 Talk about intelligent systems and we are still at this point where things are trying to figure each other out. I mean, we are the frontiers of all intelligent systems and this guy doesn't talk to that guy. So typically, this is what you would do. You would go to one of these sites, like a kayak or a guai-bibo or clear trip, cheap flights. And they will ask you a whole bunch of questions. Like, where are you going? When are you going? Who are you going with? Why are you going? How are you going? I mean, 20 questions you need to be answered before you actually kind of, it's a little bit painful. And by the time you search for it and all of that, it's kind of. So essentially, this is what I realized, is that if you're thinking about a quick getaway, quick getaways aren't really quick at all in most cases kind of thing. You would, on the average, people when they plan holidays, they visit about 38 apps or websites. Very often, they'll start with Google, they will go somewhere else, they will go 20 things. Someone will tell them, have you checked out this awesome new app they're giving 30% discount? And then they realize that's not on my sector. It takes apparently 47 days. And there is an average of 81.6% cart abandonment. I'm sure you all understand cart abandonment. I'm sure you do it all the time. You put things in your cart and you don't buy anything. I do it. So this is the world of travel. So if you look at the cart abandonment across industries, fashion is high, but travel is the second highest after nonprofit. That says something about us. We actually probably are abandoning carts in nonprofits saying that I'll pay you money. And then I'm saying, no, I won't pay you money. So anyway, travel is the second highest. And before that, within travel, if you look at it, people actually tend to honor car rentals more than they honor OTAs. So essentially, this is how it happens. There's car rental, cruises, airlines, OTAs, you name it. This is how the cart abandonment overall works across all of these kind of things. So to introduce myself, I am Jay Datta and I work for that OTA. The one where you saw the cart abandonment was the second highest. And the travel, which is also the second highest. So as you can see, I have a wonderful job. I lead the design UX for Make My Trip. Make My Trip is a NASDAQ-listed company. Has been around for 10 years. When I keep talking to designers, the usual thing is I want to do a startup in travel. And travel is the hardest place to do a startup in, because it's so complex. Like what you saw there, there are so many sort of touch points and movable parts. And I'm sure these guys have been doing a wonderful job of organizing a conference for 10 years. You know the parts are all movable. Someone doesn't get a visa, someone's airline ticket changes, something happens. It's crazy. So I think, guys, round of applause for UX India, by the way, guys. It's not easy to do conferences, because we are doing one. And we realize that what we completely empathize what they are going through. So I do a conference called DesignUp, which is a broader kind of a thing. Broadly, I've been there, done most things. I've done one failed startup and one successful, I won't say startup. Those days, they weren't startups, really. They were like a consulting company. I used to work in Manchester, did my own company, run it successfully until the 2008 recession hit. So it was no profit, no loss. There have been losses and no profit, no losses. I've been, I've headed Adobe's UX design practice or built it from scratch for when it was a few designers. And I know a couple of people from Adobe are here today. I was at Flipkart. Flipkart, I didn't last that long, because Flipkart is a very interesting place. But I learned a lot. I think I would say that hard places are also great places to learn. So I think I'm a type designer. So okay, so I'm going to be talking about the ship of theses way or approach to redesigning things. I think the moment when you say you're a designer, the first thing you want to do is you go to a company and say, well, I want to redesign everything right from scratch. I want to redesign this. I want to change this. I want to change that. What do you want to do that? Anything that you want to lay your hands on, you want to redesign everything, kind of. Like, yeah, let's start, kind of. So when I joined Make My Trip, so I was with the VC before Make My Trip and the VC said, hey, we have big investment there. Why don't you join and work with them? And all my peers asked me, Make My Trip, are you crazy? You must be joking. That was one category of question. You must be crazy. It's another category of question. The third category must be stupid. So I said, well, I always remember this ad which I saw from Honda in the 1980s or 90s, I think. It's wrong, it's 1990s. It was for the diesel motors that Honda's actually, you know it for cars. But Honda's great, their heart is in motors. And I think motors is what they're really awesome at. And so they had this ad saying, very nice jingle, hate something, change something, make something better. And this was all about how do you make diesel engines better? It just stuck with me. So I think I hate MMT, I used to hate MMT. So I think this is a good opportunity to do something better there. Because if I look, if I were to join Uber or if I were to join any other company, they're already great. I mean, what can I do more kind of out there? They're already doing really well. So that's where I went in. So what was interesting about MakeMyTrip is that if I were to look at it, each of those LOBs or icons, how many of you use MakeMyTrip or have used MakeMyTrip? There's a lot of people. I'm surprised and I'm overwhelmed kind of thing. I'm sure you have bad experiences and good experiences and not so good and okay kind of thing. But each of this, what we call line of businesses or LOBs is almost like an organization. So Airbnb, if you think about it as an organization completely is actually like a line of business, what we call homestays. And we're not even sure whether we want to have homestays or not. And we keep toying with it. It's not really a big deal kind of thing. If you look at booking.com, which is a really big strong player, then booking.com is essentially competing with our hotels. And that is one of our lines of business. So if you look at it, there is a whole bunch of, we are fighting on many fronts. And it's many companies almost into one. That was very interesting for me. What was also very interesting, the timing at which I went, go I bebo red bars and make my trip merge together. So far, we were all fighting each other and kind of saying, okay, I'll discount more than you will. And when you start discounting walls, I think you don't focus on product. You don't focus on users so much. You focus on acquisition. You focus on giving money to acquire users who are not going to be loyal anyway. So after the merger, we decided to sort of really focus on product. So what I wanted to do was redesign, but one thing I really didn't want to do was incremental pixel pushing. By that, I mean that you can actually go in and make an app better just by cleaning it up, making the type cases better. That's good. You can add some more color, left, right, center. I think if you heard of Luke, the broski if I'm not mistaken, I always sort of doubt pronouncing his second name. So Luke essentially is someone who was talking about how eBay for many years, almost like a decade kept pixel pushing, but fundamentally nothing changed. It was the same app, but suddenly you change the button, you change the color, skew morphism gave it to something else. Something moved above, below, blah, blah, blah. And another example which he gives, which is very interesting, is Amazon's sort of password entry thing, where for about three years, they kind of keep making password. Can you show password, hide password, show password, hide password. After three years, someone says hang on a sec. There's a button out there, you can just press that whole thing. That has been the mobile sort of centric thing. Why don't you go embrace mobile centricism? And they did it, it was great. So when you say make something better, what does it mean? Typically, hey, I started very late. So what does that mean in terms of better? So better means you've got to sort of have a thesis for what is better. Because better can be again, all of these visual flourishes and beauty and all of that, but it can't be really better. So we look back at this, the abandoned carts, and the abandoned carts means abandoned context. And I think you guys do understand that, because we have been speaking about that quite a bit, which also means that we are abandoning a lot of users. For some reason or the other, they are kind of getting abandoned. So I took it very personally, make my trip, took it very personally. We said we got to do something more about this. So we said, what are the eyes that let's start with the home page redesign? And I'll come back to why I said the home page. I could have said the entire app redesign, but I think that said the home page redesign. And the question was, why are we redesigning the home page? And the idea was a couple of things. I'll come back to one thesis later, but broadly the reason was that this is the first page that people mostly hit, especially in an app context. And we have about 80 million people using our apps every month, which is a lot of people kind of think of it. That's a lot of zeros actually if you think about it. The idea was that make my trip was very impersonal. There was nothing, if you came back and if you looked at things, then you would kind of say you did an eighth and search and you came back again. You will not find the eighth and search again. It'll still be blank. It'll just start back where you are. So you need to re-initiate a search. Some of the searches are complex, especially if you're doing a multi-city. Your hotels, you've shortlisted something. So you spend half an hour maybe on an app. At the end of it, what have you done? What's your output? Did you shortlist a hotel? Did you shortlist a flight? Sometimes you'd go back without anything and when you come back again, it's all blank again. Hopefully this all works. 545 AM flight, meeting in a few hours. Forgot online check-in. Need that cup of coffee and an ATM. Endless queues at security. What happened to that refund? That unfinished presentation. Between work, cabs, queues, airports, life happens, and it's complex. Your travel app shouldn't be. The new Make My Trip app, built around you. A series of swipes reassures first-time user, Elia, that she'll find what she came for. Flanks, hotels, enticing deals, quick discounts, and some inspiration. But she's here for a quick search. It's reassuringly fast and no fuss. Surely she'll be back another day for another trip. In his next visit, Jeet finds his refund has been processed. The flights he was thinking of have become cheaper and he's reminded of his last day. He can share it was indeed very special. So maybe it's time to dream of a bigger holiday somewhere else. Frequent flyer Felicia is waiting at the airport. She's pleasantly surprised to find a bunch of great deals in the hotels in Mumbai. Should have booked through this app. Next time, and consider a homestay next time. The Miles Collector finds the homepage reflecting back her bucket list. Her recent stays. Her world of travel. Throughout travels, we define our world. And Make My Trip is there to make it simpler, to make it special. Built around you, built for you. So broadly, this is the redesign. I think some of you would have already seen that, and let me just play this one. So a couple of things I'll kind of, one is it's a visual change, but the visual change is not what I'm kind of really interested in. There are two very interesting facets to it. One is putting that my back, as I said. You will find, you'll come back and you'll find whatever you're looking for. There is, this actually has become very popular, the flight fares, this thing, where you can see how flight fares are going up and down. And so in case you were a guy who didn't have really married to a particular kind of itinerary, you could actually choose one of them. But the most interesting part is this. If you look at the one on the left, the colorful one, and if you look at the one on the right, the right one looks much more cleaner and neater. But the left versus the right, the right actually has probably about eight X, the inventory or the space, that you need to sort of highlight things. So you might want to sort of put in a message about refunds, put in a message about kind of cancel tickets, new tickets, et cetera. And now let's look back at it. This is how it stacks up next to some of your other directories. These unfortunately have not moved beyond directories, they're still directories. So Clear Trip once upon a time said, we are better than Make My Trip because we are cleaner and I think that's what Make My Trip isn't. So that is not a difficult one to achieve. I think cleaner if they want to, you can achieve faster. But the question is what's next beyond that? And I think you need to prove yourself wrong many times. I think personalization is not really just saying, hey, hello Ranjit, how are you doing? Or hello Abhishek or hello Narayan, it's not bad. I think that's everyone can do. Every app is like personalizing hello Narayan. I think what is very important is the context of your hello and the context of why and what can I do next. This is what we sort of set out to do. When I say hello Anamika, you've got something that you can do because I know your context really, really well. That's what we do. This is the old one, the current one. This is what we are changing towards. This is some of the search, some of it is work in progress. So another thing you'll notice is that this is a homepage change. I told you it's a homepage change. There are some bits and pieces which you are working towards. What we have done is we have evolved it for a complete system. A system that we call Cosmos. And Cosmos pretty much rules our lives today. It's a library, it's an asset system. It's a system of multiple interactions, patterns and so on and so forth. Built by this folks, we call it NH44 because the moment we call it make my trip, someone will say, hey, I didn't get my refund. When is my refund coming back? So we call it NH44. We do our blogs, we talk about travel that we do. So Ship of Thesias. And I think that's the one which you must be wondering like this guy's talking about all redesign but what happened is the Ship of Thesias part of it. So I'm sure you know what Ship of Thesias is, right? So Thesias was this Greek war hero who came back to Athens and his ship lay there. Thesias passed away but his ship kept on being there and people would keep preparing his ship and the oars would change, the planks would change. And this has become a very interesting paradox in philosophical terms that if the Ship of Thesias is kind of completely changed, that is it the Ship of Thesias? Because it's no longer the same ship. So usually this is what kind of Thesias did. He moved fast and he broke things and he broke the Minotaur's head, married his daughter, did a lot of things. Same thing that we tell our startups that move fast, break a lot of things. Here's what people did who came after Thesias. They moved slow and they fixed things and they fixed things better and better. Now here's what is very interesting is that when I went to Adobe and I think there were a couple of things we changed. Photoshop Elements being one which actually went through a lot of change. There were a lot of things which kept going through changes. When I went to Flipkart and it was a short journey for me but I think I wanted to change the world very, very quickly. I realize that's not the way it works because pretty much like this the founders, there are people who have been with the brand for such a long time, they're invested in it. So you have holy cows and you have holy ships and you have holy symbols and holy rituals which really just can't change in one day. So here's what the way in which this ship of Thesias applies to make my trip. I think the way it happens is it happens slow, it happens consistently, it happens every day. Every day we are fixing things. Every day there are things which are broken and Cosmos is a system which I was telling you about. Is that overarching library system kind of which really kind of helps us put everything into perspective. It won't change overnight. It'll take me a year, it'll take me two years to change it. By the time you fix something, something else is broken. Pretty much like the ship of Thesias. Maybe there's a plank which is rotting somewhere which needs to be replaced. By the time you replace the plank, yeah, maybe then it all needs to be replaced. It's new and yet it's the same thing. It's old and yet it's kind of something that people believe in. So essentially if you think about it, there are three parts to it. What the ship of Thesias metaphor teaches us is there is a paradox to it. But it can also be a paradigm. As long as you don't believe that it's okay for what your peers think about you, that's okay too. With that, I leave you with one interesting quote from Dan Gilbert, a philosopher, who says that human beings are work in progress. Actually whatever we do is work in progress. All our life is actually work in progress. UX India's work in progress. Your careers are work in progress. But with that, I shall finish my talk. My talk is finished for today. And feel free to sort of text me or kind of reach out to me via Twitter. I also do a newsletter which comes out approximately every week. So you can always write to me there. Thank you so much for listening. Thanks.