 Good morning, am I audible, awesome, I will just wait for people to settle in. As they do that, just for me to get a quick feel, how many of you think of yourselves as coders, awesomeness, how many of you think yourself as designers and how many of you think yourself as both, awesome, thank you. It's my pleasure and honor to be presenting the opening keynote at what I think is a fabulous event, and so I am taking the unconventional approach. I'm sort of sharing what I think or my perspective on what I believe user experience to be. So I might go into areas that are not normal, but at the end of it I think we will all find a connect, okay. So welcome to my world, a world which is filled of words, every, I mean I got into this world in 99 and it felt like half the business was in the business of making these words. Those days the fight was am I an information designer or should I call myself an information architect. Today the fight is more about should I call myself a UX guy or a UI guy or am I UX slash UI. I think it doesn't really matter. What really matters is user experience and everybody has their own meaning to user experience. First of all our clients right and somehow their understanding of user experience is quite different from how we see it because we look at it many a times with this whole fight of what is UX and what is UI. We go on about, no UX is more than UI because UX involves research, UX involves meeting people, doing a lot of things because UI is basically about the screen, right. Interestingly that's how the clients are only interested in because the only thing they keep coming back to us is can you put this color here, can you move this button, can you make the button larger. In the current company where I am consulting or rather serving as the head of their UX team, the recent fight is what should be the color of the button, it should be orange because people click orange and if it's blue they will not click it. Why? Because somewhere there are a couple of articles about why Amazon works and I said perhaps it's linked to the brand, the brand color is orange. Well so we all have our own meanings and why we go around it but I think the primary thing with UX, creating a user experience is to keep in mind this that we should actively, always, continuously keep learning from mistakes, from our mistakes, from past mistakes. So you know we can go back to Nielsen and say frames of art which is a joke in the community and so we have Davies and other things but or we can basically say okay here's a collection of topics on which there have been others who have studied written design, what can I learn from this, what is it that I can use to make my design better and my user's life easier and which comes to this is not user experience. Right? This is a meme, I was just looking around for UX. How many of you have done a search for UX memes? Do that. I mean if that's the one thing you take out of my session today, do that. It's fantastic, it'll take you down a rabbit hole. So that's how I found Rowan Atkinson, the being character, that's how I found this. Think about this. Today when we make a call, we are put on hold and we get to hear jazz, we get to hear flute, we get to hear oh the latest one, latest one, marketing messages. Have you tried calling ICICI or all these brands? All you get is like half the time you're thinking okay perhaps they do not want to answer my call because somebody in marketing says hey you know make them listen to this new jingle I have made. But let's spend a couple of minutes on this. Why do you think this came up? How many of you drive through Martholi? Okay, that was my life, I was at a safety for a few years. I remember when the Martholi bridge was sort of made, you would go under the bridge, actually first you would climb the bridge when you're going from this side, it's a japa side and you would take a right that caused a block. So they said let's redesign this. They asked us to go under the bridge and take the first right. People who have done this, okay that dates you. And then they said oh this is causing a block. So now we will push you slightly further, 200 meters, take a U turn, come back and go. Yes? How many of you has done that? Okay, that times you, see? That tells you when you started traveling to Martholi. And then it's now almost all the way to Isro and then a U turn and back, right? Why do you think this is happening? Because we are not going back to the crux of the matter. We are looking at every problem, every design problem with a fresh eye, but not looking at the history. We are not looking at what originally caused the problem, which is why we have now got to very recently, that you again climb the flyover, take left, take a U turn and go. Design is like this. This was people called a call center and you were put on hold and you heard that same train, train, train. And you said, this is boring. So what can I do? What can I do to solve my user's problem? Ah, let us play some music, because music is good. And then the problem originally was the wait time. The real problem of wait time was never solved. Wait time only kept increasing with more number of calls coming and now with marketing coming, you are even wondering, do they want to solve the wait time? So perhaps the one message that you can take back is every time you are trying to look at a UI, an interface. And in today's world, interfaces can be anything. They don't even need to be a screen. They don't need to be a button. They can be what we are doing right now, which is voice. It can be just gestures. And soon, I hope, just mind control, because I delve in that side of the world too. So if you think something, that should happen. And some of these advances in research in MIT and others are sort of delving into that area. We're not there yet. But can we, each time, look at something with a real, fresh mind and do our own bit of research? I'm not saying user research. I'm not saying get people in a lab. I mean, if you can do that, great. But how many of us actually get that opportunity? I mean, for me, with nearly two decades in the business, I have done actual in-lab research, perhaps 20% of the time. And for most of the time, my job was as a user researcher. And so that sort of is, I mean, even as much as last week, there was something. And I was like, yeah, we need to do research on this. And I was like, yeah, you can do research. But for now, can I have the screen? So yeah, you can do your research. That's OK. That's a tick on the Excel. You can do that. So that's where we are today. And most of what UI slash UX is, is not our problem. It's the problem of the industry. It's the hiring problem. I was speaking to a group of HR professionals yesterday. And that's exactly what I was speaking to some of them. And companies don't know what kind of a role to hire. And that is where the word UI slash UX comes in. If you really look at it as a practitioner, all of us, if we create any kind of interfaces, and I don't not just saying design, I mean coding, I mean anything, right? If you are involved with one small chunk of creating an interface, you are a user experience guy. Because if there's a very brilliant design and it comes and the coder decides, no, this is very, very, very difficult, right? And so we will just put a button here or a checkbox. That's it. Because that is the interface the user is finally going to interact with. So we are in this together. Every single one of us, which is why UX, as such, is a team. And what kind of a team? I forgot about this. These are the tools. Most of the times, we are so caught up in the kind of tools that we are using and we are creating the interfaces in that sense. It's like planning a dinner, giving only attention to the cutlery. And so, yeah, so we are trying to create this. But none of us can create this. Because that is literally every single element to it. We can actually come up with a most wonderful experience for a user or plan and design, a wonderful experience for our user. But let's imagine this to be a shop, where this wonderful shop that is inside, once they walk in, they have the most out-of-the-world experience and a great time. But in entering the shop, all that they're going through, including the traffic, which you have no control over, is going to impact their user experience. And yet, we claim, some of us included, that no, I own this small corner in this multiverse. Even when it's a dinner, even if it's a very, very well planned dinner and you've got the right ingredients and you've got everything in there, it's the company that matters, the kind of conversations you're having that matter. So clearly, there are a lot of things that even a restaurant cannot own, cannot control. It completely depends on what happened halfway through your session. So that sort of brings me to what I'm talking about, creating magic, because alongside my UX side, I have been a magician, I have been performing magic almost all my life. And I try to find what is a parallel, if at all, between magic and user experience. And I mean magic. I mean magic like Copperfield flying in the air, is when he did this, or Dynamo walking on water, this was bringing dreams live. And of course, beating Beth with Blaine. Blaine basically took one of the oldest effects in magic, which was catching a bullet. More than 20 magicians around the world have died performing this effect, because something that can go wrong will go wrong. And being Blaine, he wanted to still perform it in such a way that it has never ever been performed before. And yeah, he almost killed himself. But he did not, because before he actually did the televised final recording, he had gone through a process. A process in magic known as the holy grail. Magic has always existed. Magic goes back 6,000 years. The first of magic performances was in the Egyptian, you know, pyramid times, in the court of Pharaoh, sorry, Pharaoh Cheops, and performer Magician was Didi. And Didi performed one of the most phenomenal effects. He took a hen, chopped the head off, and there was a headless hen walking around, and then he put the head back, and then it was live and walking around still. Blaine, by the way, had recreated this recently on one of his televised episodes. But what is the holy grail? The holy grail is that you take anything and you look at it and go into the field of magic. Can I find a more purer way of doing this? And this is mostly the method, what's making it. For the people, for the users, it's the same experience. But internally, you're going, okay, but I am using this technology for this, I'm using this method for this. Can I improve on this? Can I make it real magic? Because as magicians, we know we don't have any powers. Sorry, if somebody here actually thought we had. But you are essentially trying to create a character that seemingly has powers. And every time you look at something that you do, you're going, but this is not perfect. Can I reinvent this? And this is what you do. You sort of learn something, you develop on it, you try it out, you practice it, you rehearse it, you perform it in front of the people, and then you observe yourself having done it and the cycle starts again. And the cycle keeps going and going, not just within one person, but through centuries. And the classic for that is this. Do you know what this is? It's written down there. Sawing a woman in half. This was the first time that the sawing in woman was performed, back in 1921. Selbet, got a lady who was in a big trunk, sawed through it in a park and separated. No, sorry, didn't separate it, just sawed through it. And it was all over the world. And then some people, and more importantly, Selbet started thinking, yeah, but how do they actually know that a lady is inside it? Right, because if you just see the picture, I have to tell you there's a lady inside it. And so came the next version, where you could see the lady's head on one side and her legs on the other. And then they did the same thing, they cut through. User experience, roughly the same. Methods, getting improved. But actually, user experience also is improving because now it's more clearer what's happening. Now people looked at this and said, yeah, that's fine. I can see the head, I know the head is sort of moving, but the legs sort of looks stiff and it's sort of, you know, wooden-ish. And so they said, okay, let's remove the box. Let's just completely remove the box. And this is our own PCSoCast senior who performed this on the BBC in London. And a very interesting thing happened at that time. At the end of the show, as he had just cut his assistant, the show ran out of time and the curtain's closed and this was live at those times, right, 56. And people thought he had just killed a person on live TV. And so that's how half his fame came from because this went viral, not viral in the way things go now, but the phone lines, you know, the phone lines just went berserk. People started calling in and saying, what the heck is happening? And they had to say, no, no, no, everything is fine. This is all an act, but to see the whole activity to come to the theatres and so it was a sold out month. But really, here in this act, you are seeing the lady, you're seeing no coverings, et cetera, and you thought, okay, I think this is perfect. Cannot be improved. Think again, because somebody said, all that is fine, but how do I know that she's actually cut in half? So somebody came up with the idea, okay, I will just have this and you can see her, your hands are moving, you can see the legs, the legs are moving, but now you can separate it and I can walk through it. Really look back. If I can use the word interface or effect or UI, whatever that is, it's the exact same thing. It's sawing a lady in half. This was what we thought was phenomenal until this happened. This is Copperfield, where an act seemingly goes completely wrong and he gets cut and the two things sort of separate. His legs are up and this is also the first time the magician cut himself, right? Not the assistant. And they separate out and Copperfield is sort of looking at the audience. The legs are still and somebody from the audience screams out, move the legs! Copperfield looks, smiles, turns back and then the legs start to move. That's such a theatrical moment, but again, that is user experience. The element of doing the unexpected and doing it slightly more at the point when the users are expecting it, right? The element of service magic in that sense that Disney keeps talking about, even if it's about giving the child that walks into a restaurant one small two rupee car, it's not the two rupee or the five rupee or the 10 rupee that went into that small bubbly ball that they hand out to the kids or a chocolate that they hand out. It's that element of unexpected gift, right? And that's what makes user experience such a challenging field because like it or not, every single day, we are trying to make magic, to make magic for our users. And you thought that couldn't go forward, could you? Because then Kevin James did this. Kevin James basically got a person on stage, cut him in half and the torso walked off. You must have seen the Chris Angel version of this, the same torso sort of running around a park and freaking out people. So I don't know what the next version is going to be, but it's wonderful that cutting in half, something as unimagined because it's nothing that existed. Somebody just thought of this idea, hey, resurrection. Why don't I make a theatrical version of it? And it's come to here. So yeah, personally as a performer, I'm really keen on where that is headed. But as a UX person or a design person, I'm really excited about the magic that's happening in our living rooms, in our lives. The next session and others through the day are talking about some of these aspects about how we can just talk to something or we can just say what we want. And like I said, I hope pretty soon, just think what we want and that will happen. Because most of IOT is exactly that. It's about thinking what happens in magic, what happens on a magic stage, what happens in a magic book. The buttons that Amazon created for Bolt, I think they called it for, you sort of stick them on your refrigerator and things. So if you run out of a particular thing, that washing powder, you have a button called washing powder, you just touch it. So they called it magic buttons. Where does that come from? The idea that you have the Aladdin's lamp that we had at the start. Aladdin's lamp is itself an inspiration for so many different things in Internet of Things. The element of how when we interact with magical objects, they make magic happen. And that is the element of not, that is when the interface sort of morphs into the experience itself, because the interface starts getting invisible. Like you saw in the magic acts, initially there was this large bulky interface which was seemingly there, which by the time it read Kevin James, it was just the person being cut in half and the interface sort of became invisible. To me, the process I just sort of shared with you, which has been followed by magicians for over 6,000 years of trying to imagine what does not exist and try to create it and try to create a wonderful version of it is very well documented in the design thinking slides. Because design thinking again was not something that was dreamt up. The element of how does logically, how do you come up with design? How do you create a design? How do you go about imagining and developing something was captured back into a model and said, okay, this probably is one of the good models to work. It is not a holy grail. We can use it to create our own holy grails. And I think we absolutely need to because as I keep saying, whatever it is that we do, we are in the business of creating magic, magic for our users. So let's all create magic. Thank you. I'm happy to take questions. Yes. We can take a couple of questions for him. So any questions, anyone? Let's ask. We have any questions? Okay, so. Thank you very much. We have one. Oh, one. We have one question there. So during the talk, you mentioned like you asked your consultant and saying, can I do user research? And you get the answer like, yeah, you can do it, but you get me the screen first. So how often you said no to them and kind of like you did your user research and gave the prominent user experience. So how to handle that? That's a very good question. I think it's completely dependent on the kind of project you're doing and the kind of screen you're building. It's not to say that every single screen we build needs user research, right? But if you're doing incremental or if you're doing a completely reimagining of a screen or an interface or a product, user research would be very, very important. And in this particular instance, I have not delivered the screens because it requires user research. So the element of, I mean, as a designer, you would need to know when is a formal user research required for this, right? Again, when we say user research, it's a wide terminology. What are we referring to? Are we talking formative research? Are we talking in lab research? Are we doing post validations, right? We have screens and we just want to test it on users. That's validations. So in that element, it completely depends on you knowing very clearly what kind of inputs are required. And if you are convinced these inputs are required for me, it's, I mean, you've taken that call and so you have to stick with it. I have been lucky because the kind of roles I've played and perhaps also because of the kind of companies I've been associated with. Research has been respected and it's always been, I mean, even in this particular one, it was like, okay, you have the mandate to do the research, but how long is that gonna take? Okay, that's going to take at least two weeks even to sort of set up and get people and get a report even if we are doing everything ourselves. So is there something we can do in the interim? Now, that's a call. We have to take project to project company to company because many a time, the interim becomes permanent. That's been my fight with Dev all my life, right? You give a design and look at it and say, hey, this is all fine. This is wonderful, but right now, we don't have the bandwidth. So we're just going to do this and we will come back to doing this screen. Now, when are they gonna come back to that? Is an open-ended question, right? So whenever it is out of scope, I come back and ask, so out of scope, never in scope, what is it? And if it's out of scope, when is it going to be in scope? So unless you put a timeline right there when you're agreeing to sign off on that screen, that you have, you know, the dev has given you and is going live and saying, I'm saying, okay, I say okay to the screen going live. And at that point, you need to know when the redesign is going to come in. One of my most recent examples was I needed the screen to change from black to white. Very, very, very, very difficult, right? It took me a month to finally get them to make that in scope because the screen would just go, because also, I mean, a couple of buttons would change colors and CSS would need to be changed for whatever reason, the earlier design went live and then the screen is live, what do you care? So that's the sort of a long answer to that question because there's no, there's no syllable at all. So UX as we spoke tonight is kind of a subjective skill as opposed to really being objective. So how do I hire a good UX guy? I don't want to go behind a person who claims that I am a React guy or I am a Node guy because that is essentially like saying, I know how to drive a car, what they mean is, I know what a clutches, I know what a break is, but I really don't know how to drive it. A very, very good question and point. Isn't that how we hire everybody nowadays? I mean, what he just said, I want a React guy, right? That is actually the problem, right? So I'm just, you have your follow up or do I take it? Take it follow up then, because we have. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. All right, I'll go ahead. Yeah, go ahead. So earlier to the industry, things were easy. Hiring, like I said, I just had an evening with HRFox yesterday. It was, do you know Photoshop? Come, yeah? Today they hope, do you know XD? Come, it's not that simple, is it? So how do we go about hiring? Even as design folks, it's extremely difficult for us to find a right mix, which is where that whole dichotomy of a meaningless word as UI slash UX appears. I mean, go up and do a search why there is no such thing as UI UX. Because you can't have UI without it contributing to UX and you can't have UX without UI, right? So it's basically that, it's a surgeon saying, I need somebody else to just use the scalpel and then I'll do what needs to be done afterwards, right? So the problem there is, I think there's no easy answer. It has to be an element of trying out people. More importantly, giving people the space to learn. My way of personal speaking again, I would not generalize this, has been to try finding people who are interested in the area, interested in learning and doesn't matter what their background, I am not a designer. I've turned into a designer. And my personal feeling is if I could do this, anybody can, right? Because otherwise I would have been a writer because that's what my academic background says. I'm not a technical writer. Sorry if there are any. So it's essentially that, I mean that's a good example. That's how specialized we are today. We want a technical writer or we want a creative writer. We want a content writer and we want a brochure writer, whatever that is. No, I just want a writer. So in this concept, I need a problem solver, right? I need a designer. Now whether I cannot for to save my life, understand colors. So I am clearly not a visual designer. That's easy. So like I said, can you do Photoshop or can you put colors on a screen? You are a visual designer. That part is clear. But the rest of it has to be an experiential thing. You have to give those people tests or just share experiences to understand can they solve a problem? Can they solve a design problem? First of all, can they identify a problem and then solve it? Because most of our problems today, why do half our products bomb? Because the products we design are based on the latest technology that comes out. It's like magic. Magicians for a very long time created magic around the latest technology that came out. Hey, Bluetooth is out. So let me create something where you write something and I get it here and I know I can read your mind. Right? It's technology-based. It'll only work to the point where everybody in the audience does not know Bluetooth exists. That catches up with you. On the tech side, it's different. Blockchain. Yes, so my product is blockchain. What does it do in blockchain? I'm working on blockchain. What? I mean, my earlier assignment was this. So I said, okay, blockchain. So this is what you need to do. Oh, that's complicated. That went out of the window. So when can we stop? I mean, technology is important, but when can we say technology is magic? Technology is the silo bullet. It's not. What is the real user problem you're trying to solve? And how are you going to solve it? Based on that, see what technology maps to it. And that same thinking, it's difficult, but is the only way I can answer, a real-world answer, to how you can hire designers?