 Namaste, my name is Neha and I'm from Bombay. It's a pleasure to be representing women in design since morning and what I'm going to be talking pretty much is my journey from being a designer to an entrepreneur. When I started TechWade, I'm a co-founder of a UX company which is called TechWade. When I started TechWade, I was a passionate designer. I wanted to change the world and innovate and design delightful experiences, you know, like any other designer. And when I started selling the designs is when the change started happening. So the guys you're selling to are not designers. They are project managers and they're MBAs and they're vice presidents. They see the whole world very differently from the way you do. And that's some of the learnings that I thought I could share over the last eight years that I've had. What perspectives have changed from a designer to a salesperson to a relationship manager, maybe? I don't call myself a designer anymore. So, and that's what is going to be there in some of the slides. The first learning that I had, it's not about you and me, it's about us. So, you know, when I used to design and used to say that, you know, I don't like this or why don't you change it to this, my first reaction was very defensive because it was my design, I loved it, you know? So, it was about them and me. And I had to change this very consciously to about us. It is about them and me coming together to create something. So what we're together doing is creating a better journey or a better product. It doesn't matter if the idea comes from them or it comes from me, because the end result is that it's going to be a usable product. So that was one of my biggest learnings that please don't get lost into, you know, the client said this versus the client said that. It doesn't matter what they say, let's just look at it very objectively, get all the whoever saying whatever together and then find an objective answer to it. Convince the hippo, everybody else will follow. Now who's the hippo? That's an internal parlance that we have. So hippo actually stands for highest paid person's opinion. So you know, your clients that you're dealing with recognize the hippo there. And he's usually the guy who's getting paid the highest. And his opinion is what matters the most. So once you've recognized the hippo and convinced him, everything else will follow. So if you build a prototype, give it to him to test it first. And a lot of people, you know, a lot of designers may stand up and say, how does it matter? You know, why should we listen to the vice president of an organization? And that's exactly what you need to come out of. You know, that's exactly what you need to turn around. Your happy clients are your salesmen. Remember that, keep them happy. You're not in the business of design when you're running a design agency. You're in the business of hospitality. You know, you need customer service. Exactly the way we do user experience, there's something called client experience. If they're happy, they'll keep coming back to you. Exactly what we tell our clients that, you know, if your users are happy, they're going to come back to you. So that's what we put to practice. Any person that I'm training when they get into our organization, the first session that they taught is client interaction, client relationship, client experience. If your client experience is good, your business is going to go. Have a process but don't get stuck. Everyone has a methodology and we get so stuck with our methodology. User research should happen before the wire frames. Wire frames should be, you know, followed by visual design. All these are great in theory but don't get so stuck to them. These are only frameworks that are made by people, academicians to follow, to understand, to probably get structured to this chaos of design. But that is not laid in stone. So never, never get stuck to your processes and your methodology. Be fluid, be flexible in the approach that you take on a project. Every project is different. Every client is different. Every user type is different. So how can your methodology stay the same, right? There are times, in fact, you'd be surprised. We do our user researches after the product is launched. It's not about being good or bad. I mean, we're not debating if this process is right or wrong but I'm just trying to say that your processes can be tweaked around to suit your customer's requirement and to suit timelines sometimes, you know. I don't want to go and say that, you know, I don't care about your timelines but I need to talk to your users. I need to be able to be flexible to work with. Your deliveries should be useful and usable. So we heard this from clients a lot, you know. When we used to design earlier, we used to say we'll give you PSDs or we'll give you an HTML or whatever the delivery is. Without really realizing what is their team's strength to take it forward, you know. So some of our clients, for example, came back and said that your competitors say they'll give us unique pages and you know, 10 unique pages. How will you work? I said, I don't understand this uniqueness of pages. I will give you whatever you want and whatever your team can take forward and deliver and we'll see the light of the day. So your deliveries shouldn't be kind of, you know, decided beforehand. You can't tell the client or at least we don't tell the client that we'll give you ABC. We understand the problem that the client has. What is his team like? What is the strength that he has to take that forward? And hence, what should my delivery be to him? You know, if I'm doing a user research and if I just give him the research and the findings, that may not be enough. Maybe he needs solutions for it because he doesn't have designers in house. Maybe he also needs an HTML. Maybe he needs integration support thereafter. So my deliveries cannot be tied to any process, to any client or to anything, in fact. So your deliveries, your processes, should all be flexible, should all be dynamic. Everything that I'm saying here is my experience may or may not hold true for you, but you know, it's worthwhile to just discuss what me as a person has gone through and what my learnings are. And if you disagree, maybe we can meet outside and discuss. UX should involve talking to users. You know, having said all that, having said no methodology, no process, no delivery, please ensure you talk to users because that is the premise of being a user experience designer, even if you do it, like I said, after the launch of the project. So that's one thing that we convince our clients. And 100% of our clients till date have got convinced that talking to users is important. How you talk to them is a different matter. It is a direct conversation you have or an indirect conversation you have. Or sometimes we just pick up the customer support data that they have, all the calls that have come to their customer care. We just pick that up to take a, assess those and understand what the users' pain areas are. But we ensure that users are involved in the process. Prioritize your design decisions and convey them clearly. You know, what does that mean? We've learned along the way that you know, you take a lot of decisions when you're designing. Some are detailed, some are conceptual, some are very high level. Prioritize what's important for you, you will not let go. And what's all right to let go? And let go of that. You know, we have stakeholder meetings where stakeholders will say, you know, I don't like this red color, maybe the pink color is what I want. Which is all right. How does it matter? Don't get so stuck with it. No, it's not, it's going to be my crimson red. Just let go of it. So you prioritize in your head. Because if you let go, they will let go of the things that they thought were important. Right? So prioritize in your head that the colors probably are not important, but the navigation is very important. Or you know, this screen is very important. So if you've got that priority right in your head, you will see that letting go gets much easier. Use low fidelity prototypes for buy-in. So this is something that's always worked for us. Before we get into any detail design, we do low fidelity prototypes. We give it to the client. We let them play around with it. We let them get a feel of what we're trying to say. Circulate it, get as much feedback internally as you want to. But a low fidelity prototype will help you in not doing a lot of rework at a later stage. Conversations are critical. Without conversations, you don't get anywhere. So whenever you have a client and a project, and when I say a client because I represent an organization which is into consultancy, I mean clients, but for you who's working in a product company, it could be your seniors. It could be your reporting managers. It could be anybody at a senior level. Conversations are very important. Where you sit and ideate and talk together about the product. So what happens is you're talking a different language. The tech team is talking a different language and the product team is talking in altogether different language. If you don't sit together for a cup of coffee, if you don't have a conversation, you'll never talk the same language. So never build yourself into silos of teams. There has to be somebody, and you can be that representative of your team who goes and talks to everybody, gets everybody's opinions and puts them all together in the product. Let data do the talking. I don't know how many of you have started looking at the data, but if you haven't, it's worthwhile. If you've got to convince somebody, data is the best way to convince somebody. If you go back to them and say, and the data can't always be in the form of an analytics, analytics data is great, but it could also be research data. So you could go back and say, research says that da, da, da, da, it helps in putting across the point that you're putting across. Even when you're designing, your design shouldn't be, I like this or I think this or I assume this. Let those assumptions and thoughts be outside. Let the data come in. Decide on numbers. Start looking at facts and numbers of what's happening. What are the users doing? What is my majority doing? And start designing for them. Because if you've designed for them, taking decisions and convincing people is going to be far easier. This is something that, and this is my last slide. Am I on time? Who's keeping the time? Yeah, okay. Everyone is equally passionate about the product. Remember that. Don't start thinking that it is my product. I own it. I am designing it. I know what is to be done. Everybody is equally passionate. We've got clients who research at night and tell me, I saw similar products like these and I think we should make something like this. So if I was an eight year, what I was eight years back, I would say, what the hell? Why is he sitting and researching? This is my job. Let me decide what I want. Or I would have said that, let me do what I am doing. But I think very differently today. He's equally passionate. He's got no fun in letting go of his night and researching what he wants to do. He's equally passionate about participating in the process of design. And I believe everybody is a designer. If you look around you, a vegetable vendor will design, he will decorate his shop in a different way. An auto rickshaw guy decorates it. Everybody is an inherent designer. We all get up in the morning and decide what color combination we're going to wear to office today. Immaterial or what field we're from. So if that's true, then you've got to let him participate in the process of design. And you'll see that once you let him participate, he'll let go of a lot of things that you're saying. Or he'll come in agreement to a lot of things you're saying. Thank you.