I think that is a very big lie I don't I don't know what's the methodology behind this or how they got to that or if it's still valid but I definitely don't think that's true and there could be multiple ways to show ROI it's not necessarily through dollars it's not necessarily through time it could be in terms of many things right it could be one little enhancement I've seen has solved a huge problem for customers right and that could result in quite a few things could be lesser time higher engagement whatever whatever a second thing illustrate saving so the reason I talk about this is it's important to show what you're investing in and why you're investing in it and this happens a lot with developers I suppose a good example would be when you have something really crazy that you would like to develop because you think your users would find it delightful and user-friendly and whatnot but that could be very expensive to develop so it is important to show your success in just taking the right calls and in just prioritizing what you need to do first and then what you need to do next a third thing link UX enhancements to revenue market share customer lifetime value increases and whatever else you would like to so many cases we find usability flaws we do a lot of testing we do we do a lot of user research and we decide that okay these are a few things that I would like to do to improve my user experience but what I'm proposing here is to link this these enhancements or link these whatever small or big they might be to something that would help the business grow or that would help the business step forward in a particular direction fourth thing highlight reduction so there are not only results from your metrics in a positive sort of a view you could also talk about different aspects that really helped your user experience in terms of getting a better net promoter score or talking about customer acquisition and whatever else but it is important to talk about the entire aspect of what you would like to highlight when you when you execute something or when you build something then you have predictive analytics so analytics is something that it's a tool that we all have access to but I don't think we leverage it enough and we have a little bit of a skill to analyze data a little bit of a skill to understand what you are showing and what has happened in the past is going to help you basically take bit better design decisions and basically help you understand what the business problem is and it is a possibility that your business stakeholders themselves are not doing this but just by doing this small little thing is going to help you a lot the reason I put this which is a well-known fact and most of you must have seen this but the reason I put this is to basically reassure you that at the end of the day if you design something that makes your user experience better it is going to help your business it is going to help you it's going to help your business stakeholders but the way you do it and the process in which that you do is not just design driven but also very should be very business focused and should be you should be in a position to understand what's happening on the business side and then take a decision so how do you align your UX goals with your business goals and you could have your own process and if you see at a high level this is sort of your design thinking process where you analyze then you have a definition phase then you have a collaboration phase you have prioritization phase and so on and so forth but this is something that I've put together based on my experience it could be different for you but this something that's worked for me so first is understanding business objectives so step one I see 80% of the people fail because why should any business team involve you in their objectives or in their goal setting or in their vision right so there is a high chance that they're going to say this something that's probably not needed for you just focus on getting this feature done or this requirement done but the secret here to understanding business objectives is to demonstrate ROI is to demonstrate your impact is to show something tangible that's the only way they're going to start taking you seriously that's the only way you will get access to a lot of this business information which many designers today might not have in your own company second is to define clear and measurable goals so setting clear goals is easy but how do you set up a goal which is clear and measurable and we spoke about this measure the right thing and know how to measure it and continue to measure it for a long time there are very few metrics that would probably give you immediate results most of them take a long time to give you the impact that you need to give then collaborate with them have a shared goal motivate them to be a part of the process motivate them that this goal is going to get you to where you are and I have been in cases where I've been able to influence my business stakeholders to include some of my goals as a part of their goal setting framework because there is a direct impact to their ultimate goal which is usually ring to sales engagement or revenue then you have prioritization and developing a shared vision which I think we all know about then aligning your UX and business KPI so this is important whenever you design something you have a KPI for it but will this KPI help the business get future funding or get more freedom for you right so this this could be important in that sense and seven is basically demonstrating whatever you've done so far and eight which is something that we all love to do and which we do every day is continuous validation and reputation so my thinking where business and UX come together it's all about innovation growth and competitiveness so let me quickly touch upon it and see if that adds value to it so first thing is innovation and if you've been a part of any large companies you would have seen huge teams that are completely focused on innovation and here are a couple of things that you could do to improve your user experience and be innovative in the same process for the betterment of your business one is by solving real-time problems and rapidly prototyping them I think rapid prototyping is a lost art these days although you have these great amazing tools that really help make things quicker for you back in the day when we were just catching and doing paper prototypes it was a huge hassle but even with Figma and sketch and whatever else it's still I feel we are not tapping into that great tool to show the quick value and to show something that's real I don't think there are so many professions that can immediately convert an idea into something tangible and show it immediately to their stakeholders the second thing is explore extraterrestrial plans and this the reason I say this is because when you get into a team there is immediately a boundary drawn around you you are just in that boundary focused on one particular flow focused on one particular product focused on one particular platform and whatever else but it is important to sometimes step out of that it could be if you're working in some place for a long time that could be a comfort zone but get out of it look look around see what others are doing see how the industry is functioning see how your domain works and look at things that are completely out of your picture and see whether that could add value to your business the third thing is solving some of the significant problems your business faces so our user research process generally revolves around customer needs and customer pain points but it's important to also understand some of the problems the businesses faces and these problems generally do impact the UX teams and the design teams so before it impacts us it's important to understand what they are and maybe look at how you can add value there and how you can solve them lastly we're talking about AI today the whole day and yesterday and we're going to be talking about AI tomorrow and probably going to be talking about AI next year so there is a very clear pattern here where the user preferences and behaviors are completely changing just like how we say Google it I've heard people say look it up on chat GPT or whatever the other AI tools are so preferences are changing so if you're going to go to your business stakeholders for some funding or for you know convincing them about a particular thing and if you're still behind you have clearly not understood where the business is headed or if clearly not understood what are the issues the business are failing for a facing and this could be something that defines how well you do things and this could be something that clearly defines your user experience the second thing I would like to talk about the one was innovation which I just spoke about the second thing I would like to talk about is competitive advantage this comes in handy in almost all use cases whenever you create something new and to many UX designers when you speak about competition it's just about doing some simple analysis it's about doing some comparisons and it's about finding gaps or finding things that are missing between what you have versus what they have or looking at what you might have in the future and what they have right now that these are generally some comparisons that we made but building a competitive advantage is not easy and there are companies that have done this that have become huge success stories you know billion dollar businesses just because of one competitive advantage how you could do this according to me could be in these couple of ways one is to prioritize user satisfaction and delight so we have stages right we focus on needs first we focus on wants first and then we talk about delight if we have the time or if somebody permits us to think about it it's important to factor in delight in everything that you do and look at how you can give that additional bit of trust to your designs to make it have some edge over your competition so my point here is don't just look at solving the basic needs however small or big your project is or the problem is look at giving some delight to your users the second thing is to build recall and to have a sort of a unified expression of your brand so we all talk about design systems a lot right and I've seen products that have extensive design systems which is such a headache just to understand what the hell it is and how it functions but I've seen very few use cases where I've seen these huge design systems talk about values of their brand talk about the process that their brand was built through and talk about how they want to build recalls right and so on and so forth so it's important to understand those aspects and if you don't have sort of a great branding in place I think it's important to establish some facts before you go ahead and design something and that is definitely going to help you build a competitive edge third thing this is something that the reason I put this in is in many of our processes these days it starts with inspiration which is a great thing and they have been many great people who have stolen ideas and become huge successes but to all my teams I encourage them not to do that first I try and give them the time to experiment and fail just because I want to encourage fresher ideas I want to encourage crazy ideas I want to encourage failed ideas basically so I don't want people to build something similar to the next guy that is something that we always try lastly I spoke about AI previously it's very important to leverage that if you're talking about AI and you still don't understand what it is it's high time for you to at least understand some basics and understand how AI functions these days so what does good design lead to for the business at the end of the day and this is a proven fact again good design leads to higher sales higher engagement and higher customer retention but all this is possible only if you show it only if you show your business stakeholders only if you convince them that this has gotten you some positive impact for your company and this has helped you succeed so let me talk about some quick examples from my experience how we've done how we help some of our come from of our clients grow and how we were able to get some good business value out of some of the decisions that we've taken in the design process so this is a 5g platform which provides 5g connectivity for large-scale enterprises and there's a physical hardware aspect to it and there's also a software aspect to it what you're seeing is the software side of things so what we have done in this process which really helped this particular company have a competitive advantage and which really helped the business position this product in a certain way that they ensure success so one is we understood what 4 5g is we understood the domain we understood the metrics we understood how the system works and we on we also looked at other industry 4.0 technologies and we understood the entire realm of telecom and connectivity so that helped us align very closely with the business stakeholders the moment we started speaking their language they knew we were the right people to talk to the second thing 5g is still relatively a new field we are just getting 5g connectivity on our phones that are to the modern ones so it was important for this particular product to be future ready so we took in many factors while we designed this product to be future ready I don't want to get into the details I don't think we have enough time but it's important to understand where the industry is headed or where the company is going in the future and try to consider some of those use cases in your designs as well the third thing value added design and UX so when we spoke to when we spoke to them when we spoke to the leadership we spoke to them about not just design and wireframes and UI and all those things we spoke to them about how their product could be engineered in a better way which would ultimately give them a better experience to their end customer so it was not just UX but was also a lot of other things that we were able to add value in just because we understood what they were doing and where they are headed the fourth thing is a shared product vision we immediately got aligned to what their existing vision was for the company when they founded it and we continued to build on it so that was something that was very successful and lastly we worked very closely with their marketing team to help them project this experience as a great selling point so even today after a couple of years this is still one of the best user experience provided in in that industry there's one more use case so I planned is a will and trust platform only for the US market right now unfortunately but it helps you create wills and trust in a couple of steps right that's the entire product the first thing that we did with them was to conduct a bunch of workshops to establish a strategy and define it in a very very clear way and when you do this you obviously have a product roadmap you have a backlog and whatnot but what we also did was build a UX roadmap because we knew this is a very fast-growing industry there are a lot of competitors so when you're not the first you try to be the best right so we had a very clear road UX roadmap where we envisioned what the future state of our of the user experience is going to be and we really crafted it in a way that how many of our features you add or whatever you do to your product you will still have a great user experience and lastly we convinced them to invest in good branding and we showed them the real value so when they went to investors or they went to sell this to enterprises as a service right they were clearly able to appreciate the fact that this product although is new has a great trust factor to it which enabled them to buy quickly and buy easily just two things I would like I wanted to show today to establish some some facts based on the experience that I've had and to demonstrate a couple of the points that I've covered before in real time lastly looking ahead again I would like to highlight the fact that business of UX it's not just about helping your business grow or listening to the business or understanding their objectives and goals but it is about creating good design and good user experience at the end of the day so don't miss out on that or don't get too tangled up in this web of being business-friendly and forgetting what you do as a UX designer so that's it for me thank you and have a great day three tomorrow thank you