 Start by setting some context. Why did I even want to talk about something like this? Because UX has been so much about digital. I want to know what happens if it's not digital. What else can UX do? So I started with some simple questions. Let's see if I can get this working. Okay, so just bear with me for the first few slides. It's a little bit of history, then it gets interesting. The history is only so that I can set context as to why I really think UX is not about digital alone. And it can be more than that. So you guys familiar with human factors and ergonomics? So the history of UX really comes from human factors and ergonomics. And this has been there as old as the picture probably 5th century. It's been always there. Designers have always been there. We've always been trying to make things better. But what really happened with the UX world was it evolved much faster. It took us several thousand generations to actually get designed to a certain point. But UX is like what 10 years old, 15 years old, and we seem to have progressed much faster in the UX world. So that led to the question that can this rapid evolution and rapid learning be taken back and applied to some of the other stuff that we can solve if you could use so. So this was the question. Why did UX really evolve that fast? Because other streams of design haven't done so. Smartphones, yes, pretty much yes. But during this conference, you would have heard people talk about how we are still filled with problems, right? You know the doors, the cars, everything is filled with design challenges. How come those haven't been solved faster? And why is that the case? I have a theory and you guys can sort of pitch in if the theory is sticks. In the real world, if there was inconvenient design, people could do something about it. They could just walk around it. There was something that people could do if the design was really inconvenient. In the software world, unfortunately, you really can't work around this, can you? If someone gives you a screen like this, how do you work around it? You turn off your computer. What's the alternative? You really can't get anything done. So it was really frustrating. How do you actually work? Look at this. This is real. We all have gone through this, right? Trying to create a password and then they'll not tell you what the rules are till you keep making mistakes and finally you'll say, oh my god. This by the way is, I don't know if you can read this, but the point number ten says the previous eight passwords cannot be used. And this is real. It's got all sorts of rules. It's an achievement if you can actually make a password. Let alone remember it. How do you work around it? It's simply not possible. So my point is that UX was not optional. It was desperately required. Software was getting so complicated that if it wasn't for UX, we wouldn't be able to do it. I don't know how many of you remember. There used to be manuals. You would get a software, it will come with a manual. You would need to first read the manual and then start working on the software. Imagine if that was the case, how would we build more complicated software? It was already bad enough. So UX had to come in and it had to evolve very, very rapidly to make it even meaningful for us to use devices. So digital needed UX to come in and that's my theory as to why it really moved that fast. What does that mean? It really means that we developed tools, we developed technology, we developed a lot of stuff really fast. We have access to amazing technology in the UX world. We are able to go out there and create rapid prototypes. We are able to use survey monkeys, send forms. All of these things didn't really happen in other fields of design. UX in that sense is fairly unique. It developed a lot because of technology. And because it was in software, you could do something, throw it away, restart, iteration was much faster. So this led to a lot of processes. You guys have heard over the last two days all sorts of processes that are so common with UX today. Whether it is creating personas, whether it is going through iterative prototyping, interaction design, all of these happen in 10 years. So here's the question. Can we use all this? Can we use all this and go solve some real world problems? These are all problems. That plug point is supposed to have six sockets, but the guy who designed the plug didn't think about that, right? So he made it that way. So you can only put three in there. I mean look around you, the world is full of problems. There's no shortage of design related problems. This is the one slide that I wanted to leave UX designers here with, that maybe we are really looking at an opportunity, which is really tiny. And there's a huge opportunity for the skills that we have developed if we choose to apply it a little differently. And why do I believe so? Because I did this and the rest of my presentation is about an actual case study of how we actually made this happen in a very different context. This is fairly easy to understand. Software is already sort of, the lines are already blurring, right? This is the inside of a Tesla. Where does the software UX end and where does the cars UX begin? It's almost impossible to tell. The lines have already blurred, but this is still technology. In the technology world these lines are starting to blur. All right. So we decided to take this challenge to a very different world. This sofa could have been designed in the 40s, the 30s, the 90s, 2016 is when it was designed by the way, could have been done anytime. Not much has changed. It's been like this for a very, very long time. Just some context. Any of you heard of this company for Lenco? Yes, some of you heard of it. It's a furniture rental company. The company was renting out furniture. I got involved with this company last year. The company was around from 2012 onwards. They were renting furniture. They just took furniture and they would give it to people. People would rent furniture because I don't know how long I'm in the city. It just makes sense for me to take this and then I'll figure out later. I'll buy furniture when I have to, all of that. And then on one drunk at night on a Goa beach, the investor in this company was also drunk next to me. And he was asking me about, hey, would you like to take a look at this company that we invested in and they need some UX. So I went in there, took a look at the UX, we built the website, we built the app. And then I got fascinated to say, hey, but why does furniture look like this? This is what happens when you take a UX guy and put him somewhere that doesn't belong. And then he's like, okay, what exactly is happening here? Why is this furniture like this? So we started asking these questions and it led to a couple of challenges that we took on. One, we were trying to change a very deeply entrenched behavior. Buying furniture, of course, 5,000 years we've been buying furniture. Getting people to rent, not just for those folks who are temporarily living in a city, but as a way of life. The vision of the company was never own furniture. It doesn't matter who you are, depreciating asset, you buy it by the time you sell it, you lose 80% value, all of these things. Extremely difficult entrenched behavior. I added to that by saying, let's really create furniture using the UX process. My theory, if it's so contextual, you don't care whether it's rent or buy. You really want that furniture. It goes out of the equation whether it's about rental or not. But using the rental model, we could do much more. All right, so in true UX fashion, we started with the users. By the way, this doesn't happen in the furniture world. They don't start from the user. Furniture designers start from very different spaces. They start from form. They start from various design ethos. There are various, I mean everything other than the consumer. So we started with this. And we started talking to one, we didn't go and ask them what kind of furniture do you want. We said, how do you spend time at home? And it was startling. We decided to speak to young urban aspirers. These are folks who live in urban India, who have money, but furniture is not very high on their priority list. They love to socialize. We discovered a bunch of things about these users. And this is what the first of the products that I'm going to talk about happen. When we spoke to people about the living room, we discovered that people no longer use furniture the way they used to when the furniture was originally designed. Maybe your parents, your grandparents. It was very formal. People would come home. We would sit across each other. We would sip some tea and we would talk and they would go back home. We don't do that anymore. Everyone we spoke to said, hey, we don't even drink tea. We're drinking beer. We are actually smoking weed. We are playing games. We've got laptop computers. We're no longer doing that stuff. But the furniture was designed for that. So why didn't you change? Oh, we didn't know that there was something else. We didn't know what we could do about it. So why did you buy a sofa? Because that's what everyone bought. It's so entrenched that you don't even think about it. You don't even think about the space you are in. That isn't even relevant to how you are. You simply furnish it the way some magazine told you to or someone else said that this is how a home should be. And this was startling. And to me that was a huge opportunity. Right? Because people were really behaving in a very different fashion. So we said, okay, so what's the solution to this? Let's innovate from the beginning. Let's not even look at it and say, let's make a better sofa. Let's see what can we make? All of these things. We then spoke to people. We made our mistakes very early. We said, hey, how about this? How about that? We started talking about all of these things. We rendered our concepts. I mean, I'm just talking about all this because this is UX. This is really what we do in UX, but we started doing it in real world. The only difference was we would do it on the streets. We would go talk to people in the streets and say, what do you guys think about this concept? What do you guys think about that concept? We would render it. We would show it to them. People would show us away on some of the malls. Others would talk to us. All sorts of stuff happened. We discovered new use cases. People come home and they don't go back home to their house. They stay over. They sleep here. That's very common because people can't really go back drunk because they're not drinking tea anymore. They're drinking alcohol. They can't go home. They stay over. People party at home because it's really expensive to go party outside. You can go once in a week, but if you go outside and drink every day, you're going to go broke. So people love to socialize and party and have friends over. All of these things led to a lot of use cases. And this was a product that came out of it. This is a product called Bounds. This was a result of all of that journey. Let me tell you what this product is. It's got four removable cushions. Each of them is eight inches thick. It was designed to allow people to sleep comfortably all night long. It's got multiple densities of foam built into it. It's more comfortable than any mattress that you would sleep on. It's large enough for about seven people to sit in a circle and they can sort of socialize. Those boxes that you see, they are wire managers. The circle that you see in the corner allows you to put a multi-plug in there and the circles on top allow you to take the wire out and charge your devices. The top of these things come off and you can actually use them as table tops. And the circle is exactly the size of a beer mug. You can actually put it in there. So all of these things were really taken user insights and building a physical product. And as we did this, we kept the journey consistent. We kept going back to consumers all the time. These were the sort of renders that we did and showed consumers and said, hey, what do you guys think about this? Would you like to live like this? And people kept saying, yeah, of course, this is really how I want to live. I don't really want to have a formal room. This room looks better to me than my parents' or grandparents' room. So here's the proof of the pudding. This is what happened. And this really is what led me to say that, hey, there's something there. It's not just me talking. One, we did 100-plus interviews with real users. We called the person our floor sleepers because these people were very comfortable without furniture. And we just used that term because they were comfortable to put a mattress on the floor and sleep. Not because they didn't have money. They would spend money on an iPhone. They would have a KTM-Due bike. They would go traveling. They would do all of that. But furniture simply wasn't in the priority. They had the money, right? And that's why we called them floor sleepers. It's a loving term. It's not derogatory at all. And for them, this was perfect. The second circle, which says one month from start to production-ready prototype. This may not mean much, but in the furniture world, this is quite fast because normally furniture takes much longer. It could take up to six months. And this was really fast. In the first six days, we sold out everything that we could manufacture. And then today, with less than a year, we have 900 homes which have this product. We discovered use cases that we never knew. Parents of kids said that this is fantastic. My kids can bounce on this. And they don't get hurt if they fall off it. They can put all the toys into it. So all of these things really led us to believe that it is possible to create a user-centric journey in furniture and it will actually succeed. Again, a friend's reference. I just want to sort of talk about one more product, which is we discovered that men love recliners. Every man we spoke to wanted a recliner in his house. And if he had a girlfriend or a wife, she didn't. They really said, oh my God, that's ugly. This is so huge. It breaks the decor. I can't put it against a wall because it needs to recline. And an eternal fight. I said, wow, brilliant use case. We have a guy who wants it and a woman who won't let him have it. How can we solve for this? So we discovered that women love something called a wing chair. Maybe some women here know what it is. Most men don't know what the hell that is. It's a large chair. And men don't get it. They don't know why it's in the house. But women love it. So we said, hey, can we morph these two products together and create something? This was a product we created. This is actually a video that I want to leave you guys with. Maybe you need to play it from there. Cool. So that was a product that came out of that insight, right? So in its full state, this is like poor photographs. I clicked on my phone. But in its folded state, it doesn't look like a recliner at all. It has no mechanism, nothing. It looks like a chair. And in its reclined state, it has all the comfort. In fact, it's more comfortable than a recliner can be. Solving this, we'll see how the product does. It launched a week ago, so far it's already sold out. So by creating to a user insight, we seem to automatically be able to sell it. No marketing, nothing much. It just goes on the website and sort of flies off. And you can't find something like this. It's not possible to get it anywhere else in the market because everything else looks so different. So it automatically becomes easier to sell as well. So the business context gets automatically established. Towards the end of what I really wanted to say, so the takeaways, we built a truly cross-functional team. We built UX designers, furniture designers, photographers, put them all into one room, and then you can create something like this. We managed to evangelize it to the business. The business evangelizes to investors. I don't know if you guys know this, we raised 200 crores on the back or something like this. That's a decent amount of money for a startup. It allows us a great runway to actually go create more such products. Why does these things work? Because it's still about empathy. One skill that I always thought UX designers needed was empathy. And it's exactly the same thing for this. If you can empathize with what a consumer needs, it doesn't matter whether it is in digital world or whether it's in the non-digital world. It works. This is the tie-in that makes both of these things work. These are the kind of products we're creating. Gaming tables, we're creating sleep pods, we're creating products that, this one is a digital device built into your bed. A direction that has not been taken in furniture for a long time. And we can only do it because of UX. If designers go into other areas and create magic, I think they can. Thank you, folks. Thanks, Kranti. If you guys have any questions. Any questions? So the chair was very interesting. And did you ever have a use case for the chair to be used by both men and women at the same time? Sorry, what? I didn't catch the question. Was it a use case for both husband and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend to use that chair at the same time? Ah, okay. The use case, I suppose, will evolve. I don't want to dwell too deep into that particular use case. No, but yeah. People really did tell us that they want a chair that both of them can fall in love with. And we're hoping that they can achieve that with this. Pollution example. But I think naming it as UX is, I think it's not right because this product design process is quite conventional, even 20 years before the process was same. Like you start with the user study, you co-create with the users. So I don't know why it was named as, like you had taken the process from UX. So I just want your views. And I think if it was UX, I don't know if like maybe you're not shown the details of the product, but if it was real UX, I think like some details like how, when you open those, the holes you are shown. So what kind of sound it makes and how the texture feels or how do you wash it. Like those kind of details, when you work out, I think that would be a real user experience. But now what I see on the slide is more of a conventional product design process. Great question. Yes, you're right that it's for the lack of time that I haven't gone into those details. But let me, now that you asked me the question, let me answer some of them. One of the other products, which is actually right behind this slide, this table that you see, it's a gaming table. The insight was that we no longer sit and eat meals on a dining table the way we used to. So we created something like this. One surface is a dining table, the other surface is a gaming table. Now the UX behind it is this. Because it's a rental model, you not just get the furniture, but it's sort of a lifeline to getting games as well. We ship a game every month to you. You can play different games. There are game designers who are involved in sort of sending these games to you. Same thing with the product bounce as well. It's not just the product alone. It's the service that is wrapped around it. Which means that it comes with a cleaning service. You get different bed sheets. You get a twister that you can play on. You can get a wireless poof with a speaker built into it. And it comes back to us. The product comes back at the end of the cycle, gets upgraded and goes back. There's a lot more to the journey. I haven't covered all of those details here. Why is it UX? Because we used all that rapid evolution that UX brought into this. We actually used technology significantly more than the conventional design process. Our personas were really built on the way the UX personas are built. We went really, really deep into those personas. That's why I started by saying that UX didn't fall from the sky. UX itself emerged from a much more older HF&E sort of a process. So yes, there are parallels, but what I was pointing out was the evolution that UX made on top of that can be taken back and applied. Like the technology especially, our surveys were all digital. Mapping was digital. We went through a process that was very digital. And that's what allowed us to sort of speeden up the time. It's not fundamentally different, but it allows you to optimize much better. Hello. So I have a question. Like the great products that you have been working on. So I think a workaholic in cities like Mumbai or Bangalore, and I'm talking of a bachelor who doesn't, who cannot afford a good house and something, or maybe a freelancer. So don't you think a product which is a bed and a work table at the same time makes sense? Absolutely. We have more use cases than we can imagine. I only have that many furniture designers and only that much products that I can build at a time. But yes, this is one amongst use cases. The moment you open that sort of a context and say, hey, what can I build? There is no limit. We have enough ideas for the next 100 products that we can build. It's a matter of prioritizing and saying, what shall we build first? The moment you apply that lens, it simply opens up. Now that my furniture designers have been exposed to the way UX designers think, they can't now walk past a room and not think of solutions like this. Now they're always asking, hey, why can't this be there? Previously they were never asking those questions. They were really asking very different sort of questions. The moment they're able to wear the user shoes and say, hey, why doesn't this exist? People now are not looking at a furniture but a space. To enter your house, there is a shoe rack. But what else can the shoe rack do? It can do so much more. The moment you say it's not a shoe rack. And to the concept of renting furniture. And I guess a lot of the current generation would definitely relate to it. But my question is, did you focus on only that section or that age group of people as a target persona or did you look at, let's say, a traditional family who've been living there in that city for a couple of years because a nomadic person would definitely rent furniture. But in terms of a target persona, did you look at other age groups or different stratas of the society as well? Great question again. So the company's vision that would get everybody eventually. We started with this persona because it's easier to sort of convince that persona. But our product portfolio also includes everything from conventional beds to sofas to all sorts of products. To answer more specifically to your question, we mapped them all. We mapped. We have four target groups. In fact, we have something called a home buff who somebody who's really interested in their home, they're 35 plus. They really love living in that house. Their use case is very different. We discovered that women love to get compliments for the home they have done up. But those compliments dry out. After you've done up a beautiful house, you yourself fall in love with it every time you walk in. But after a few weeks, you yourself don't notice that beautiful table. It becomes part of furniture, literally, right? Your friends have all seen your house. You've got all the compliments you've got. Now what do you do? Most women move things around. They move this piece from here, that piece from there. Given a choice, they would love to redo the house, but it's too expensive. They can't really do it. So for them, the use case really was, why would you be with the same couch? Look at the clothes you're wearing. You wouldn't have worn this five years ago. You probably won't wear similar clothes five years from now. You evolve as a person. Why get stuck with the same piece of furniture even if you're not moving anywhere? Why not try different stuff? Have a red couch, have a blue one, have a recliner one day. So it basically frees you to have the home that you really want. And the pricing model allows us to actually make it cheaper than really buying. So that's why the rental is so important to this. So yeah, each age group has a very different reason to do so, but we map them all.