 I went first thing. Thank you everyone for coming here. I know that there was a bond. Thank you for all the volunteers who were able to come here much earlier and make this happen. So my talk today is about the journey beyond the screen. Now typically I like starting my talks with some food. I feel like it gets everybody's attention really well. So today we're going to talk about this. This is a dish that my roommate and I tried out very recently. It's called an apple rose. In fact, a shout out to the audience. How many of you here enjoy cooking? A quick round. Oh wow, so many people. Awesome. So I think for me, cooking, I've always enjoyed the process of cooking. I think the whole idea of how recipes come together, where the idea of taking something like that from this to that and in the case of this, the recipe itself had so much thought that had gone into it. The apples need to be the right amount of thickness and it has to be rolled to the right level so that it's not too tight where there's no air going in. But at the same time, it's not too loose where it opens up. And I want to talk about one more recipe that has the same amount of thought that had gone into it as well. This is a recipe called Riso Capio A Pepe. To talk about this recipe, let's go back a little bit. We're going to go back in Modena 2022 where there was a huge event that had happened that day. There were two magnitude six earthquakes that had hit and the epicenter was in Modena. And this, of course, for all of you who have been in earthquakes or similar disasters, you know what happens when this goes. There's a huge, huge loss. Everyone is scared. There's so much panic that's happening and if that wasn't enough, there was a whole new problem that Modena had. Modena produces almost half the amount of Parmesan cheese in this world and 360,000 barrels of those cheese was about to go to waste. This is not just a food waste problem anymore. This would have meant a huge economic problem for Modena. So why am I talking about this? Well, the next thing I want to talk about is this chef, Massimo. So Massimo is a three Michelin star chef. For this chef, it's not about just the food that he makes. It's about the power that the food has. He believes that as a cook, he's able to create recipes and put food together that creates memories and brings people together. And that is what he wanted to do now. He came to Modena and he created the dish. He created Risso Cappio Pepe. It was a recipe that very interestingly used up this cheese. And the idea that he had was he said, I'm going to tell the story of Modena and we're going to have a dinner all over the world where we're going to cook this dish and we're going to talk about the story and we're going to sell out all of the cheese so nobody has to lose their business. And that's what happened. 40,000 people across the whole world made this one dinner. In fact, Forbes talks about that even now. They said it was one of the biggest Italian dinners in history. Thanks to this one simple recipe, he was able to save the city of Modena. And this day is still celebrated each year. So Massimo talks about this dish as a recipe for as a social gesture. Because you see when Massimo was coming up with this recipe, he didn't just think about how would this food taste like. He thought about much bigger aspects. He was thinking of the economy of the country of Modena and how something as simple as this recipe could impact something like that. And as designers, I think we have a lot to take from this story because as designers, we too create smaller pieces of work which goes in and has the capability of impacting much bigger places. To make my point, I'm going to play a small clip from one of my favorite shows. And in fact, for anybody else who wants to read more about this, you can go watch the first episode of Chef's Table. Make a right, turn. Wait, wait, wait, wait, no, no, no, no. It means bear right up there. No, it said right. It said take a right. No, no, no, no, no, look. It means go up to the right, bear right over the bridge and hook up with three or seven. Maybe it's a shortcut, Dwight. It said go to the right. It can't mean that. There's a lake there. You can know where it is going. The machine knows. This is the lake. Stop yelling at me. The machine knows. Well, I know we probably didn't drive our cars into lakes, but you get what I'm trying to say. Technology and the products we design have embedded themselves into our lives. Right from when we wake up to when we go to sleep, we're constantly moving from one product to another. And this comes at a cost. While Google Maps has changed the way we navigate our cities, it also has done a lot more than that. In fact, I was planning to keep some stats and create some stats to give an idea of how much technology is impacting us, but realized I don't think I need to. I think we're all quite aware of the roles that technology and these products play in our lives. How many of you have played this game or have heard of this game? Right? I remember I played this game so much time until it was taken down. A game that was taken down because it was too addictive. In fact, the owner of this game received death threats from families saying that please take this game down because people are not able to stop playing it. But you can't really do that. We can't start taking things down that are not working. So there are some companies that are trying to do their bit of trying to solve for addiction and trying to solve for things like this. But I believe that design can do a lot more. In fact, this is a great example headspace where they're able to make a product, a simple few elements on a screen is able to combat such complicated issues like depression and anxiety. So design has the power to do a lot more. If you go back to Massimo's story, when Massimo was coming up with the dish of this recipe, he didn't just think about the immediate aspects. He didn't just think about things like the serving size, taste, the common things that most people think about when they make a recipe. He was able to zoom out and think about a lot bigger aspects. He thought about the economy of the place at that time, supporting the local cheese makers, the city's food waste. And if I were to reflect this with designers, I feel like there's a lot of resemblance here. As designers, we have immediate things that we look at, things like the interface, things like usability, accessibility, aesthetics. But we also have much bigger aspects that we don't always consider. Things like behaviors, what are the behaviors that our products are driving? What about branding? What about habits and policies? Even sustainability, that's a whole different topic. So as designers, how do we start thinking going from immediate aspects to start looking at more long-term aspects? A great analogy that I like to use to explain how we do this is the iceberg model. So the way the iceberg model works is you have parts of the iceberg that are visible and parts that are not. Similarly, even for us, we need to understand how do we go from the visible to the invisible? Let me relate this to design. So for us, when we talk about visible, we're talking about touch points. These are things that are tangible. The things that we're most probably designing. This could be a restaurant, homepage, a menu. These are things that you can touch, you can see. You design them. A lot of what we do falls under this category. Then you have experiences. These are the way that users navigate through multiple touch points to achieve the goal that they want. So for example, attending a conference is an experience. Another example is ordering food, dining out. All of these are examples or experiences that we go through. And then finally, we have systems. These are the overall ecosystems and the scenarios in which these touch points and journeys exist. These give structure and logic to why experiences and touch points work the way that they do. For example, in the case of ordering food, a system that you might want to look at is how the entire food supply works. Now, so the idea that you need to look at is the next time you're looking at touch points and you're designing these touch points, try to go deeper. Try to think about not just the parts that are visible. Try to go a little bit beyond that. Try to find the parts that are invisible. Try to find surface problems that you might not directly see. Let's talk a little bit more about how we could do this. This is a user journey map. How many of you have heard of this or used this in your work? A lot of us. So while we talk about user journeys, the way that it typically works is you have a user. You have all these actions. Each action is probably related to a specific touch point. Now, what if I told you that the user journeys we create are actually incomplete? Because while we call them user journeys, we most often just refer to them as we just call the user as the end user or the customer. But if I were to go into what could this user look like, there are actually a lot more. So of course, you have the end user. We are aware of this. So if I were to look at a scenario of ordering food, while it's me, the end user who's ordering food, there are a lot of people who influence my decision of doing so. For example, my roommate. There have been so many times where I'm just working, mining my own business, and my roommate would come out and he's ordering something from corner house. If you've not been to corner house, you should. And he's like, hey, should I add some more for you as well? And it's been really tempting. So also the delivery apps, there have been so many times where I get a pop-up saying 30% off on this ice cream that I know you like. So what I'm trying to say is there are immediate and direct stakeholders apart from the end user who influence these decisions. There are also indirect users, people like the farmer, people like the food suppliers, the stores, the people who are indirect stakeholders. And understanding this gives you a much better idea of what are the main decisions and behaviors that drive ordering food. This is called a stakeholder map. It helps you understand the relationship between different direct and indirect stakeholders. So the next time you're going and looking at mapping your user journeys, let's bring all of these people out. And in fact, let's map their journeys as well. Let's map their journeys along with the end user journeys and try to really understand what would this mean for what we are trying to design. Because in doing so, you'll be able to get a much better grasp of what you're trying to do. Now, let's look at some examples because that always helps bring some more idea on this. The first one is by Click Health. This is a health care ecosystem. What I really like about this is they didn't just stop at mapping the different users. They've also gone beyond that and started mapping their touch points. Doing this helped them understand what are the different common areas that are being used. Which user uses technology? Which users actually don't use technology? Things like brochures or certain policy documents are not digital. So it gives you a much better holistic understanding of what touch points each users have access to. Another great example is Organizing an Event. This is by UX Booth. What I really like about this part of it, what they've done is they've created a journey and they are mapping out the activities that happen inside the app and outside the app. And what that difference does is it was able to help them surface insights that things like the organizing and planning that happens around an event. Or sharing pictures or even collaboration and networking outside of the event. Doing these, making maps like this helps them really understand what are the opportunities we can look for that are not just limited to the app but even outside that. This is a great example by Anna Soto. For those of you who want to have some really cool surface design references, definitely look her work up. They look really, I mean one thing I really like about this is how visually aesthetic it is. It reminds us that our work, even though however complex doesn't have to look boring, it can look really interesting as well. This is a journey she designed of a family going through a Walt Disney park. And what I like is she's actually segregated the different people in the family and mapped each of their journeys separately. And doing that helped her understand and find opportunities for almost like micro experiences within these different areas for her to start putting them together. Here's another one where they've mapped the entire customer journey, all the touch points that have that come in at every step and all the different people and when they're involved. Doing this helps you understand how do your employees actually work together. Like how often does the legal team and design team actually have to work together and realizing that okay there are actually a lot of overlaps between the design and the legal team. So maybe we should start putting them together more often. This is another example from something that I was working on a few years back. This is in the realm of sustainable real estate. That's me on the top left or my reflection at least. I was really happy when I took this picture because while all of these people have been working in this company for over four or five years, they've never sat in the same room together. And it was really interesting to see all these people come together. That's the blueprint, a service blueprint that we had when we were showing all of them. And what we were trying to do is really make everybody understand where their role falls in. Another thing we did was to also create a really good illustration. A friend of mine called Gautam helped me create this illustration where we mapped out the same journey. But instead of looking at as a table, it now is an actual journey. And the funny thing is the caricatures are actually the people in the company. And it was really interesting to see some of these people walk by and look at their own caricature. I remember this one story of somebody from the construction team, somebody who's never really involved in customer experience discussions, now is seeing their own caricature and that somehow changes something. It makes them feel like they're part of it, right? Because everybody at the end of the day works together and that's how systems work. So let's recap. There's a lot of things that we went through. Now, I wanted to again put a lot of slides recapping everything, but I wanted to borrow another clip from a really famous movie that will help me recap what I just said. Perfect! Mind taking that sticky yours and drawing me a map up? Ow! Hey! To find it, you must look beyond what you see. What the heck is that supposed to mean? It means look beyond what you see beyond what I see. So if I had to give you just one takeaway from my talk, this would be it. It's to look beyond what you can see. Because if you can look beyond what is visible and try to find problems and areas that are underlying aspects of that visibility, if you're able to go much beyond your user and try to find out all the different people who are involved, you can really create experiences that start to matter a lot more. You're able to create a much bigger impact. And to end with Mahatma Gandhi's quote, where he said the difference between what we do and what we're capable of doing would suffice for most of the world's problems. And I truly believe that as designers, if you're able to look beyond and design much more impactful work, one screen at a time, I think we can leave this world a little better than we found it. Thank you.