 So good afternoon everyone, really happy to be here. This is my first time attending UX India, and I'm really very impressed with the energy and the enthusiasm that I've seen here. So it's fantastic. Now my talk is about designing delightful experiences and how you can go from being usable to being delightful. And I'd like to share my journey of how I moved from the traditional design approach to adopting a design thinking approach in my practice. So let's talk about why design delightful experiences. We'll talk about some core principles and then some how-to methods. So a little bit about me. I like to call myself a global desi, which means that I grew up and did my schooling in India, but I've been based in the Bay Area for the last 13 years. And these are some of the companies that I've worked for. And in the last year or so, I've been doing my own design consultancy and I'm running my own design studio. And I work in the Bay Area as a designer and an innovation catalyst, and my company is Delight Cube. Okay, so why design for delight? I think when we have a delightful experience, if we look back to a moment that was delightful, we relate it with a lot of positive emotion and it's something that we can't stop thinking about, we can't stop raving about, we tell our friends, we tell our family, we tell anybody who cares to listen. And we keep wanting to going back to that moment. And the same thing applies for software and product design. When our customers have a good experience, they can't stop talking about your product. They want to tell everybody, oh, this was a fantastic product. And it makes them want to keep coming back to your product. And in turn, it allows you to drive growth for your company and delight your customers. So this is an interesting quote from Aaron Walter. He's director of design at Mailchimp. And what he's saying is, if design is usable, it's the same thing as being edible. It meets the need, it's getting things done, but it's just plain edible. And this is one of the examples from Mailchimp. And this is a user who's been working on an online campaign using the Mailchimp software. And he has been working on it, iterating on it, getting approvals, and he has finally published it. And the software recognizes that. And guess what it does? The Mailchimp monkey raises its hand and says, high five, your campaign is in the queue and it'll be going out shortly. And can you imagine what people do when they see this on the screen? They high five back. And this is something that somebody tweeted. There's like every time they run a campaign, they just feel so relieved and so destressed that it's finally done. They just feel so accomplished. And they really appreciate that the software recognizes that. And I think that's one of the moments that builds the delight in the product. So I wanted to talk a little bit about my personal experience and this design approach shift that I have noticed going from the traditional design approach to the design thinking approach. And so we're in the past where I worked at Oracle and I worked at Bank of America. We used to do a lot of detailed planning upfront. There used to be month-long customer studies, a lot of slideware, PowerPoints, analysis, where we wanted to avoid failure at all costs. And there was a lot of analysis and the emphasis was on thinking. To this sort of new design thinking approach where we recognize that it's okay to learn from trial and error and then we try to get deep customer empathy fast. It's okay to release a minimum viable product which means that it's not perfectly baked. It has some of the core functionality that you need to test with users and it's okay to release that to the customers and learn from that and fail early, fail fast, and always being iterative and continuously designing and going from thinking to showing. So you're not just talking about what your product will be doing. You will be showing it to the customers and learning from that. I wanted to share this example from Intuit and I worked at Intuit as an innovation catalyst and this was their journey. So Intuit was one of the companies that adopted design thinking back in 2007 and in now they're kind of one of the most innovative companies out there. And so this is an interesting quote from Karen Hansen who was the then VP of design and Intuit was being hailed as the best zero growth company in the Bay Area. And so what Karen said is that we realized that we were no longer proud of the experiences we were creating. In many cases we were no better than our competitors and that's why Intuit was not growing. It had zero growth. And so they thought deeply about this problem and they came to this insight that the number one customer, the number one driver of new purchases for Intuit products is word of mouth. And what promotes word of mouth? It's when customers are delighted when they have a positive experience, they want to talk about it and they want to tell everyone about it and so delight promotes word of mouth. So this led the founder, Scott Cook, to say that design for delight is a number one weapon in attaining growth and there's no number two. And so they adopted design thinking as a company-wide practice, not just limited to designers, but everybody, the executives, the product managers, the quality guys, the software engineers, everybody's using design thinking methods and coming together to run experiments, go deep into custom empathy, run experiments, learn from that and then innovate. And the journey into it went from in 2007, going beyond ease to in 2012, where they're doing everyday D4D, it was listed as the 56 most innovative companies in the Forbes list and now in 2015, they are recognized as a center of excellence where they are coaching other startups, other enterprises on how to be innovative and they're sharing their best practices and methods with other companies and becoming a center of excellence. So this is the delight pyramid. And at the base of the pyramid, what you see is at the very basis, the very foundation is the benefit that I care about for a customer. Is it easy to use? So those are the foundational building blocks. But on top of that, when the customer has a positive emotion attached to the product, then it starts to get into the delight cloud. And so when people are delighted, they become your net promoters, they want to tell everybody about it and when they tell everybody about it, everybody wants to use your product which in turn drives growth. So I hope you see how delight can drive growth. Now if you look at TurboTax, which is one of the Intuit products for doing online taxes, it's a hard problem to solve. Most of the Americans have a very negative reaction to doing income taxes because taxes, if you think about doing it yourself, it's complicated, it requires a lot of paperwork, you are afraid that you might make a wrong mistake and lose a lot of your refunds and it's inconvenient and time consuming. So the product team at Intuit, the product, designers, everybody, they had to recognize and acknowledge and overcome the barriers that the customers were facing and meet them where they are and engage them in the tax preparation process. So here's just a simple example of, you know, the questionnaire style designed that TurboTax came up with where they're asking, they're breaking it down for the customers. Tell me, are you single? Are you married? Or, you know, you don't want to say. Because if you file taxes as an individual, your tax bracket is higher, if you file taxes jointly, you're likely to get a bigger refund and they tell you that. And so these are some of the principles, empathize with me, nurture me, meet me where I am. A lot of the consumers, they're not very tech savvy, so meet them where they are and help them understand it and make it easy for them. So we talked a little bit about why we should design delightful experiences and we saw some examples. And now I'd like to shift into designing delightful experiences and some of the principles that I've used. So the first thing is using a human-centered vision. And to give you an example, the vision that into it is to improve our customers' financial lives so profoundly that they can't imagine going back to the old way. So the customer is actually the center of this vision and by making it customer-centric and empathetic to the user, it allows them to drive that vision across the company and build that culture that uses design thinking and delivers on delight. Another company I worked at is Cisco and this is an example from Cisco where the vision, and this is for a company that primarily builds routers and switches, their vision is to bring people together. And for Cisco to adopt such a vision shows a shift in their approach from going from enterprise, hardware, centric company to being a more design thinking company. The second principle is design the whole experience and not just in silos. Because if you have a good experience with one part but the next step is broken and the next step is different, then your overall experience is still not good. So think about the overall end-to-end experience. This is an example of the Cisco collaboration experience design. I was part of the Futurama team which was reimagining the collaboration vision at Cisco. So if you think about some of the Cisco products, they have Webex for online meetings and then they have Jabber and then they have Telepresence and a lot of IP phones and video endpoints and they all operated at that point as separate business units. They don't, the products don't talk to each other. If you have to join a video meeting from a Webex you can do that or vice versa. And so this is literally operating as separate companies. And so this was for the leadership to recognize that these are all collaboration products and our customers don't distinguish between the mediums and the business units. They just want to have a good collaboration experience and we should be delivering on that. So the Futurama vision tries to deliver on having standard patterns for joining a meeting or getting a call back for starting a video meeting from any of these endpoints for having a conversation which is basically between two people and they can add more media and they can escalate and downgrade the media or they can add more people but recognizing that at the center of it people are just trying to have a conversation. The third principle I'd like to share with you is bringing stakeholders and customers along in the journey. And this was again a personal experience where in the past the researchers would go out on the fields and do the research studies and come back with their findings and then designers would absorb that and do some wire frames and then the stakeholders would weigh in on that. I think the approach now is moving towards a co-designing approach and bringing stakeholders and the customers in the journey and so you are all one team working on designing the delightful experience. This is an example of a design sprint that I ran it into it and this was trying to understand the journey of quality engineers and mobile developers as they go from releasing, building on products and releasing that. So these are some tools I'd into it for building mobile applications. And one of the things I did was I ran a five-day design sprint where on the first day I brought in some of the customers. I brought in people who are using this product and I broke them down into different groups and then I brought in my product manager and my architect and my quality manager and the other engineers and I got them to interview the customers and understand and empathize with the customers and then map out the journey of these customers and identify the pain points and the opportunities. And so when you put your heads together with your customers and your stakeholders it allows you to get much faster into deeper insights and you don't really need months of ethnographic studies to do that. You can quickly create something that you can take to the next level. This was the final outcome. We turned these journey lines into large posters and they gave us a lot of ideas for our future roadmap and where we can innovate and what are the pain points and frustrations. This is a code that I'd like to share with you about code designing and this is the magic happens when developers get and see the customer pain and the biggest single source of innovation is typically the engineers and they know what's possible better than anyone. An example I'd like to give you is that Cisco, I was getting a lot of pushback on one of my projects from the architect because he felt it was the design called for a more expensive server call but when he saw the customer interact and react to that interaction he totally understood the customer pain point and turned around and was most supportive of the idea. Here are some business outcomes of empathy. A lot of people ask us, okay, we're doing empathy but how do you quantify that or how do you understand the value? By understanding our customers deeply when you engage the leaders and the stakeholders in designing for the customer, they're better equipped to discover customer insights on what the customer really needs for innovation and it drives inspiration for long-term vision and roadmap and improved usability. That let me shift a little bit to now some methods and process on how to design delightful experiences. So here's the design thinking process that came out of the D-School. You start with empathy and then once you have empathized deeply with the user you define the problem, you ideate, you prototype and test and you can start at any point in this process and keep going back in the loop for as long as you like. Here's the design process that we used at Intuit and now Intuit is sharing with the rest of the world. The first step is to deeply empathize with the customer and then go broad to go narrow which means create a lot of different ideas to get the best idea and then run multiple experiments. There's no one solution. Run multiple experiments and learn from those and then go back and empathize again and this will drive delight. So there's been a lot of talk about empathy at this workshop and basically empathy is knowing the user's thoughts, emotions and motivations so that you can know how to design for them and you do this by observing the user, by engaging with them, by immersing yourself in the user's environment and getting into that deep understanding about your user. And again, this is not something that needs to take a lot of time. It can be really flexible depending on your project. Here's an example of an empathy map workshop from a workshop that I did with some kids and they are gaining empathy on designing a holiday experience for one of their friends. The second step is divergent thinking which means that in order to get one good idea you need to generate a lot of ideas and your first idea is typically not your best idea. And so some of the activities you might do here is brainstorming, whiteboarding, iterative design and going from different levels of fidelity from sketching and whiteboarding to paper prototyping to Azure prototypes. And then the last one is testing your ideas which means running experiments with the customers right from it can be just a sketch or a storyboard of like, hey, would you like to try this out and what do you think about this idea that I'm thinking to maybe going to the field and doing some tests there or doing some iterative usability tests and getting customer feedback. So these are the three principles, the three methods that I'd like to share with you about how you can go about designing delightful experiences. Thank you.