 My name is Prachi Sakhandane. That's me as seen through the eyes of my seven-year-old, who also happens to have an eye for detail. Though I don't usually carry flowers in my hand. It's my laptop more often than not. But the other thing is, I can deal with the game through G.O.T. which she's doing. All right. So I'm working on. I also think I'm all these things, which I think are kind of essential for what we do. I had a product experience lecture thing. We were saying that a group are competent engineering group with product consultancy services. What my group does is it's actually a part of TCS's non-Indian initiative. We work on a lot of products for our customers, for our in-house people, a lot of technology products across domain, retail, healthcare, forecasting, so on and so forth. I also suffer from malconsolium phobia, which I made up. But essentially, it is fear of bad design. Mal is bad. Consolium is a design group. And because I'm a drama queen, I hope I can eradicate maldesign from the face of the earth. But even if I do it in my own whatever space, I think it's good. When I started putting my talk together, this whole track of women's design really flummoxed me because I didn't know what I was bringing in to the table different as a woman. So I got thinking. And then these were the things that came to me that as a woman, curiosity, collaboration, and empathy, our kind of, we are genetically predisposed to it. So we also know what's happening in our neighbor's house more than our husbands do, if the uncle who can amaze to us every morning doesn't turn up for two days, we go and check. Collaboration, yes, because it's nature and not true. But I think it's kind of a kind of way of survival for women, taking consensus, moving along, and empathy. So whether it's like our genes or whether that's the way we have evolved and survived in the society. But these have kind of taken an inherent in what we do. Now, I will need you to hold this thought for a bit when I jump into my next move slide, which is about design thinking. And I think we've been hearing a lot about design thinking over the last two days and now actually for quite some time. So design thinking is like an in thing, right? It's the designer's new black. What really is design thinking? So if you really look at the methodology, it does have curiosity, collaboration, and empathy at its core, which I think as women, it gives us an edge. If you look at the methodology itself, I guess a lot of you are familiar with the DT-Dump Diamond. So you start with a high level design brief. Then you typically go on to your discovery phase, which is a user research, which is diverging, where you are broadening the canvas. This converges in some insights. And then what you have is the problem statement. Once you've defined, once you've nailed down your problem statement, you're going ahead. Again, you're diverging in terms of trying out various solutions. No idea is wrong as long as it is executed cheaply in the form of prototypes, fast. And then you hopefully nail down your final solution. Now, if you look at all these, the entire life cycle, you see that empathy, collaboration, curiosity, they are inherent in the entire design diamond double-tiesed flow. So because DT is a structured methodology for finding answers to difficult questions or finding solutions to problems, how about we, as designers, apply it to ourselves? Why? Because we also get asked a lot of questions. So things like, we build the application, we fix the UI. Can you make it look good by tomorrow? Why do you need to talk to the user? I'll tell you the problems. Just fix the colors while you're asking so many questions. Why buy a frame? Just give me the HTMLs. And what do you mean this needs to be semi-designed? You just train them. Anyone who's supposed to not be exposed to these questions that really like to meet you, yeah? So these are the kinds of questions that I'm not talking like a new thing, right? Over and over, years and years, every conference, we kind of touch on this, ask versus, then find us a thread. So why not do our own user research? Why not get in our end user perspective? And I'll get in a little bit of context here. The context that I'm talking from, and because context is so important to what we do, right? So I'm talking about an experienced design team that works in a large, very conservative IT company, like Marguerite was telling me, build by engineers for ages. Who are our service consumers? Techleafs, project managers, developers. How can we do our user research? How can we understand? So what are their end points? So one of the things that we practice very religiously is through these CSAT surveys after every delivery. And it's not a matter of protocol or procedure or some process that we have to follow that someone has told us, but we realize that it's a diary. So every team member is very serious about getting these CSATs, finding out what worked well, what did, and taking those findings back into improving a process. Loon cause analysis, so you get a CSAT low within 90. You do a loon cause analysis, you follow them, you have a one-on-one. Sometimes, you just didn't have the right people or you didn't have people at all, which led to frustration. More often than not, a lot of this understandings which are one-on-one discussions, collaborative workshops, focus groups. So these are all the things that we apply for our users, our customers that have applied it to themselves. So we did this discovery phase. Now, once we found this problem statement. So we gathered all these insights, we took a step back, and again, I want you all to remember our context. A small design team in a large fairly conservative company. And this is the problem statement that we came up with. So design is a network of larger engineering than the world of IT companies. As long as it is considered a mysterious bamboo jungle. Design and designers will always be treated as others, okay? And you know, because it will continue to be an afterwards of that situation, at the end, we are losing out. We are losing out on making good products, okay? Because every designer, I'm sure, every designer worth his or her salt, wants to, at the end of the day, do a good work and go home. So then, how can we bring in more transparency, structure and openness, and create a symbiotic relationship with the larger IT community? And that is what the next part of my talk talks about. So this is probably based on our experience, our learning, which I thought I will share with you. So, drawings on our experiences, in-ports discussions, we came up with a series of possible solutions. These are in the perpetual prototype scenes. So, they will have to keep evolving, they have to keep changing, people change, mindsets change, cultures change. So, I think this is a beautiful word, perpetual prototype. We've been prototyping these solutions. I'm not gonna go into how we prototype, but I'm gonna talk about what has worked. So the tie acronym has not evolved. I'll just, you know, this entire exercise that we've been doing for almost three and a half, four years now. Transparency, involvement and evolution. So let's look at this one by one. How do we do more transparency? Methodology, quality and metric. If we talk about methodology, okay, what do we mean by methodology? We all use user-centered design, right? So, what more do I get in, you know? How can we look at transparency in user-centered design? But if you look at this overall process of the integration with the software and the movement life cycle, then you will find that there are a lot of interesting gaps which can actually be overcome through a little bit of design thinking. Does everybody work with effort estimation templates? Yeah? All right. So, okay, this is how it happens in my organization. We get, like, a design problem. My team works on the effort estimation. By the time we work and we give, you know, the effort back, we realize that the project plan is already gone. And, you know, they have estimated something. You know, often that something is like one sort of what you'll actually need. How about then, empowering the project managers to estimate? So, we have data. We have work parts. We know that, you know, if this is the size of the project, then this is tentative. The effort that is going to be needed for estimations. Why not empower them? You know, with these numbers, with this data. So, that's some decisions they can take themselves without having to come back to us every time. It's all about empowerment, right? As a lady's handshake side of mechanism. Again, you know, this is some obvious. But let me give you a scenario. Working on, you know, a design and we show it to our customers. They don't like it. It comes back. I creation one, I creation two, I creation 25. End of the day, everybody's frustrated. Timelines are delayed, right? Why not set up a proper process, proper mechanism upfront. There, you just make a formula that, okay, we work on two iterations, three iterations. Anything after that, it's taken us a year, right? I mean, they do follow the functional development all the time. Because we learn from these well-structured, you know, program process is an interesting one. It kind of, the job of this came from, again, my engineering colleagues in TCS. See, when you talk about functional development, there's a very strong traceability that exists, right? It's a requirement to design, to develop, and to test it. So, we were working on this, you know, initiator. And we were trying to create the same kind of traceability when it comes to user experience. How do you define user experience requirements? How do you put them in a system? I think it's a very interesting problem to solve. The second part of it, the quality. So, we've actually invested, you know, one of my attributes I've put in as an inventor. We've got patents on assessment models. How do you assess the quality of user experience? How do you assess the quality of visual design? We use a lot of application by second management tools. We have processes that come out of UX and, you know, put into a system. And, you know, they're analysts, every quarter. We want to see where the development teams are going wrong. How about bringing in UI testing for automation? So, you know, some part of UI testing, you're testing again and again and again. There are frameworks, there are tools like that, it came out of them, which could be leveraged to do UI testing. So, all of these are going to make your process more efficient, more robust, more transparent, bringing more credibility. Metric, I can't emphasize this in us, but I'm guilty of it. I'm sure many of y'all are. We do not define the metric upfront. Only now we've started, you know, formally phrasing the problem statement, but even then, why am I solving this problem? What is going to measure the success of my design? How many times do we deliberate, discuss, formalize it? The second part is involvement. So, here, partnership and collaboration and enablement starts in mentoring. See, it's all about collaboration, it's all about empowering, it's all about working together. So, you know, unless we empower others to do some of what we do, it's not going to be possible for us to move on to bigger things. We want to be strategists, right? How can we be strategists if we are only fighting in biofins? So, cultivating product experience champions, that is something that art of management has like really pushing down. Initially, even we were a bit, you know, resistant because how do you train an engineer to be a designer, but with sustained mentoring, with a lot of patience, you know, and I said, you know, every time and then in a project team, we will unearth someone who has an aptitude for design. We work with them, mentor them, as they become the product experience champions of their group. We work alongside product managers in Asia as print. Easier said than done, I know. But I think as designers, we need to have an equal stay in the kind of user stories that are going in. We need to have a say in what is going on in the MVP, right? Empowering non-designers, this is, I think, fairly obvious, but a thing here is digitizing design guidelines, you know, into plug-and-play components, but we'll just rely on people to follow what you're doing. Formal trainings, WBTs, that is web-based trainings, instructor-led sessions, mentoring. Finally, fostering an environment of trust, collaboration and kinship, because as women, as designers, we want to take everybody together and move forward. The last of the TIE acronym, Evolution, stay relevant and doing whatever it takes to design great experiences. And that means that we, as designers, also have to evolve beyond UX. Sustaining innovation for design thinking workshops. I mean, I've been saying that, yes, I will participate in strategy. My work is not only implementation. Taking in unusual assignments, right? So, like industry shopping, to assess customer experience, we've done that for Airtel, we went and we actually sat in the email centers and we sat in their stores and tried to figure out what was wrong, the industry shopping. Customer experience assessment. So nowadays, we just think that we use that heuristic evaluations and usability reviews. We tried to say that let us get on to the entire gamut just with your experience, touch points and give customer experience assessment to you. Service design, IVRS design, space design. See, everything is in your mind, right? You will decide where you will draw the boundaries. Also, very important investment in research and innovation. So these are some of the areas that my team is very aggressive in working on because we really believe that is the way forward. Finally, own the entire product experience. So stop calling us as user experience designers. We are experience designers. We own the entire experience. We are custodians of the experience. What I mean by entire product experience is this. I've run out of time. Thank you for your patience. I will leave you with this. Thank you. I thought you were talking about limiting the design iterations to, say, two iterations, three iterations. That's actually one of the main points for us as well. But coming from design thinking, a part of you which encourages you to think of more and more ideas. So it doesn't contradict with limiting to three iterations when on the other side we say that as a design thinker you should think of all the possibilities and so I'm kind of a bit confused there. So I think there's a time and place for everything. So when you're doing your user research or when you're doing your low fidelity prototype testing, that is actually when you will go on and on with your iterations. Perhaps you have nailed the idea. It's not about the visual design. Presenting the design options, you have to put a stop somewhere. Right? And that's where I think we need to take a stand. Later on in the processing, iterations have to come down. Most of the iterations we've seen happen at the visual design, you know, someone likes a blue, someone likes a pink, someone is happy with the fonts and not. So that's where, yes. I would like to just put a point there. Because the iterations are good, but at the early stage as you said, you know, but when you're actually putting it across to the customer, they don't give you a lot of options because you are an expert. If you're going there as an expert, you are an expert. You do all your research, you do all your iterations, you do 50 iterations. But when you're walking up to him, just put two, max, or three. However, don't give him 15 choices and he'll have a gap, make him take over to the other side. Any other questions? I can leave them one day. Yeah, I was just going to respond to that. That's all very well for the consulting, you know, industry. It doesn't work well when products are used by end users. The end users use it. You've given those two iterations and those two iterations. So to me, iterations are not just one cycle. They need to go multiple cycles. Your question. Iteration means, you know, releasing a product or coming back, being open that you didn't do that. That's continuous investment. And probably consultants don't get that opportunity because they move on to another project and things like. I see that. When you have your own product and understand that because it's always going to be, you know, you add your features and go back to the market because it's early to market and then you build over the period of years, you know. But when you are first designed, when you have something unique and you want to put it out there, my customer has given you, this is my requirement and give me, when you put 15 things in front of him to make him choices for the customer, it's not at all acceptable because then you are not taking it anywhere. But first you do your research, you go to the market, you do that iteration. That's what I'm saying. You do those 50 iterations you want to do. But when you're talking to, like the state code where the senior manager is coming, I want this product to be developed. Don't show him those all 51. Because there is no. Certainly, you've got to be sure about which, but maybe sometimes you may have more than. I mean, I've come to a situation which I totally understand too, too is a good benchmark. But maybe for A-B testing, there's people that go about so multiple. So, yeah, it's a good rubric, but it depends entirely on the situation. I agree. So, it's going to be series of MVPs, but I think we have to decide, maybe we want to limit an MVP and take things ahead, right? If it's a product design, you can't, there's no A-B testing, right? If you are doing something for the intervention of customers, then A-B testing doesn't make sense. Yeah, I mean, it can be A-B testing, it can be multiple. Maybe you missed out, maybe the customer missed out giving you a requirement. That is happens over and over again where the customers don't articulate their requirements clearly. So, even though you gave them things, maybe they didn't hit the ballpark. So, to have humbling effects, saying, okay, we didn't really get it right the first time, we didn't get the requirements there, but we're happy to redo. I mean, being open in that culture helps.