 Back in 1999, when I started, I used to be called as a web designer. So I always used to struggle to tell people that no, I do user experience and usability, information architecture, tell everything and finally they say, that's fine, you're still a web designer. So from there to here, it sounds really exciting. Okay, so I'm here to tell a story, a story that actually tries to tell you what makes sense. Right? The real intention of trying to tell you this story is to highlight the fact that out of the many eventual benefits that you see out of a great design, money is just one of them. It's not the main important thing. There are a lot of other outcomes and money is just one of the outcomes of great design. The real value of any design is when you touch the emotions of the users, meet the expectations of the users and create a cohesive environment in which they can sit down and work. That's what I call as great design and applies to any kind of design, literally any design, whether you take it a product design or application design or anything, emotions, expectations and creating a cohesive environment, these are the most important aspects. So as any story has, this story also has a premise. By the way, this is not my company. This is a company for which I've worked on a consulting basis. So EdgeFX Kids is a premise of our story. EdgeFX Kids is a product company which is based out of Hyderabad. They are experts in creating electronic and electrical project kits for third and fourth year engineering students. So third and fourth year engineering students have to submit their projects as part of their curriculum and I don't want to get into the aspect of ethics over here, so they can go and purchase those products from them and they can submit it over there. So let's not discuss that aspect, okay? Fine, so they have a good research team backed by great experts, so they do their due diligence. They go around India, go to all the universities, colleges, speak to the students, understand what the needs are, accordingly come up with great products and I understood that their quality is also great because I've done my own background research, their quality is really great and this is the premise basically. We'll talk a lot more about it as we move forward, okay? So as any story requires, this story also has got a protagonist, which is the hero if you want me to call it as, then this is the protagonist of the story. So these are the project kits. As I mentioned earlier, their research team comes up with projects that are always up to date right from the old analog devices to the ones that run on the iOS or Android. They have got everything that people call as the latest ones and the beauty is all these project kits have got three different versions to them. A version number one in which the student buys that kit, which has got all the components in it, the zero board, the bread board and has got the soldering device and the multimeter and all those things are put into it. All that he has to do is look at the guide or look at the videos and build it all by himself, which they call it as a DIY kit. The other one is a ready-made kit for lazy ones like me. They just go and buy the product, submit it to the college, get the marks, pass, take a certificate. And the third one is a combination of these two, okay? A hybrid kit, a DIY kit and also a ready-made kit together into it. So you fiddle around, try, if you fail, you have the ready-made kit for you. So that's about it. So again, please don't ask me any questions about ethics over here. I'm not here to answer all of those, okay? My job was to design for them, create a great e-commerce site, and this story is all about that. So let's go to the next one. So you have the protagonist, then you need to have an antagonist, or else you'll not have a story at all. And we don't have one, but we have two over here. An antagonist and the accomplice, the bad design. This is the e-commerce design with which they're working. So as I mentioned earlier, they have a great product or a product line, 500 project kits. You can call them as the latest ones in the market. And the quality, whichever student I've spoken to, the student says that the quality is excellent, and they provide everything. As I mentioned to you, they have the zero board, the multimeter, the soldering, and whatnot. Everything put in one single packet, all that you need to do is sit down, dirty your hands, and come up with the result. But still, the online sales were really, really bad. The reason for that is if you look at this particular design, it doesn't even look like an e-commerce site, right? I think you have a large image in the center, which doesn't take you anywhere. Yes, it does talk about what are the contents of the kits. But even before that, you need to first try to create a conversion on an e-commerce site, that is not happening. And if you try to observe, there is a search on the right-hand top corner, which looks like a disabled field, and a button right next to it. So on and so forth, the categories are put on the top, and they're not really too many, and people used to get confused with what they are. Now let's switch to the accomplice over here. And this happens to be the project details page. Now you look at it, it looks like any e-commerce project page. Now as I mentioned earlier, each project, each of those 500 projects have three different versions to them. The DIY, hybrid, and ready-made. It has a table at the bottom, but it doesn't tell you that you have an option to purchase each one of those. It doesn't tell you what are the benefits you get out of it. So this project details page also has got a lot of confusion in it. It doesn't really lay out the information properly. And on top of it, you find a lot of font inconsistency. Design style is also a passage, old style of design, and stuff like that. So we have, just looking at those two screens, we have said that these many things in just about two minutes. And if I give you that for about five or ten minutes, you'll enlist another 20 or 30 different problems. When you sit down and fix them, you can easily come up with a good layout and add your prowess of visual design. You can make it really look sexy and start selling it. But do you think that is design? That is definitely not design because whatever we are talking now about the flaws that you see over there, the design style being passing and all that stuff, all this is based on the experience that we have given over a period of time and a lot of common sense added to that. That's it. But we haven't spoken to the actual end users and figured out what exactly they want. Unless and until you speak to them, sit with them, understand their environment, empathize with them, and figure out what is the need of theirs, you cannot conclude that whatever issues that I have figured out and if I fix them, will be done. Okay? So this is what we wanted to do next, something more to it. So we have decided to come up with a plan and this was the plan. I might be running a little fast because I'm already scared that people are pushing them, your time is out. So if I'm running fast, so stop me, I can go slow and I can answer all the questions. So this is what we wanted to do. So we have divided the research aspect into four different parts. Number one, we wanted to understand the value that is actually claimed by the company for all those project kits. Is it really there or not? So we wanted to go around all the colleges, speak to the students, figure out if they really appreciate all those project kits on our, if they really understand what is the value of individual kit, the versions of each of those projects, and if they really like all those projects. Number one, that's what we wanted to do. For that, we conducted individual interviews. We went around to the colleges and spoke to the students. Number two, we wanted to figure out the competition. So what exactly is the competition this company has got? Is there anyone else who does similar kind of job in this area? For this, we did a lot of online research and we also spoke to the students and also the faculty members of all the colleges because they give you for standard information because majority don't mind for this if any academician is over here. I'm sorry if I'm sounding very critical over here. Majority of these colleges, with all those faculty guys, they have literally less amount of knowledge of what is the latest in terms of these electronic and analytical projects. The guides also don't really perform well, but they know really where to find the project. Whether you have to go to Sultan Bazar or Koti to fetch all the components and build it together and showcase it over here. So that knowledge they have. So we went around and tried to understand the competition. The third one is the user experience study. So we took the actual e-commerce application to the end users. We brought them rather to a controlled environment wherein we asked them to sit down and started asking them to perform certain specific tasks which always lead it to a purchase. And while doing so, what we wanted to understand was like what are the flaws there are in that application and what are the knee-jerk reactions that the users show while they're using it at application. And any expectations and verbal communication and all those things. And the last one is the influences. I'll come back to this a little later. So for this, we'll come back to that as I mentioned. So now, after we have performed all these three particular steps, so we figured out that these are the results. First, students love the projects. They have no problems whatsoever. And they also are fine with the pricing. When I said fine, I'm not saying that they love the pricing because some of the projects were about 14 or 15,000 rupees, but still they are fine with it because the quality of the project is like that. So there are absolutely no problem there. And the next one is the beauty is they have negligible competition. There are a lot of websites which sell the components but very less sites which actually create kits specifically for this particular strata and sell them. So which is what HFX kits does. And the third one is not all projects are at one place. This is something that we need to understand. Yesterday I was speaking to someone about reading between the lines and this is exactly the reading between the lines. So some of the students said that not all projects are at one place and they also said not easy to find a project that I want. So one of my designer who was part of the team who was working with me said when we were summarizing and patronizing all the responses and finally we said these are the concluded statements after the user study. There were a lot more but I'm just highlighting the most important ones. Not easy to find a project that I want. He said like, so why don't we have a search at a prominent place and make the design very good and probably that'll solve the problem. Well, the users did not say that I'm not able to search a project. Specifically when we have asked the questions they said fine, we'll search it. That's okay. But I'm not able to find a project that I want. So this is something, there is a huge difference in between these two things. We don't understand clearly what they want what they mean by that particular statement but there is a difference. That is what we need to understand with influences. For example, when I was talking about or when I was mentioning about empathizing with the users you sit down with them you ask them a bunch of questions in an environment which is conducive to them or to your whatever it is. So they will be answering, trying to answer questions, answer those according to the environment in which they are and they're very, what you call that as, cautious in their responses. In majority of the cases, especially in the Indian scenario the users don't want to hurt you, right? They like in a typical Hyderabad way even if they don't know the direction they say see the job, right? So the users also like that. Fine, okay, let me not disturb this fellow. If he asked me a question if I think that it is bad I will say it is okay. And the designer goes back to his desk and say they said this is okay, this is okay, this is great. So overall I am good. So that is bad approach. So if you, a lot of times when you ask the questions you don't get the right answer. So majority of the questions what you ask will give you a premise of where exactly you need to fix your design but it will not give you the nuances of the areas that you need to fix. For that you need to understand their environment. For that you need to understand all the peripheral influences that are falling on them. For example, this site has got something called as expert search. So the moment you open the application a chat application pops up and expert pings and starts asking what can I do for you? So the users talk to them. During the initial discussions with them we figured out that a lot of people actually speak to these experts then pick up a phone call, make an order and then go to their office and pick the project. So what do you call that as? Do you call it as an online sale, online conversion? It is not an online conversion at all. The conversion did start at the website actually took a tangentially different route. So the revenues were great but the online revenues were not at all great because the site is not actually doing the job that it is supposed to do. So the first thing we out of the many other peripheral influences that we have studied the first influence and one that I'm gonna discuss here because the positive of time is discussing with those experts and trying to figure out what could be the reasons for that last statement. So these are the three excerpts of randomly picked up excerpts of chat conversations between them. So if you look at the first statement the first one it says I'm really confused about the project of final year. The second one says which one is the best in electronic projects? And the third one says give me project ideas. All right? It is evident that all these three guys are clueless about which project to pick. So when you go back now you look at the last statement. That is not about search at all. That is about their confusion to pick the right kind of project. So if you have directly concluded with that statement from your user research and say that put a great search on top just like Google then you're not doing the design at all properly. You need to understand clearly where exactly there is a deviation. That's point number one. Point number two look at the last statement. It is the same for all the three ones. It clearly says please check the model number whatever it is and then it says you can search the model numbers in the gray colored search box at the right hand top corner. You type whatever and then after you type it you need to enter or you click on the go button on next to it. So it is ridiculous, right? The expert is actually telling the end user what is that search field whether it is a gray colored one or yellow colored one, go there, click, type the number and then press enter. If that is the case of user experience on your website then it is a downer, straight away a downer, right? Then we thought, okay fine. So we can at this point also straight away go back to our desk and say that okay, there is a search problem. We need to fix that. And there is also a problem related to people finding the project kit that is useful for them. But no, we didn't do that because we wanted to go back to the experts and ask why are you giving this kind of detail to each and every user? There could be some reason for that because no sane person will be giving this kind of detail to someone who is studying engineering. After all engineering students are supposed to be intellectuals, right? So no pun intended guys, okay? So we went to the so-called experts and spoke to them and figured out that there is another startling revelation over there. The experts said, majority of these students try every single option, okay, I'm zero minutes? Okay, I'll quickly finish, give me two minutes. So the majority of these students go around, scout for the projects and figure out that they are failing to find the right kind of project and then finally what they do, they come to this website. So they are coming to this website in a panic mode or it is out of laziness or maybe because they couldn't get anything, scampering for everything and finally they figured out that this website can give it to them. So there is an aspect of mood over there. So you need to address that mood also in your design. You, unless and until you address that mood, legibility is extremely important when panic is going to be the primary mood of the users who are using your application. So this is the next level of revelation. Apart from this, we have found out a lot of others which I'll detail as we move forward. So instead of showing you all the wire frames, so I'll show you the final result. Or rather, the influences, we have divided them into tangible and intangible ones. The tangible ones that we have discussed already, the intangible ones is the other one that we figured out from them. It is, I don't have a credit card, okay? You might say that, you know, okay, fine. They can go back and use one of their parents' credit cards and finalize it. But the point over here is from the point of finalizing the project and going back to the parents, there is some time gap, okay? And that can lead to shopping cart abandonment. Believe me, about 69.7% of average shopping carts are abandoned every single day. That's a large number and for a smaller company, it is caring. So you should not let anyone abandon their cart. You need to convert it right away. They got an idea? You need to convert it, fine? And similarly, not sure what to buy. We discussed about it. Will my choice be accepted? Will my college accept it or not? And the last one is, how do I prepare for the Viva? I'm sure a lot of you guys are relating to that, right? Okay, so this is what we did. So if you look at it very carefully, we have added a widget at the center of the screen where it says, can I help you find your project? Where in the user will type which year, which branch and which category they are actually looking at. We added another filter to it. What is the price point you're looking at? And that was a big hit. And then we added, we made the search very prominent one. Then we have added all the categories on the left-hand side. Give a sorting of branch. Then we added cash on delivery. And then we also added something called as project acceptance status based on the survey we did with all the colleges. And we also fixed the accomplice wherein we brought all the details of the kits on the top. We added the project video and also documentation, including the Viva questions. Again, no ethics, please. Okay. We also figured out that their overall design coherence of their entire ecosystem was not great because a lot of students actually visit their campus and talk to them and the packaging also was not good. So just we fixed it. In overall, we have fixed their customer experience, the entire customer experience based on whatever study we have done. So the result, as I said, the eventualities are always great. The bond states have fallen down. The dwell time has increased. The conversions have increased. To speak about the revenues, which is one of the great eventualities, the entire 2013 revenues, the 2014's first quarter revenues were thrice the 2013's year revenues. So yes, design works, really works. So online sales, all that you need to do is to arrive at this kind of conclusion to the design. You need to be aware and awake all the time. Believe me, guys, e-commerce in India is at a nascent stage, very, very nascent stage. We just, only 4% of Indians buy online against the world average of 8%. UK buy, you know, 15.6% from the UK buy it online. We're still very far away from that. I'm not really saying whether you should buy it online or not. As designers, as working for e-commerce sites, you need to be always aware, awake, look at all the possible influences and come up with a great design rather than creating a templatized e-commerce websites. Unless and until you do that, you cannot really call yourself as great designers. Thank you. When we do designs, you know, like if we see Flipkart or Amazon like e-commerce, we'll have the cart at the right side and the users are used to it. If we change the template somehow, like you're saying you shouldn't follow the approach and you should understand users. We'll definitely do that. But according to some design patterns, like the cart should be at the right, logo should be at the left. If we change the template, what are the influences should we overwrite the pattern or shall we lose the users or not? To follow the template and go ahead with the design, what I meant is each e-commerce site will try to sell something and each of the sale point is unique, completely unique. Unless and until you understand the user's expectations and the unique proposition of all those sales, you cannot straight away say that, you know, this stamp of design will work over here also. But that doesn't mean that you should also change the logo position and the cart position, right? Because if you do that, you're actually defeating the purpose over there completely because people are used to certain norms and you should not actually tamper with them, right? Yes, you know, this is Abhinand Nair. I have a question over here. And the question was about navigation. Why did not you go with a mega menu over there? Why did I not go with mega menu? Okay. Which could have solved a lot of problems, like when the user is searching for any of the project or this one could have sorted out over there. So why did not you go for mega menu and why you went for search, that concept whatever you are told. Okay, so as I mentioned, I skipped a certain amount of details because I could have gone on with this particular project for about four or five hours. But what happened was most of the students wanted to look at the complete list of projects right about the fold. And also they wanted a sorting over there. So I had to go with a conventional mode of showcasing all the details over there. And on top of it, I have a big problem to solve over there because majority of the students don't know which project to buy. So that had occupied a larger area where I'm trying to give them a widget wherein it solves the problem for them. So we had to add a somewhat of artificial intelligence over there to retrieve the data according to the combinations that they provided. Yes, I could have gone there, but it didn't because some of the requirements didn't allow me to go there. Should also include the streamlining the backend, like items set up and price set up. We have changed, as I mentioned a little earlier, we added a lot of artificial intelligence into it. And we also added the, we went around to the colleges and spoke to them and said, which kind of projects would you allow? And for which years would you allow? So there is a lot more intelligence we had to add to the backend. And accordingly, the front end and the middle layer also had to be changed. So, yes, we did make changes. Any more questions? How much timeline did you put on research thing? Okay, I missed actually mentioning about this lady, the owner or the CEO of this company is a very pragmatic lady. Her name is Kamini Gupta and she gave us ample time. When I told her, went to her and explained that this is the problem that I perceive in that, perceive in that. So she gave us the required amount of time that we wanted. So we spent about four weeks research, which is a luxury, seriously speaking. Not many companies will give you that, but I had the luxury then.