Fast & Furious — UX Design Workshop for Startup Leadership Chennai
What was a barren landscape a few years back for startup events in Chennai is now a bountiful harvest.
Keeping up with the Fast & Furious sequels, the dynamic Startup Leadership (SLP) team headed by Praveen, CEO of Codewhite.co, continued the torrid pace of SLP recruiting events with yet another one last Saturday (July 16th) in Chennai !
This time it was a wonderfully conceived UX Workshop courtesy the PayPal Chennai team. So after missing a couple of the events due to personal engagements, off I went to Karya Space, Mylapore to check out the talented designers and front end developers who had turned up.
We had a full house with about 45+ attendees and after the introduction about Startup Leadership from Co-Program Leader Suresh Radhakrishnan, the session got underway.
The PayPal team consisting of Malcom Anthony (Creative Services Manager), Anbarasu Siva (UX Lead), Priyanka (UX Designer) and Raja (UX Designer) started off with a preliminary discussion about UX and its usefulness. This kindled a debate among some in the audience that the benefits were understood quite well and that the presentation needed to move on to ‘sterner’ stuff. Point noted and issue resolved, it was time to dive right into the workshop.
User experience indeed for the PayPal team!
The participants were divided into 3 teams and each were given a different scenario (problem statement):
1) Team A — Pat is waiting in a traffic jam with his family to go and dine at a new restaurant. He has two kids who are difficult to manage at a restaurant. It will take about 35 min to reach and another 25 min to get his table. Pat wants to save time and still have a nice meal without waiting for the table or food. Create a mobile app solution for his problem.
2) Team B — Jane is a photographer who is currently travelling. Jane has forgotten John’s birthday, but wants to send a gift to him. Jane has a perfect birthday gift idea which is a physical framed portrait of them together. She doesn’t have her laptop to edit the photo. Create a mobile app solution for her problem.
3) Team C — Company Q wants to promote innovation among employees so they want to create a place where employees can register their ideas, generate interest, socialize and collaborate on the ideas and take it to the next level. Create a Web solution that solves this need.
Participants had to pool their resources, allocate responsibilities, hear contrasting views, agree to a consensus and complete the task of coming up with the likely persona, task analysis and logical design (aka wire frame) for a mobile or web app.
With the clock ticking, the teams sprang into action. In less than 45 minutes, they had to nail the pain points, identify the real need, address all design elements (login, options, number of screens, on-boarding, billing, etc.), draw the flow diagram for building the mobile or web app and have the wire frame ready on a colorful paper chart.
The teams did a wonderful job within the short time period and got their ideas to an acceptable wire frame. They then presented how the idea was conceptualized and brought to fruition. All of them did a thorough job. Great job guys!
It was certainly an interesting exercise as noted by one of the participants on Meetup.
It was time to thank the excellent and patient PayPal team for their support, and time spent in preparing for the workshop. Thank you PayPal!
SnackExperts, founded by SLP16 alumni Arul, had thoughtfully sent across their delicious and healthy snack packets. Thank you Arul!
Credit also due to Arjjun Chander of Karya Space for generously setting aside space and the time slot at short notice.
Startup Leadership Chennai’s friend Kevin William David (who was the 1st in India to get funded by 500 Startups) was around to watch the proceedings. He graciously accepted our offer of dinner at the nearby Woodlands restaurant, as the program team took a welcome break after the culmination of four weeks of hectic Startup Leadership recruiting events.
A reminder — August 1 is the last date for applying to this year’s batch. Get your application in, if you haven’t already. The link is here. Classes start September 1st week and end in March 2017.
Come and meet the Startup Leadership team at the Startup Walk (I am a guide on Route 1 — PipeCandy, Paypal Incubator, Unmetric, Chargebee, and FutureFarms) on 21st July or on the 23rd inst. at the AI’Thon, an Artificial Intelligence Hackathon conceptualized and promoted by SLP16 Alumni Botminds and iYantras.
