
Designing for Daily Life: A UX Designer’s Perspective
Every designer I have met so far has a unique story to tell about how they grew from a young designer just out of college to their current role. I believe my story is also different and this article is my way of sharing it with the world 🤗.
In college, we learn that the UCD process is one where our users should be in the center of all our design decisions. As human beings, we experience so many things in our daily lives. Our daily routine blinds us from the various issues we see around us as it becomes our new normal. But as a designer, we should be more conscious of our surroundings and we should try and understand our environment in depth and attempt to find a solution as it won’t just help us, but also others around us who are facing a similar problem. Since my college years, I have been attempting to work on issues faced by normal beings like myself in their daily life and hope to ease the lives of everyone facing similar issues. Here are some instances I can recall where I worked on projects related to my personal life.
Travel Experience
I was a day-boarder, so I needed to travel to & from my college daily. And as I was living in a metropolitan city like Bangalore, bus transport is very convenient for students. Most of the commuters used to use the BMTC app which is managed by the local government agency that is responsible for the intercity public transport bus service. So I drafted the idea based on my experience of my daily commute and spoke to a few fellow commuters to understand their issues. Based on this research, I tried to come up with a mobile application for an easy & simplified route search for planning inter-city travel with the added advantage of having access to all other information about the local bus transport in Bangalore.
Music Sharing Experience
I often found myself bored during my daily commute as it would usually be on the same bus with the same people. So, I wondered how I could make it more fun and add some real personal interaction too amongst strangers. One of the keen observations was that a lot of people spend their time listening to music. And each person is restricted by the songs or genre or artists known to them, so it’s common for them to get bored. So, I got an idea to let the commuters to share their songs/playlists with people in their vicinity. In this way, you have the option to tune in to new playlists created by people traveling along with you, making the service fun and sociable for everyone involved.

Identify possible design intervention of absolute needs in the Kitchen area.
In another instance, I decided to focus on the kitchen experience especially when one is cooking. A common scenario is having to juggle between multiple tasks while cooking and things get burnt or spilled when you don’t do the right thing at the right moment. For example, a regular task of boiling milk in a pan requires around 5–10 minutes to be perfectly boiled so it can last longer in the fridge. But in those 10 minutes, I would also have to feed my kid or take an unexpected call from a friend and my focus is shifted from the pan. And it could lead to a mini-disaster. Hence after brainstorming, I thought of conceptualizing a “Smart Handle” that could be our assistant and help avoid such incidents.
Improve Cooking Experience with Smart Refrigerator
Similarly, one such idea was to improve the experience of the kitchen by creating a smart refrigerator with a dashboard to help you track its contents and create a personalized shopping list.

Service Design for Pregnant women
During my pregnancy, my doctor advised me to eat nutrition-rich, healthy and preferably organic food. These are not easily available and the ones I found very scared and very costly. So, I had to constantly research new services, but those were not focused on delivering to my locality. Hence as a service design project, I targeted on creating a new service focused on planning and ordering fresh organic food as per the meal chart shared by a nutritionist for a pregnant woman.
