 Yeah. Hi. My name is Narendra Ghate. I'm a designer from IDC. Our professor, Professor Natkan is here, so we are very honored to be here. I've passed out 97. So last 20 years, I've been in Tata LXC. I'm leading the design studio there, and we're doing multiple projects right from UX and in AI, which is something that we'll talk today, to transportation, service design, product design, all of that. So it's a fun place to be, and I hope we have a good discussion today. Thank you. Raghavan, Director of Products at Adobe. I've been in the software industry for longer than that. I'm sure some of you may go all the way back to the days of fireworks when that was a cool tool to use. So I managed that, and after that, it's been fun with Muse and Dreamweaver and now into the more modern world of XD, which is a new tool that we have introduced. I'm really looking forward to how the other panelists and all of you feel about changes in UX and how we as a tooling and solution provider can meet your needs. I've already had an introduction, and pardon me, as you can hear, I'm quite sick and you may be getting sick of me because I've been on stage twice now so far. But I do work at IBM Design, helping clients take advantage of emerging tech, and the keynote I gave yesterday and the workshop were both about a new book that I've written about an emerging tech that I'm super interested in. Awesome. Let's start with this question about why emerging technologies are the next frontier for UX? What kind of roles and opportunities UX designers can play in this field? We can start. Mia, I can start. I am a super proponent of designers leading the charge into emerging tech, largely because we should do what we always do, which is bring that human centeredness to it. The prior talk was actually all about that, and I believe that's like if we just let the tech go without user centeredness to it, disaster will follow. I think what's world without changes? The world is changing whether we like it or not, and it's I think up to this group here to humanize it. I think that's what the real value of UX is to make the technology or the other advances be more value add to the general population rather than just to minorities. That's how I see it. So, Javadev heads the society general on emerging technologies. So, can you give a quick intro? Hi, I'm Javadev Sambedu. I'm a part of Sockchains Emerging Technologies and Trends division. So, we focus on technologies that will come mainstream five to 10 years for the bank. We focus on blockchain, machine learning, deep learning, IoT, and augmented reality. There is a common sentiment in the industry that emerging technologies can be both boon and pain for consumers. Chris, what do you think about the positive of an emerging tech? Since I have the mic, maybe I should answer. See, it's slightly long-winded answer, so please bear with it. If you see what's happening till almost five years, from industrial revolution till about five years ago, what was happening was that the designers or the people, for example, were not actually fully utilizing the technology in the products. For example, you had to be trained to use the product better. Now, next five years as AI comes in, what's going to happen is that the technology can do far more than what people really... Sorry, it's the other way around. People expect far more than what the technology can really offer. And I'll just give you an actual incident that happened today morning. And Alexa has been, or Amazon Echo, has been introduced in India just now. And I got mine yesterday and I introduced it today. I mean, I sort of installed it today in my house. And I was very happy because, you know, it was doing a fair bit of complicated things like follow-up questions and stuff like that. And I was thrilled. I told my wife, see, it's working. My wife asked her, it's a question. So today, what's the traffic like on the way to Whitefield? It couldn't answer because the Google Maps is yet not integrated in Alexa. So she's saying, shit, it doesn't work. The point is, the people expect far more very quickly because of these buzzwords like AI and smart technology and things like that. And then when it does not perform, you really feel that the product is not up to the mark, the brand is up to the mark, not up to the mark. And for the next five years, I think the role of UX designers would be to how to humanize almost the other way around, how to make people understand technology better so that they don't expect, or they don't let their expectations run away and they think these products are magic and let the products mature. And this is happening everywhere, whether it's smart cars or your smart chatbots. And that's where I feel UX, people will have a large role to play to just make this gap that is widening between users and product, come closer again. I mean, I do have a point of view. When you talk about anything that is emerging, it is disruptive by its very nature. And anything that is disruptive can be scary. You may not really, you can be on either of the sides. You could be benefiting from that disruption or you could be made redundant because of your current skill set or the role that you have. I guess it's all about how do you react? How do you make the most of it to even convert a potential, bend into a positive moment for you? So that's how I see it. I think I feel quite similarly. We have a lot of problems that we're facing in the world and they are massive and they are global. And unfortunately, the way that cultural attention works, it would be difficult to use old tools to try and solve those problems. Emerging tech gives us both the opportunity to rethink the problems, how we address those problems. And just because of the nature that it is emerging, people will pay attention. And if we can design them right, we can really use those to tackle some of the global problems that we have. So I know I'm a bright green optimist, but every time I think or look at a new emerging technology, that's my first take on it. Well, how can we use this given the massive problems that we've got? All right. So Jaya, what are the promises and challenges you look for from emerging tech? Okay, specifically each of the technology that we are tracking, I mean, we look at it from what are the industry trends and identify some of them, which we think has maximum impact. For example, one of the things that we've been pioneering is from last two to two and a half years, we've been looking at blockchain and the kind of disruption that it can bring. Because specifically, instead of waiting for other companies to disrupt us, as a bank, we ourselves are disrupting. As a lab, I have absolute autonomy on the kind of products that I can choose, which business line of our group I wanna go for. And we start exploring with this. And in many cases, you can clearly see, because we are doing this, the only one who's gonna be majorly affected is us. But instead of being worried about it, we look at this as an opportunity that we can invent a new kind of a product which does not exist in the market today. And that's the kind of mind, it's more of a mindset than anything else. And that's where I think emerging technologies helping us have this conversation. And it's the same. In fact, unlike any other technology, I mean, we work with IoT, as I said, augmented machine learning. But blockchain has been the only place where we've ended up collaborating with our competitors. That's never happened until now. And the number one bank in the world in commodities is working with us. We are the number second in the world in that. And this has never happened in the history because we never see eye to eye on topics of collaboration, let alone on technology. But in blockchain, we've realized, if you collaborate, both of you, I mean, have a chance to win. So that's the kind of disruption what we're seeing, which we've never seen something before. Great, Raghavan. So you guys are really, really groundbreaking products you're making. You are disrupting yourself by creating brand new products, future projects. And especially most of your products are targeted for designers and the developers, animators and whatnot. So what are the promises and challenges you look at from this emerging tech perspective, building products from Adobe perspective? The pace of changes, the pace of disruption, innovation has just significantly increased from the days of, if you look at Photoshop, what was changing from a core value that it was providing? Not much. There were obviously innovations in that, but from a design perspective, there was not much happening 10, 15, 20 years timeframe. But then I think in just the last three, four, five years with I think the value of UX becoming so critical, the design world has totally transformed itself. Last year's technology is no longer the hottest of the coolest. The innovations are at like almost on a daily, monthly, weekly pace where it's hard for a tooling and a solution provider for us to think about like what could be coming, forget about today's problems. You have to build solutions that would be value add for the next generation. That's tough, but that's fun because instead of just solving the same thing over and over and making some incremental changes, now you are truly looking at IoT or machine learning and how do you really bring that in and add value? It's not easy, but I guess that's what is keeping the team really excited about it. Yeah, as you rightly said, this technology is actually moving very rapidly. So in this fast-paced technology of tradition today, how designers can upgrade their skills? Do you think our designers need to learn code or what breed of designers is industry looking for? I'm sure we'll have a good discussion. Yeah, I am a strong believer that designers need to understand beyond just pure visual aesthetics and into the technology from a code perspective. And just take the example of such a mundane thing compared to IoT or more esoteric things, such a simple thing as website design, right? I'm sure all of you at some stage have done that or continuing to do that. If you're designing the experience for a website and if you don't know the technology behind it, which framework or which framework is gonna be used by the developer, I don't think you're gonna succeed. Empathy for the end user is one, but if you cannot collaborate and work closely with the developer to whom you are handing off the design, it's a, I think it's very inefficient. I've seen that happen so many times and I just really feel that if the designer can not actually code, but if you can at least relate to it and can understand it, that's significant. I think the days of somebody who was just purely drawing boxes and thinking his job is done, I think that's just not how I see it. So Narendra, your perspective. You are leading more than 100 designers and basically you're working on it from autonomous car to a lot of projects. Yeah, sorry. I'm going to be frank and harsh and we can have a fight, but I'm very clear in my mind that designers should not code. And I'll try and defend it. 10 years ago, maybe. Now when AI is going so rapid, you draw these boxes, put them colors, you press a button and the code will get ready. Automatic generation of code is already here, right? So what's happening is that technology is getting so advanced and it is so complicated that you really need to be deep into it to really be able to do anything with it. I mean, we heard Saurabh's talk in the morning. I mean, if you want to create personalities and actually give those kind of algorithms into that code, you really need to be very good at it. And you cannot be both ways where you're also doing a bit of design and a bit of coding. The other thing that is happening is like I said in my earlier remark, the gap between what people expect from the technology and what the technology can do, the gap between what they think they understand of the technology and what the technology can do has increased vastly. Now when you open your car bonnet, you really do not know what's happening inside. So the designers actually have to help the technology and the engineers so that the product can be made more usable and friendly. It means much more harder work on the coding side so that you reduce the load of trying to sort of what the end consumer is supposed to do. And my opinion is that technology is getting so complex that you cannot have both the hatch at the same time. Okay, what about you, Jeff? No, definitely I think a certain degree of understanding the process is absolutely critical for the engineer. They may not really need to know the nitty gritties of how to code, configure, and things like that. But what we've seen, for example, the biggest problem what we had when we were building a commodity trading platform was not how the screens would look, but frankly how the user was looking at naming a port. You know, the port name was called Vladivostok, but in Russian it starts with a W and with English it starts with a V. The bigger problems we had from the design elements were things like that, because the designer did not get into the mindset of what, who they were designing it for. But I agree, we don't really need to get down to the nitty gritties of the code, but definitely a very, very strong association with the tech team and understand what they're trying to solve will really help in bringing out a overall better experience to the end customer. That's where it's. What to add? I'm just saying that understanding has to be both ways. So even now, after so many years, I am half the time evangelizing and training or educating my customers and that, in terms of what is design. So design is not aesthetics. Design is not showing how the colors would work. The fact that a certain thing has to be worked in a certain way is where design really comes in, because that's what the solution creating is happening. And because designers are not constrained by the technology difficulties that are up there behind it, they can really imagine a solution that is really the ideal solution. And then we can figure out how to really get to that and what is possible in stage one and stage five. So I feel designers can actually think of a complete solution, and partly also they have to keep, but I agree with you, they need to understand at least what's happening behind the scenes. They cannot be completely oblivious to that. I'm probably more on this side of the stage than that side of the stage. Yeah, fair enough, fair enough. I mean, I wouldn't trust an architect who had never applied a nail to a board, right? Some familiarity with the medium is critical to knowing what it can do so that you don't paint a picture that is absolutely unattainable. At IBM Design, the designers end up acting as facilitators between business and user advocacy, which we do, and development. And knowing just a bit of code, not how to launch an enterprise application, but just a bit of code and the vocabulary and the concerns of developers means that that conversation is easier, means that that facilitation is possible. So I would not advise designers to become coders, but yes, get familiar with the medium. Yeah, they need to know what's happening. Great. So let me ask you this question basically. The world is moving towards automation, right? So there is a lot of buzz in the industry, like a lot of jobs get replaced. So is it same for the designers too? Do you think designers' jobs get replaced by AI and robots in the future? Jya? I think the role of the designer becomes all the more critical today than ever before, because today we are moving more and more into a world where algorithms are dictating things about how you would buy things to where you would be getting your cab to a whole lot more. But if we don't humanize these elements properly and keep the customer in the center of what you're trying to do, because at one point I remember there was a study where if your battery of your phone was dying to about 1% or 2%, and at that point where Uber was applying a surcharge, they used to check that element that your battery was running out of 2%, and automatically placed a surcharge because there was no way you could go back and ask for another part. Now if you keep allowing algorithms to find the most optimal one, they will do what you ask it to do. If you ask it to bring it more profitability, that is what the algorithms will go out to design. And today, as designers, we have a lot more bigger responsibility because you need to humanize this whole thing. Is it ultimately only about increasing the revenue for you? Or is there a more larger impact that we as an enterprise should do? Because you can even help that person out with that lesser battery without applying that surcharge because you don't really have to do that. That's where I see the role of designers becoming more pertinent today than ever. And it's not about the worry about, will they take away jobs? We need to completely turn the question around to see, what are the additional elements? What are we, who are we designing this for? Is more relevant and that's my take on this. But yes, I totally agree with him. And see, I'll give you an example of what I think is going to happen, especially for UX or designers, careers going forward or what they're expected to do. The core humanity of understanding humans, understanding the subtleties, is something that AI will need to learn from people like us who tell them that this is what people expect and hence you have to repeat that. And I'll give you an example which is almost impossible for an AI to understand right away. So how many of you all, for example, listen to music while sleeping? Some of you, right? Have you all noticed that when you turn off the lights, the music seems louder and clearer? It's a pure perception of the human person that suddenly the sound seems better because the lights are off. There is no way an AI can understand that. And there are many, many, many such small, small perceptible nuances of humans that makes us humans. And it's only us designers going back to the core ethnography and core understanding of people is where we'll be able to understand it, quantify it, maybe make it into a platform and translate it so that some of the AI systems can then start appearing more and more human. So it's going to be our job to make this AI system more and more human by being core to understanding what people are. Let me look at it from the point of automation because again, like I said before, automation is inevitable. It's already happening. And something a lot of you would have done or would have seen done in your world which is redlining a design, right? How much time and effort has gone into doing something that probably every single designer hates doing. But everybody had to do it. Now there are tools which have totally automated that. So you don't need to really spend the precious time of a designer wasting time doing redlining and handing it off to be put into production. Just imagine that at significant additional levels where it's just inevitable that more and more parts of things that a computer can easily do whether with AI or other deep learning capabilities is secondary but the key is automation is gonna just move up the chain till how long and how much will be taken over I think is secondary. All I will say is for this audience just keep in mind that things that can be automated will be automated, it's just a matter of time. So just always move up the chain, re-skill yourself and make sure that you can think about how to step ahead of that game. Chris? I'm gonna tell a scary story. I worked with a client who had developed a system that broke online advertisements down to their atomic elements and then built what we would call a narrow AI nowadays such that it simply did A-B testing across every single place and every person that it delivered that ad to. So it would try a picture of a puppy with Helvetica and the color red with a mother of the age of 35 in Des Moines and see if she clicked on the ad. It would try the color blue and times with a financial advisor in New York City and see if he clicked on that ad. And it would slowly get better and better as following what the results were, right? Which in this case was simply clicking on the ad. So over time, the AI was doing the design of these online ads. Now the kicker, that was 10 years ago. I think as a designer your job is, well your future will partially depend on what it is you sell. If you sell that you are pixel pushing, your job is not long for this world. If you are a strategist, if you are a user advocate and a systems thinker, you're fine for the three to five years that we've been talking about. Yeah, so how you sell yourself and what you do, what you think you do is gonna be really important. So Narendra, a question to you. So what is one session you can give to the UX India audience to stay relevant and transform their skills? I sort of partly answered that. What I feel is happening with lots and lots of technology including other products that are getting easier and easier to use, that people tend to use products and create beautiful things and feel that that is the design. And they are missing the core thinking and the core skills, observation of empathy, of deep thinking that was done much more earlier when these tools are not that easy because you tended to sort of finalize your design in your head before you start turning on your computer. Now it is like you're designing on the computer. This thing of being able to be true to yourself in terms of how you think and how you design and how you are able to relate to and observe things around all of that is something that will really help you in the future because those are the ones that can be applied to any new tool that will keep coming. I'm sure he's working on the next version which will be easier and faster and will do a half a job anyway. So this thing of knowing that as a designer you're able to think creatively, able to think holistically. If you're able to sharpen that and like he said, to be able to present it in your own self and for the world in terms of how you are, that will really help you. I think it's all about storytelling. Whatever technology comes, whether it is AI or something else, your customers are always gonna be humans and they want to be treated like human beings. So I don't think that will ever go away and that is what this group has to look at. You are dealing with real customers, real people. As long as we provide a very personalized solution that treats your end users as people, I think things are gonna be fine. Chris? At IBM Design we talk a lot about the loop which is about making and testing and reflecting and honestly I would give that as advice to individuals as well. To participate in communities of practice to make whether that is storytelling through videos or speculative designs or whether that's actually picking up a blue mix account and trying out one of the 15 Watson APIs but in making is where you'll learn in participating in communities of practice is where you'll get feedback and of course making a habit of just coming to conferences and reading every single day to be familiar with what's in the zeitgeist. Yeah, I think that is true. In many cases we are told when you're designing something get into someone's shoes but one thing people don't tell us is if you have to truly get into someone's shoes you need to leave your shoes out first because we try to get into someone's shoes with our shoes on and that is the way we try to empathize with people. If you truly want to build a product you really need to get into someone else's shoes and build it for them. For that you also need to keep a tab on what are the things that are coming up in the market because that can, there is no limit to how free you could be when you're designing something but you also need to know what is available out there so keep yourself abreast of what are the latest things that are happening but truly if you need to empathize leave your shoes before you get into someone else's. Cool, great. I think like it also, I have learned a lot of stuff with the great panel here. So as designers, fellow designers we have to remember that, you know, so emerging technologies keep emerging all the time, right? So we should be little frontier and actually start learning technologies. Designers, as panelists said we don't need to code as a designers do but we should understand what's coming up so that like you can understand in terms of what technology offers and what is the experience we can create, right? Or design fundamentals are still same so whatever technology is coming we are building on the top of it or looking at the empathy perspective from the experience perspective and end of the day design is all about problem solving so we are, there are tons of problems to solve and we are all, we are solving and technology actually helping us to take the momentum up, right? So, and because there's a lot of disruption happening in the industry and we should proactively start learning so as they said, keep reading a lot of stuff, go to conferences and maybe like, you know, talk to developers like, you know if you keep talking to developers you will understand the terminologies or like the problems what they are facing and we can provide and design a better solution from a user perspective and I hope you all learned along with me and I would like to thank you all the panelists for, give a big round of applause for all these great panelists. Thank you so much, sir.