This post was originally published in the Bootcamp:

The last time I wrote, I had just completed about a year and a little more. Between my first and my third and halfth year, a lot has happened. I moved between Startups (from logistics to fintech) & cities (from Delhi to Bengaluru & back), grew from a Product Designer to a Senior Designer, helped build a platform and an app from scratch in a very niche neo banking industry. Apart from learning to design better solutions, I’ve grown in stakeholder management, and contribute towards cultural aspects of my design team like hiring, branding, etc. Personally, I’ve never been more confident, my firefighting skills have sharpened and I’ve learned to humbly embrace human flaws. Sharing some of my learnings with you all and myself, so that I can get over my anxiety of forgetting, and make space for something new.

I’ve divided this article into two parts, the first part covering aspects particularly learned from working with Startups and making products from scratch. The second part talks more about growing as a Designer.

Building 0 ➡️ 1

Pan the breadth and then breakdown tasks.

A mismanaged timeline can be the biggest cause of stress and takes your focus away from the solution to focusing on the delivery.

Young designers often look at the problem statement from the surface and jump to give an estimated timeline. Once you actually start solving, you realize all the auxiliary flows, and the little nooks start to come in (You forgot about the notifications, didn’t you?). Almost always, product development cycles last longer than expected. Design needs to help the whole team measure the breadth of the product, in terms of user experience. This will not only achieve better timelines for design, but also for engineering efficiency, making the first cut of the product of a much higher quality.

Once tasks are broken down it’s much easier to prioritize and phase out. This becomes even more crucial when working in a hyper-accelerated startup environment, where designers and engineers may not get to be a Sprint apart, but almost parallel. In such scenarios, designers often don’t get to do a grand reveal of their envisioned Product Experience and handover with fewer feedback rounds. This only means to break down your tasks into smaller and smaller flows, thinking one API at a time.

You can’t always chase the best version of everything

When bootstrapped on time and resources, you’re going to cut corners somewhere. Sometimes, those creative juices just don’t flow! But if you’re going to cut corners, do it at a place where it’s least likely to be noticed. Look at the data on the frequency of a user experiencing a flow, fix everything with high-occurance and high impact first, and then shift focus towards areas where effort vs. impact debate starts to arrive.

At times, as designers we look at our work in isolation, with a Halo-effect, forgetting that breakthrough interaction (validation forthcoming) may not really be necessary at the MVP stage (when you’re still figuring if the idea), and it’s probably okay to follow a pattern which users are familiar with and is working well somewhere.

Framing is Everything! EVERYTHING!

While presenting as Designers, it’s important to make the audience empathize with the user. However, Framing is not just for the users, it’s also for us as storytellers to highlight the conditions and the limitations.

Walking through the process is as important as looking at the final outcome: the research method, the decision framework, the educated guesses, the resources available which helped you achieved the final result matters.

Why? From a product perspective, it helps evaluate the conditions under which one decision was made, and how close they are to the real world; it helps understand if our biases played any role, and most importantly it helps tech and product empathize with your design process. In addition to that, it also helps to understand & highlight what is required to get better data to make more informed decisions. More importantly, when working under a constraint, it helps build the path for negotiating resources, and look at design as not just a place for ‘making screens’.
Framing the narrative can make the same solution from looking crude to mindful.

Pro-Tip: When narrating, use the first names of your stakeholders in second person to build empathy with the doer: Chetty Arun

Everyone loves consistency. But…

Building a product is being for the first time, there is a lot of responsibility to get the defaults right. The defaults tend to stay much longer than anyone expects and can guide first-time user behavior, and the first impression of the application of users.

Now, as your product grows, you’re going to be adding newer flows. Existing interaction patterns can add as an anchor to what you want to build and is sometimes the easier thing to do when you’re working for speed.
But then again, sometimes we’re so busy fitting things in a box that we forget to ask ourselves if this was really the design solution, this problem needed; ask yourself because at times you’re the best person in the team to answer this Q.

Ask yourself the following questions on the approach you take while solving questions:
• Did I really explore alternatives? Or did I pick something that was the first thing to come into my mind?
• Am I building this under a recency bias?
• Is this really how users are want to use the new feature?What are the tradeoffs of curving away from it?
• Am I building the obvious? And if so at what cost?

And if you realize that there could be another better solution to the problem, go fight for it.

Getting better with Experience 🐣

Do NOT guilt-trip on feedback.

Feedback is the breakfast of the Champions! But Feedback can stir a lot of emotions. Sometimes, it brings a very new perspective towards looking at a problem, sometimes it can bring to your notice things that weren’t visible in first glance, and make you feel a bit silly for not having thought through things enough. Let’s face it, there is always this nervousness about showing your work to others; before explaining your thoughts to the audience, the tiny voice may roll its eyes and tell you “you’re stating the obvious” or “what you’re headed towards the opposite direction than intended”. I’m happy to report, that this voice only grows tiny as you keep going. As a young designer, I used to feel extremely self-critical of my work after every round of error-pointing, but I’ve been mindfully replacing ‘criticism’ with ‘improvisation’.

Some feedback may be harsh and lead to a lot of rework & longer estimates, making design a blocker. It’s easy enough to undervalue your worth with all this self-bashing and imposter syndrome. But Design is the place for healthy debate and brings to light, a lot of difficult discussion on viewing the design. It’s a point where the company can put down their vision to a product and question what they are doing. Feedback and course correction at a low-fi level is better than having to correct the product path after release.

Feedback is a perspective gained by the luxury of experience & the clarity at the end of the tunnel.

To summarise, don’t let feedback hamper your self-confidence if at all, you should take pride in the risk-mitigation that comes with the product debate, as they eventually help form the tenets of the product.

Just keep swimming.

Every time I come across a good designer or look at those who have achieved Mastery in this field, it always reminds me of so many things I‘m yet to learn; this feeling of inadequacy can be overwhelming. I know this advice almost always sounds preachy, but you must remember that every day you spend with your craft makes you better at it. From being iterative while solutioning, product thinking, and trying to not falling into thought traps, from planning and estimating to handling stakeholders. Everything gets better with persistence & experience!
I still remember my first attempts at UI. The first time, I was like oh, this is easy and I can do it. But then, when I showed my work to my seasoned batchmates, they were like “ugh….it could be better”, I didn’t agree. A few months later, when I looked at the same piece again, I was too embarrassed to have put up the attempt in my portfolio. And now, when I look back at the work from that time when I looked back at my work, I feel the same about my work from 6 months back. And that’s the thing about the experience, even without actively focusing, you tend to improve if you just keep swimming.

Leaving this video about the Design Process of Lisa Hanawalt, Creator of Bojack, at this very interesting pointer about “How it shouldn’t matter if you’re feeling good or bad about your art, the art will be good if you put the work to it”

Be realistic about deadlines and respect work-life balances

Whether you’re fresh in the industry or working in a startup where the stakes are high, you’ll want to over-commit your weekends & post-office hours to work. There may be some war-rooms worth the sacrifice, but I plead caution when walking down this territory. We sometimes may consider being successful means long and exhausting hours of toil, and it may also mean so for brief periods but, this cannot be a way of life. A successful career should mean efficiency and balance in equal proportions. If careers only reward dogged long hours, it’s not inclusive towards so many people: the Career Moms whose Nanny leaves at 8, the folks whose parents need medical attention and care, young fathers who will always miss out on their children’s young years, the people who need to give dedicated time to their sensitive health and just normal people with normal social lives and hobbies.

When one person starts committing the weekends, it becomes an unsaid rule to commit in the team. And this may lead to short-term success, but in the long run, leads to a fatigued workplace. So every time you pick your laptop on the weekend, think twice before pinging someone on slack.

Be Vocal about Culture

Till March 2020, we had only 3 women in our 20+ member team. It was a depressing number, but as uncomfortable as it was, I wrote a document about why we need to hire more women in the team, and how to do it. With this point being raised, I thought I was going to come across some awkward conversation, but the acknowledgement was most welcoming and appreciative. Since then we have 9 women in the 30 member team, which may not be a perfect ratio but definitely better than where we were previously. I want to highlight this point for two reasons:

1. Important things happen when we can have meaningful conversations. In this case, the conversation started because I was vocal about representation (despite my apprehension).
2. Great teams also empower and enable their team members. None of my courage would’ve seen the light of the day without the nudge and encouragement from my team, every step of the way. And none of this conversation would’ve turned to action if my team wasn’t a receptive and agile audience.

My current workplace Team Razorpay takes its culture very seriously, and this one example is just privy to that. Eventually, all of us make the workplace we want to work in, and hence it’s important to light our concerns.

So if you’re stressed about bad cultural practice, I urge you to talk about it. Talk to your manager, talk to your team, and talk about actionable!

With this I hope I have provided some valuable learning to you, that may make your journey in design a little bit easier. closing this long article with the most important point:

Don’t forget to have Fun!

Always happy to have the best colleagues at work Razorpay.Design, but a special mention to Saurabh Soni, Chetty Arun, Pingal Kakati & Nishant Chauhan for making work fun.

Recommend reading Keep Going by Austin Kleon, the one who made me come out of my Medium slumber and write this article.

Read my previous article on learnings from my first year in Design:

Reflecting on my first year in UX industry

Also read about the powerful interaction design of Instagram:

The powerful interaction design of Instagram stories

Survival tips after 3.5 years into the design industry was originally published in Razorpay.Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The last time I wrote, I had just completed about a year and a little more. Between my first and my third and halfth year, a lot has happened. I moved between Startups (from logistics to fintech) & cities (from Delhi to Bengaluru & back), grew from a Product Designer to a Senior Designer, helped build a platform and an app from scratch in a very niche neo banking industry. Apart from learning to design better solutions, I’ve grown in stakeholder management, and contribute towards cultural aspects of my design team like hiring, branding, etc. Personally, I’ve never been more confident, my firefighting skills have sharpened and I’ve learned to humbly embrace human flaws. Sharing some of my learnings with you all and myself, so that I can get over my anxiety of forgetting, and make space for something new.

I’ve divided this article into two parts, the first part covering aspects particularly learned from working with Startups and making products from scratch. The second part talks more about growing as a Designer.

Building 0 ➡️ 1

Pan the breadth and then breakdown tasks.

A mismanaged timeline can be the biggest cause of stress and takes your focus away from the solution to focusing on the delivery.

Young designers often look at the problem statement from the surface and jump to give an estimated timeline. Once you actually start solving, you realize all the auxiliary flows, and the little nooks start to come in (You forgot about the notifications, didn’t you?). Almost always, product development cycles last longer than expected. Design needs to help the whole team measure the breadth of the product, in terms of user experience. This will not only achieve better timelines for design, but also for engineering efficiency, making the first cut of the product of a much higher quality.

Once tasks are broken down it’s much easier to prioritize and phase out. This becomes even more crucial when working in a hyper-accelerated startup environment, where designers and engineers may not get to be a Sprint apart, but almost parallel. In such scenarios, designers often don’t get to do a grand reveal of their envisioned Product Experience and handover with fewer feedback rounds. This only means to break down your tasks into smaller and smaller flows, thinking one API at a time.

You can’t always chase the best version of everything

When bootstrapped on time and resources, you’re going to cut corners somewhere. Sometimes, those creative juices just don’t flow! But if you’re going to cut corners, do it at a place where it's least likely to be noticed. Look at the data on the frequency of a user experiencing a flow, fix everything with high-occurance and high impact first, and then shift focus towards areas where effort vs. impact debate starts to arrive.

At times, as designers we look at our work in isolation, with a Halo-effect, forgetting that breakthrough interaction (validation forthcoming) may not really be necessary at the MVP stage (when you’re still figuring if the idea), and it's probably okay to follow a pattern which users are familiar with and is working well somewhere.

Framing is Everything! EVERYTHING!

While presenting as Designers, it’s important to make the audience empathize with the user. However, Framing is not just for the users, it’s also for us as storytellers to highlight the conditions and the limitations.

Walking through the process is as important as looking at the final outcome: the research method, the decision framework, the educated guesses, the resources available which helped you achieved the final result matters.

Why? From a product perspective, it helps evaluate the conditions under which one decision was made, and how close they are to the real world; it helps understand if our biases played any role, and most importantly it helps tech and product empathize with your design process. In addition to that, it also helps to understand & highlight what is required to get better data to make more informed decisions. More importantly, when working under a constraint, it helps build the path for negotiating resources, and look at design as not just a place for ‘making screens’.
Framing the narrative can make the same solution from looking crude to mindful.

Pro-Tip: When narrating, use the first names of your stakeholders in second person to build empathy with the doer: Chetty Arun

Everyone loves consistency. But…

Building a product is being for the first time, there is a lot of responsibility to get the defaults right. The defaults tend to stay much longer than anyone expects and can guide first-time user behavior, and the first impression of the application of users.

Now, as your product grows, you’re going to be adding newer flows. Existing interaction patterns can add as an anchor to what you want to build and is sometimes the easier thing to do when you’re working for speed.
But then again, sometimes we’re so busy fitting things in a box that we forget to ask ourselves if this was really the design solution, this problem needed; ask yourself because at times you’re the best person in the team to answer this Q.

Ask yourself the following questions on the approach you take while solving questions:
• Did I really explore alternatives? Or did I pick something that was the first thing to come into my mind?
• Am I building this under a recency bias?
• Is this really how users are want to use the new feature?What are the tradeoffs of curving away from it?
• Am I building the obvious? And if so at what cost?

And if you realize that there could be another better solution to the problem, go fight for it.

Getting better with Experience 🐣

Do NOT guilt-trip on feedback.

Feedback is the breakfast of the Champions! But Feedback can stir a lot of emotions. Sometimes, it brings a very new perspective towards looking at a problem, sometimes it can bring to your notice things that weren’t visible in first glance, and make you feel a bit silly for not having thought through things enough. Let’s face it, there is always this nervousness about showing your work to others; before explaining your thoughts to the audience, the tiny voice may roll its eyes and tell you “you’re stating the obvious” or “what you’re headed towards the opposite direction than intended”. I’m happy to report, that this voice only grows tiny as you keep going. As a young designer, I used to feel extremely self-critical of my work after every round of error-pointing, but I’ve been mindfully replacing ‘criticism’ with ‘improvisation’.

Some feedback may be harsh and lead to a lot of rework & longer estimates, making design a blocker. It’s easy enough to undervalue your worth with all this self-bashing and imposter syndrome. But Design is the place for healthy debate and brings to light, a lot of difficult discussion on viewing the design. It’s a point where the company can put down their vision to a product and question what they are doing. Feedback and course correction at a low-fi level is better than having to correct the product path after release.

Feedback is a perspective gained by the luxury of experience & the clarity at the end of the tunnel.

To summarise, don’t let feedback hamper your self-confidence if at all, you should take pride in the risk-mitigation that comes with the product debate, as they eventually help form the tenets of the product.

Just keep swimming.

Every time I come across a good designer or look at those who have achieved Mastery in this field, it always reminds me of so many things I‘m yet to learn; this feeling of inadequacy can be overwhelming. I know this advice almost always sounds preachy, but you must remember that every day you spend with your craft makes you better at it. From being iterative while solutioning, product thinking, and trying to not falling into thought traps, from planning and estimating to handling stakeholders. Everything gets better with persistence & experience!
I still remember my first attempts at UI. The first time, I was like oh, this is easy and I can do it. But then, when I showed my work to my seasoned batchmates, they were like “ugh….it could be better”, I didn’t agree. A few months later, when I looked at the same piece again, I was too embarrassed to have put up the attempt in my portfolio. And now, when I look back at the work from that time when I looked back at my work, I feel the same about my work from 6 months back. And that’s the thing about the experience, even without actively focusing, you tend to improve if you just keep swimming.

Leaving this video about the Design Process of Lisa Hanawalt, Creator of Bojack, at this very interesting pointer about “How it shouldn’t matter if you’re feeling good or bad about your art, the art will be good if you put the work to it”

Be realistic about deadlines and respect work-life balances

Whether you’re fresh in the industry or working in a startup where the stakes are high, you’ll want to over-commit your weekends & post-office hours to work. There may be some war-rooms worth the sacrifice, but I plead caution when walking down this territory. We sometimes may consider being successful means long and exhausting hours of toil, and it may also mean so for brief periods but, this cannot be a way of life. A successful career should mean efficiency and balance in equal proportions. If careers only reward dogged long hours, it’s not inclusive towards so many people: the Career Moms whose Nanny leaves at 8, the folks whose parents need medical attention and care, young fathers who will always miss out on their children’s young years, the people who need to give dedicated time to their sensitive health and just normal people with normal social lives and hobbies.

When one person starts committing the weekends, it becomes an unsaid rule to commit in the team. And this may lead to short-term success, but in the long run, leads to a fatigued workplace. So every time you pick your laptop on the weekend, think twice before pinging someone on slack.

Be Vocal about Culture

Till March 2020, we had only 3 women in our 20+ member team. It was a depressing number, but as uncomfortable as it was, I wrote a document about why we need to hire more women in the team, and how to do it. With this point being raised, I thought I was going to come across some awkward conversation, but the acknowledgement was most welcoming and appreciative. Since then we have 9 women in the 30 member team, which may not be a perfect ratio but definitely better than where we were previously. I want to highlight this point for two reasons:

1. Important things happen when we can have meaningful conversations. In this case, the conversation started because I was vocal about representation (despite my apprehension).
2. Great teams also empower and enable their team members. None of my courage would’ve seen the light of the day without the nudge and encouragement from my team, every step of the way. And none of this conversation would’ve turned to action if my team wasn’t a receptive and agile audience.

My current workplace Team Razorpay takes its culture very seriously, and this one example is just privy to that. Eventually, all of us make the workplace we want to work in, and hence it’s important to light our concerns.

So if you’re stressed about bad cultural practice, I urge you to talk about it. Talk to your manager, talk to your team, and talk about actionable!

With this I hope I have provided some valuable learning to you, that may make your journey in design a little bit easier. closing this long article with the most important point:

Don’t forget to have Fun!

Always happy to have the best colleagues at work Razorpay.Design, but a special mention to Saurabh Soni, Chetty Arun, Pingal Kakati & Nishant Chauhan for making work fun.

Recommend reading Keep Going by Austin Kleon, the one who made me come out of my Medium slumber and write this article.

Read my previous article on learnings from my first year in Design:

Reflecting on my first year in UX industry

Survival tips after 3.5 years into the design industry was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It more than just following the principles

In 2012, Mark Zuckerberg wanted to buy Snapchat. Evan Spiegal (CEO and Co-Founder) declined. Snapchat was still a new kid on the block which had caught attention in the west, but had a notorious reputation, and Facebook was still a default.

In 2016, when Instagram introduced Stories, I didn’t understand why, I mean Instagram was for posts and we already had Snapchat! Snapchat was in its prime; from sharing mundane nuances like my food with a friend, to new comedians emerging from behind those AR filters, Snapchat was raging. For most of us, Snapchat was kind of a private space with selected friends. I dismissed Insta-stories on my first reflex, because who wanted to publish the banalities of my life to such a large audience.

In 2019, stories have become the omnipresent interaction tool of every app owned by Facebook (Instagram, Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp), and now extending to other apps like YouTube and Google Photos, Spotify wrapped. Snapchat is the skeleton in everyone’s app drawer & Instagram is making more revenue from its ads on stories than on ads on its scroll.

What has made this simple interaction tool so powerful? It is all in the design of this highly addictive tool, psychologically engineered at every level to give a dopamine rush.

Capitalising on the smartphone

The first social media was on the web and engagement was primarily through a laptop or a desktop, but ever since smartphones came in, it’s been on our fingertips. By virtue of the smartphone’s form, content creation as well as consumption of picture based content has significantly risen. This is not just because of better cameras and their accessibility but also because of higher immersion with larger screen space. Thus a shift from predominantly text-based content which was more popular during the early days of the internet(blogs and forums) to picture based media (Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest).

Apart from technology enablement, cognitively too, its easier to consume images than attentively read text. Stories break away from the traditional gestalt’s principle of continuity, and engage with the user once story at a time, and allow deeper immersion in just 7 seconds (15 secs for a video), by using all of the screen space. Stories is one of the few interaction patterns that is built mobile first as compared to the scroll-based interaction which came as a legacy from the desktop.

Power of Gestures

If you’d see the construct of the story-creator tool as well as the consumption tool, all buttons are transcluscent, unlike a loud CTA prompt. There is no forward or back button or even an arrow to indicate it, apart from the tiny timer on top. Almost all actions are under a derived from swipe gestures (legacy: Tinder), making them part of your muscle memory. This non-intrusiveness of buttons adds to the immersion into the picture, and reduce any cognitive overload of reading while posting or browsing.

The minimal photo editing filters are carefully sitting under swipes, rather than a carousel to pick from, so as to rely more on your intuition of what looks good or what doesn’t. All text additions are done from a limited range of fonts. Users not spending too much time editing is very likely to lead less abandonment of their …‘Snapsterpieces’, thus pushing users to create in a single frame rather than the three-step progressive disclosure format on Instagram posts.

Content

In our minds, stories are effervescent and thus should be as spontaneous as possible. Its capturing our life in real-time from a party we attended to a flower we came across, as compared to old-school posts that are more r̶e̶t̶r̶o̶s̶p̶e̶c̶t̶i̶v̶e̶ throwback in nature. This allows anyone to put in anything, from badly sung songs from a karaoke party to morning selfies to EVERY moment from the vacation. You can put in anything and everything. (The side-effects of this have been talked about enough, so I’m not going there)

This removes a lot of psychological barriers on what image are users presenting a large audience and the judgement around it, and to what can be more acceptable on the content stream, thus giving higher freedom of content.

To build on top of this Instagram has added a range of other engagement formats allow you to take quizzes and polls or AMA’s which makes users not only contributing to their friends survey about Beach vs. Mountains but even ask their favourite celebs on ‘What is their opinion on XYZ matter’.

Because its always gonna be 7 seconds, its the perfect ad space for anything (even your own life), and from there you can redirect anyone with piked interested to other places like a blog or a youtube video and so on.

& Engagement

After all this picture taking, engagement is the reason, we’re posting in the first place; the dopamine rush to have anyone respond to your social cue makes the entire effort worthwhile. Stories optimise even there by going reaction-first and type second, which allow even passive observers to engage as quickly as possible rather than spend time typing in detail. Thus more reacts are created with ease, alongside communicating with the creator of the content in privacy. The privacy bit is also important here, because the moment you remove the stigma of being seen by others, it also reduces the need of being politically 100% correct, and adds on psychological safety and intimacy of 1:1 conversations.

But what if you didn’t get a react? Cause maybe the story was very meh? This too has been overcome, cause you know someone is watching from that tiny icon full of viewers. The impact of this icon is mighty though, as Instagram is a social media platform more than just a picture sharing one, it satiates the self-expression by validating visibility. So you know, that its never going to be that no one’s watching, and we do know that we like being watched when we can dictate the narrative…

The Unending Stream

By now you already know, that stories are a carousel of back-to-back full-frame pictures, where each user (& advertiser) add their frame to this unending carousel. You never run out of content because you’re looped to the start till someone adds something again. The frames move on their own, without you putting an effort (or thought) to scroll, and keep you raptured like watching a movie.
If something catches fancy, you can hold the frame for as long as you want, and you may want to do that, because maybe you won’t see this story again after it’s 24 hours. Because you never know how many stories will you be provided, you’re consumed by a FOMO, hooked in the truest sense, and thus making it the number one space for advertisers to reach to you.

So as you see, the design of stories could not have come up with a traditional approach but rather a highly technical understanding of psyche, cognition and hooking models, and a radical approach to design. This simple interaction tool is powerful and wicked genius at the same time, to enable a business of ads under the garb of a photo-sharing app .

Other Notes:

So I’ve talked a lot about how Instagram stories are designed to be addictive. And since enough has already been talked about the ‘act of picture-taking’ elsewhere, I wanted to talk about how the format of stories has leveraged a change in our behaviour.

Versatility of Progressive Disclosure

Since its onset, Instagram stories has undergone subtle changes but a lot of improvements came from how users started coming up with creative ways to use this space. The multiple story format allows you to use progressive disclosure, and I see ingenuity in how a lot of pro-hobbyists and media accounts are using it, to break large stories into small bytes of consumable information.

Listing a few of my favorites here:

1. Comics by Evan Mc.Cohen
2. Wired’s flow chart format in stories
3. Atlantic’s weekly quiz
4. Wired’s/ Atlantic’s/ New Yorker’s weekly headlines

Bye-Bye Landscapes

While on my recent vacation, I noticed a change of my behaviour towards taking pictures of vast sceneries, I held my phone in portrait mode, even for videos. Why? Because the portrait mode is the default layout for any phone. One may even observe a trend in video creators who have started working on vertical content because that meme has become outdated, and if we’re gonna see everything is portrait mostly, then it’s time to adapt.

About Highlights

While we’ve talked about effervescence of stories, there exist Highlights, which let you preserve certain memories forever on your profile, or share them as a post. The entire idea of preserving something for others to see it and form a perception of us, is the part of exhibitionism we’re indulging in. Because eventually, Instagram stories is the advertisement of our lives, and we want to build as well as dictate the narrative on who we want others to see us as, thus handpicking aspects of our own personality we like, be it hobby paintings or travel memories. Would it be surprising if in the future, the Instagram profile prioritises its layout towards highlights than posts? I don’t know yet, but won’t dismiss the possibility.

What happens next?

Facebook is betting big on these stories, and we know that because there is a separate tab for it on WhatsApp and a lot more real-estate on Facebook than ever before. But does this push for replacing the scroll format entirely, just because it’s more engaging? Will there be a hybrid format which includes posts and stories? Only more time on Instagram can tell.

The powerful interaction design of Instagram stories was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A large part of my summer memories are accompanied with a high-pitched version of ‘And I love her’ by the Beatles. ‘High-pitched?’, you ask… Its because it was a recording of a recording of a recording of a….

Cassettes those days were costly and songs were a prized possessions borrowed from friend, who shared it with you because it was a gem they wanted to show-off. I remember cassettes collected after putting pennies together, waiting for the big release. The fast forward buttons on the Walkman were tiring, and thus the song didn’t last just 3 minutes, it lasted a whole damn hour. Lyrics were carefully crafted by songwriters and written listeners alike. I remember looping this one line, a hundred times to make sure I heard that metaphor correct, and put it to paper, to never forget. Songs were not just a singular entity, pelted one after the other to keep you interested like they are today, but carefully curated to build a mood, a story with a melody, an experience.

Someone once told me, there are two kinds of people in the world: the ones who listen to songs and the other who listen to bands, and the latter were more sincere with their fandoms and commitments. I’m not sure if its true, but I wonder can you even call yourself a ‘Metalhead’ if you can’t list down more than 10 songs from Metallica?

Cut the chase to early 2000’s. MP3’s and limewires are in vogue. The internet though, was still a sluggy dial-up with 1GB limit. As a teen, I resorted to writing a whole lot of mp3’s, to never ever lose a song which got stuck in head for more than a day. Back then, I was heavily into punk rock, it was great to feel things as I looked outside the window to contemplate, or to scream with when I felt angsty, and this rebel girl had hella lotta angst. It was also the age of discovery of a lot of underground music, versions of covers accidentally downloaded over a p2p network or a small band that composed an OST for a film. With lot more memory space in mp3’s, all was written down and then discovered by a classmate and progressed to end up on their iPod/mp3player.

As the decade progressed, and music accessibility became a whole lot easier with cheaper internet, torrents and YouTube. I struggled to keep my music as underground, a genre that was mine, a song that was personal. I struggled hard because you see it was also an era of bad remixes of perfectly good songs. And I guess I hate ‘things’ becoming mainstream, because crowds dilute sanctity, and rip-off meaning for ‘just another’ dance number, and I didn’t want that to happen to my song. There was still some ownership. So I shared these bands with only a handful of people, people who would ‘get it’. And I not only shared the band, I shared the bond with them, as they shared their bands with me, and it was sharing a little self-piece, something you identified yourself with.

They say you can tell a lot about a person by looking at their playlist, I wonder what can you tell from mine? (Movie Lost Stars, anyone?)

Speaking of crowds, has singing along in concert left you with goosebumps? I remember getting mine for the first time, in a quaint little hill-town by my favourite artists; there is something magical about a bunch of people coming out of their homes, just to watch a band perform live, and sing to the much-loved numbers in unison, feeling the same emotion as everyone else in the room(or an arena?). If you ask me, its beautiful, to relate a bunch of strangers, you have no connection with, but this one song. There is something about belonging, a crowd of people you can identify yourself with. They don’t make music like that anymore, do they?

I don’t know when exactly did the transition happen though, I don’t know when exactly I stopped hunting free downloads of music from the internet and started streaming music everywhere. New music applications have sprung up everywhere and started tailoring playlists according your mood; (remember when 8tracks was a thing? and they allowed you to find playlist for sad + sexy, also Spotify has a playlist called a cup of lo-fi) and suddenly my open office setting and the innumerable hours on the road has made a music like a background thing. While I’m listening to a whole lot of new artists everyday, I kind of don’t remember most of them, because everything sounds like some ambient white noise I zone the world out with. And while there is internet everywhere, everybody is using a different streaming application and thus no one shares songs anymore, they just tag you to a playlist (sometimes, rare); the native smartphone music player is long dead. Honestly, my favourite music is not even on the same application anymore; its on 5 different platforms because apparently the Arctic Monkeys don’t like Amazon Prime and maybe the Beatles decided not to publish this one album on Airtel Wynk and so on…

Music has changed, and so has my attention span….I can’t even remember the last time I listened to an entire album, or knew my lyrics by heart because user drop-offs is a thing which exists between songs, the stream is infinite, and the skip button is damn easy to press, its not even tactile anymore.

Recently I thought I’ll take part in a social media fad, a #30daysongchallenge, and I was caught at a loss of things to say. And just about when I thought I had lost my title of ‘aficionado of melancholy feels music’, I’m asked to handle the playlist at a party in the wee hours of the night or on while on a road-trip, when everyone has run out of things to talk about, I can only think of playing the age-old timeless numbers by the likes of Kishore Kumar and more, a song all of us could fetch the lyrics for in a jiffy from the recesses of our hearts.

Mixtape B-sides was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Listing pages are a common method of number crunching and analysing data inventories. They are versatile showing different attributes of a data set, collected from various sources, at a single place (Think of a single excel sheet that is bound to grow forever). Often when we start collecting information, we have a few attributes to begin, and as we scale, we keep adding more data points to that existing set, which maybe sourced from various places.

Enterprise software users end up using these pages full of critical information through the day. Having a nicely designed page helps in better usability by aiding decision making and reduces cognitive fatigue and errors. Here are some tips one can keep in mind, before starting to design this software and make you sail through the process with a breeze:

1.Decide your unique identifier for each data entry:

A unique identifier helps demarcate one set of data from the other and helps in decision making process. When dealing with multiple attributes associated with a single data entry, there maybe no single entity which can make a data entry unique, but a combination of attributes may make each data entry unique. This will help in making this entry actionable. Additionally, you can add one or two variable entities which can help in decision making for a data entry. Overall, the list should not have more than 5 entities per data entry.

2. Remove Information:
On opening a software, if we’re barraged with too much information, we feel overwhelmed and feel the software is too complex; we don’t know where to begin. Furthermore, this increases the on-boarding-time for new users, before they can actually start working on these softwares with efficiency and confidence. For this purpose, we can keep the unique identifier of the data on top and nest rest everything that does not satisfy the primary use case. This also reduces the server load, as instead of fetching everything in one go, it fetches information as and when required. Here, apart from using secondary pages, you can also use an array of interaction tools like nested lists, popovers and drawers for convenience, and when you want to reduce time in switching between data entries.
A lot depends on what is the decision making process of your users based on context. A listing page in shopping website will be inherently different from a listing page of a troubleshooting for a client servicing team.

3. Group information:
Information of similar kind, can be grouped into categories and fetched together. Depending on your use context, you can call out separate buckets of information. Colour can be used to indicate buckets of information, where the groups are finite. For example status of an aircraft can be arrived, departed, boarding, each status could be in a separate colour. Also think of using UI elements like tags and badges, which help in picking up information in a single glance from the rest due to its form factor. If these are being acted upon separately, you can use tabs to segregate these buckets and then add context-specific actions and insights.

4. Actions:
Based on the context, you may want users to make some quick actions per data entry or bulk actions for a group of data entries. For this purpose, you may want to keep some extra space to add these buttons (which maybe full text or just icons). Simultaneously, you may want to hide these actions on the first glimpse and disclose them on hover or in an ellipses. Since users read from left to right, it is advisable to add these actions on the right end of the row, so that you are aware that they have consumed the information before performing the action.

Scale these actions to bulk actions to allow agility.

5. The Controls: Sorts, Searches, and Filters:
A list, by default is always populated on a sort logic. Additionally users like to sort items on different attributes; these attributes need to visible in the first glimpse, and the logic of the sort should always be visible to the user.
Filters can help in decision making in case of looking for data with a particular criteria, often by nulling out information that doesn’t fit that criteria. Commonly used criteria qualify for quick filters.
A search is a case of looking for a particular entity, and is exactly the opposite of filters. You can reduce the time taken to search for items with autocomplete suggestions. It also helps to combine the search field for multiple attributes into a single field, where the naming convention can help distinguish different kind of data. There are times when one cannot specifically separate out a search from a filter, and typing in the information maybe easier than looking for, and hence the search and a filter should be placed nearby.
On a data set with a lot of search attributes, it makes sense to hide the lesser used searches and filters in an advanced search, so as to not make the page look overwhelming with controls and reduce complexity.

6. Help in readability, navigation and where you are placed in the entire system:
With so much of information upfront, it can be difficult to focus on a single row of data. Highlighting the data on hover can help users focus on the data entry. Moreover, while browsing through all this information, one may feel lost on where they are placed in the list and thus it helps to give an identifier through the information, for example, the no. of items one has browsed (use in case of infinite scroll), or the page no. in the total no. of pages and total no. of results generated. Additionally, if user selects something on top of the list and moved to the bottom of the list, indicate the selection on the interface. Help users bookmark information through large amounts of data.

7. Think of other formats this data maybe consumed;
These lists maybe shared over the internet, copied or downloaded for other softwares or saved for later reference, therefore allow the data to be consumed in different formats.

8. Account for bad data, exceptional cases:
Truncate information incase of longer than usual , account for bad data and data inconsistencies which may arise while fetching data from different formats. For example what happens when you get a name with three parts when your entry field only requires First and Last Name.

And that is it! You take it forward from here and go ahead make that enterprise software kickass.

If you found this article helpful, hit a clap or more to make it reachable for more people.

You may also like to read my article on my first year in the UX industry here.

This article is also a part of Delhivery Design Blog.

Building for listing pages in enterprise software was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A primer for anyone new here.

After two years of hardcore Design school, I finally stepped into the industry. I thought I knew how it goes, after all, I had been a good student all my life. But no amount of straight A’s can prepare you for what lies ahead in the industry, though it may definitely help to know your theory inside out. I made a list of things I learnt, and I thought it could be a nice hand-me-down to an anxious fresher in the industry.

1. Iterate quickly, build for the Minimal Viable Product (MVP), think to scale.
   When I joined the product company I am working with, I was apprehensive that would I be out of things to do, what after a product is launched? Do I sit there, and browse the internet till a quick fix comes by? The interview panel had smiled at my naive question. This is something we’re not taught in college, we usually live with one idea and present it to the jury and then move on to the next project there. Cut the chase, today everyone in our team is handling at least three projects: an upcoming venture, something you’re working on right now, and evaluating something thats running in the market. Our hands are always full. This is because unlike college, great products are not built overnight, but in a lot of versions and releases. Visions and scenarios of each product changes by the time we reach our first vision and its time to build again, and scale up for new things. The work is never over, you will always find something to improve upon.
2. Designers are facilitators of discussions between stakeholders for usability, feasibility and vision.
   As much as we like to work in isolation with just designers, our job will be to coordinate between Project Managers, Devs, Clients, Users, and every other stakeholder of our product. And no design would be complete without all these being on the same page/table. Hence, we’ll be doing a lot of conversations, some difficult ones and some exciting ones. Without these conversations, most product designs will only dwarf at prototype level, which is something you don’t want to see.
3. Be a nice person.
   It is as awkward for the person infront of you to tell you what they need, as for you to ask it. Its important for anyone in front of you to be comfortable, and for you to seem approachable and not condescending to their pain points. Being a nice person doesn’t mean you need to shower everyone around you with rewards and chocolates, it just means you need to be empathetic with everyone and their journeys.
4. Be open to learning and criticism.
   You can’t please everyone, but you can certainly achieve a benchmark. A lot of design criticism will happen inside the team and outside. While not everyone will tell you everything useful, value their intention and filter out honest feedback, which you could do by listing your own pros and cons first, and confirming it with others. Feedback can feel harsh at times, but its nothing personal, so don’t feel disheartened.
5. Thought Leadership > Computer Skillsets.
   While computer skills can give you an immense head start to saving your time, and upgrade your quality of work to a huge extent, thought leadership and management skills will take you to greater places. Reason being simple, skillsets can be bought at a much lower cost than thought leadership. New ideas and deeper understanding isn’t too easy to find; in fact it is probably your biggest skillset.
6. You will wear many hats.
   Unless you’re working in a ‘very’ big company like Google/ Microsoft, more often than not you will be wearing all the hats on the design table. This will mean that even if your core competency is interaction design, you will also be working on visuals. Often as you grow with a product from MVP level to version 2 or 3, you will need to learn which design research methods work for your product. You will conduct usability studies yourself, you will be your own data scientist, you may even code/animate, depending on your role. Be flexible.
7. Work on paper.
   A lot of your work will happen on paper a lot of your ideas will get killed on paper too. When I joined the industry, I felt too conscious of working on paper too long, when all other teams tapped away their laptop keys (open office?). I like using stationary and scrawl notes and afterthoughts, all over the place. I think I was also too intimidated by showing these rough scribbles to people around me (because they weren’t as beautiful as they were expected out of a designer). I started skipping this practice, when I wanted to look like I’m doing ‘actual’ work, and often jumped to digitising my flow as soon as possible. BAD IDEA. While working the solution in your head, you are likely to think in chunks, on paper is when you put those pieces together (quick and dirty), skipping this step is likely to waste a lot of time as you get warped into polishing details than putting those chunks together.
8. Document everything.
   A lot things will be said over conversation or an afterthoughts to meetings. You may or may not remember everything, and so to those around you. So often the product is made, and no one remembers why exactly certain decisions were made . Onboarding new people without documentation also becomes a huge task, as no one knows who should they talk to, for what detail. There might be good ideas floating, which could work for your v2’s, but no one remembers. Hence, document everything, take pictures, send m.o.m’s, be as quick about this as all this information is as ephemeral as your memory about what you ate yesterday for breakfast.
9. Read a lot, bring imagination and foresight to the table.
   You don’t need to just look at design books for inspiration, honestly design books can be repetitive and full of jargon after a while. But if you look up allied fields for inspiration, you will never run out. Read science fiction for example, or economic theory or history or psychology. You can never run out of ideas if you’re always fascinated with the vast universe of knowledge around you.
10. There are multiple sources of truth.
    While dealing with multiple stakeholders, you will find multiple sources of truth. But it is important to find them all and accommodate them all. These are the use cases which your Business Requirement Document (BRD) does not cover, these are the use cases that come from visiting the ground, and observing users. While often your BRD may seem very straightforward, I would always suggest you that no matter how ruthless your timeline is, if you’re not able to accommodate a full blown research, you must always take 15 minutes to talk to an actual user about their process and their expectations from a product.
11. Design is in the details. Design is in the big picture.
    While big pictures are important for designers, to make room for scaling up, a lot of experience design is in the details of interaction and visuals. Its a kind of detail design school never taught us too well, because we usually talked about big pictures. But in order to make pretty big pictures, industry requires you to develop that eye for detail, even if you’re not building those details. Consistency across these details, makes the picture glitch-free.
12. Enterprise UX is a different ball game. While most of the internet is abuzz with fancy interfaces full of colours, a majority of tech industry is involved in building products which aren’t necessarily customer facing and may involve simplifying extremely complex processes to the larger audience. This side of UX isn’t much talked about, this isn’t always about direct conversions and user delight, and may be referred to ‘boring’ by most college students. However, no matter how complex the problem, it is our job to simplify it.

Originally these pointers were a part of an interactive session conducted with my juniors in B.Des, at IIT Guwahati( November 2017). The response there was good, so I thought I’ll add more to my list from there on. If you would like me to add anymore insights to the list, hit me up with the comments section below or on the notes.

A huge shoutout to Avisek Bhattacharya , Anulal VS, Asif Zaidi at @ Delhivery Design for helping me wade through the industry. ☺

This article has also been published at UX Collective and Delhivery Design blog.

Reflecting on my first year in UX industry was originally published in Prototypr on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A primer for anyone new here.

After two years of hardcore Design school, I finally stepped into the industry. I thought I knew how it goes, after all, I had been a good student all my life. But no amount of straight A’s can prepare you for what lies ahead in the industry, though it may definitely help to know your theory inside out. I made a list of things I learnt, and I thought it could be a nice hand-me-down to an anxious fresher in the industry.

1. Iterate quickly, build for the Minimal Viable Product (MVP), think to scale.
   When I joined the product company I am working with, I was apprehensive that would I be out of things to do, what after a product is launched? Do I sit there, and browse the internet till a quick fix comes by? The interview panel had smiled at my naive question. This is something we’re not taught in college, we usually live with one idea and present it to the jury and then move on to the next project there. Cut the chase, today everyone in our team is handling at least three projects: an upcoming venture, something you’re working on right now, and evaluating something thats running in the market. Our hands are always full. This is because unlike college, great products are not built overnight, but in a lot of versions and releases. Visions and scenarios of each product changes by the time we reach our first vision and its time to build again, and scale up for new things. The work is never over, you will always find something to improve upon.
2. Designers are facilitators of discussions between stakeholders for usability, feasibility and vision.
   As much as we like to work in isolation with just designers, our job will be to coordinate between, Project Managers, Devs, Clients, Users, and every other stakeholder of our product. And no design would be complete without all these being on the same page/table. Hence, we’ll be doing a lot of conversations, some difficult ones and some exciting ones. Without these conversations, most product designs will only dwarf at prototype level, which is something you don’t want to see.
3. Be a nice person.
   It is as awkward for the person infront of you to tell you what they need, as for you to ask it. Its important for anyone in front of you to be comfortable, and for you to seem approachable and not condescending to their pain points. Being a nice person doesn’t mean you need to shower everyone around you with rewards and chocolates, it just means you need to be empathetic with everyone and their journeys.
4. Be open to learning and criticism.
   You can’t please everyone, but you can certainly achieve a benchmark. A lot of design criticism will happen inside the team and outside. While not everyone will tell you everything useful, value their intention and filter out honest feedback, which you could do by listing your own pros and cons first, and confirming it with others. Feedback can feel harsh at times, but its nothing personal, so don’t feel disheartened.
5. Thought Leadership > Computer Skillsets.
   While computer skills can give you an immense head start to saving your time, and upgrade your quality of work to a huge extent, thought leadership and management skills will take you to greater places. Reason being simple, skillsets can be bought at a much lower cost than thought leadership. New ideas and deeper understanding isn’t too easy to find; in fact it is probably your biggest skillset.
6. You will wear many hats.
   Unless you’re working in a ‘very’ big company like Google/ Microsoft, more often than not you will be wearing all the hats on the design table. This will mean that even if your core competency is interaction design, you will also be working on visuals. Often as you grow with a product from MVP level to version 2 or 3, you will need to learn which design research methods work for your product. You will conduct usability studies yourself, you will be your own data scientist, you may even code/animate, depending on your role. Be flexible.
7. Work on paper.
   A lot of your work will happen on paper a lot of your ideas will get killed on paper too. When I joined the industry, I felt too conscious of working on paper too long, when all other teams tapped away their laptop keys (open office?). I like using stationary and scrawl notes and afterthoughts, all over the place. I think I was also too intimidated by showing these rough scribbles to people around me (because they weren’t as beautiful as they were expected out of a designer). I started skipping this practice, when I wanted to look like I’m doing ‘actual’ work, and often jumped to digitising my flow as soon as possible. BAD IDEA. While working the solution in your head, you are likely to think in chunks, on paper is when you put those pieces together (quick and dirty), skipping this step is likely to waste a lot of time as you get warped into polishing details than putting those chunks together.
8. Document everything.
   A lot things will be said over conversation or an afterthoughts to meetings. You may or may not remember everything, and so to those around you. So often the product is made, and no one remembers why exactly certain decisions were made . Onboarding new people without documentation also becomes a huge task, as no one knows who should they talk to, for what detail. There might be good ideas floating, which could work for your v2’s, but no one remembers. Hence, document everything, take pictures, send m.o.m’s, be as quick about this as all this information is as ephemeral as your memory about what you ate yesterday for breakfast.
9. Read a lot, bring imagination and foresight to the table.
   You don’t need to just look at design books for inspiration, honestly design books can be repetitive and full of jargon after a while. But if you look up allied fields for inspiration, you will never run out. Read science fiction for example, or economic theory or history or psychology. You can never run out of ideas if you’re always fascinated with the vast universe of knowledge around you.
10. There are multiple sources of truth.
    While dealing with multiple stakeholders, you will find multiple sources of truth. But it is important to find them all and accommodate them all. These are the use cases which your Business Requirement Document (BRD) does not cover, these are the use cases that come from visiting the ground, and observing users. While often your BRD may seem very straightforward, I would always suggest you that no matter how ruthless your timeline is, if you’re not able to accommodate a full blown research, you must always take 15 minutes to talk to an actual user about their process and their expectations from a product.
11. Design is in the details. Design is in the big picture.
    While big pictures are important for designers, to make room for scaling up, a lot of experience design is in the details of interaction and visuals. Its a kind of detail design school never taught us too well, because we usually talked about big pictures. But in order to make pretty big pictures, industry requires you to develop that eye for detail, even if you’re not building those details. Consistency across these details, makes the picture glitch-free.
12. Enterprise UX is a different ball game. While most of the internet is abuzz with fancy interfaces full of colours, a majority of tech industry is involved in building products which aren’t necessarily customer facing and may involve simplifying extremely complex processes to the larger audience. This side of UX isn’t much talked about, this isn’t always about direct conversions and user delight, and may be referred to ‘boring’ by most college students. However, no matter how complex the problem, it is our job to simplify it.

Read my learnings as I complete 3.5 years in the industry:

Survival tips after 3.5 years into the design industry

Originally these pointers were a part of an interactive session conducted with my juniors in B.Des, at IIT Guwahati( Nov 2017) (Thankyou Abhishek Sir for that opportunity). The response there was good, so I thought I’ll add more to my list from there on. If you would like me to add anymore insights to the list, hit me up with the comments section below or on the notes.

A huge shoutout to Avisek Bhattacharya , Anulal VS at @ Delhivery Design for helping me wade through the industry. ☺

Reflecting on my first year in UX industry was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

‘Data killed my Desire’ is series of opinions putting across the shortfalls of tech as it tries to cater to our changing needs, frustrations and expectations(?). Its a dissection of whether our lifestyles have been influenced with the plethora of applications, and whether in the future technology could replace traditional approaches of mankind. This particular article talks about the changing dating scenario, and if we UX guys are to blame for it? Or are we looking for the wrong things?

“Its a Match” — Dating via Data:

Tinder has become a buzzword in the recent times, as we have started looking towards technology to fulfill our needs for love and lust. As a tech enthusiast and someone who was looking for some adventure and likes to conduct social experiments(that is another story), I tried Tinder for a day ; my profile always read- “Doing UX Research, Swipe Right at your own risk.”. Within a lot of swipes left and a odd number right, I picked a date with someone whose interests were similar to mine, we chatted quite a bit before we decided to address the elephant in the room and negotiate the date to what, when and where to finally meet in person. To my surprise, our conversations didn’t hit off as expected. There were decent amount of awkward silences, and generic interview lines to keep us through dinner, and both us wanted to close the day and head our own way. After the date, we tried to keep in touch due to courtesy, but I’m glad I won’t meet them again.

The thing is that algorithms are supposed to match you based on common interests, its just that there goes a lot more to human connect than these common interests. That data is qualitative, not quantitative; its about what exactly did you derive or interpret from a book/movie as opposed to how much you like reading a book, or a movie on a scale on 1–10, which dating applications tend to miss out. Common interests are something you’re supposed to like, but neither that is the rule nor the opposite the exception. How you judge yourself is also completely relative. Someone might find having a post-grad degree a norm while the other might consider them as highly educated. Do you get my drift?

On another occasion, precisely after a year, when my mother casually stemmed the fear of how potential marriage time was inching closer, I panicked and decided to try two more dating apps (TruelyMadly, Happn) simultaneously But within an hour of making a decent profile, took myself off those platforms.

The reason simply felt as if I was shopping for dates, while being paraded with so many faces + tagline put on a carousel, to be picked up till the time stocks last (FOMO anyone?). How is one supposed to find the human connect while trying to hold up a casual chat with a stranger, simultaneously selling yourself in the process (also called putting yourself ‘out there’ as euphemism), as they swiftly glance over your hobbies and other cool things about you. Suddenly the gradual process of unfolding another human being is a rushed carefully careless chat, as long as you hold the interest of the other party, and they hold yours back. Stressful and Uncomfortable.

In real life, if you’d ever meet a person, the only thing you look out towards is how well you get along. This doesn’t mean both of you have to like the same music or movies, or need to pursue the same hobbies, its just how easily both of you ‘click’ with each other. You’re more likely to be willing to compromise in this case, if you knew you connected well. Notice, how the choice to compromise came in much later, when the initial experience was good. While dating on an application almost always means, making an informed decision about risking a compromise first and then getting to know whether the experience has been worth the reward. It also means you’re more likely to be judgmental on the physical attributes of a person based on just 5 pictures, even before looking at them in real life, something which you wouldn’t bother if you met the same person without the fear of losing out the potential match.

That’s where these products need to improvise a LOT, from becoming the starting trigger of a digital human connect, to being actually convert it to an offline event, and push the user to make deep relationship offline. As of now, there is very little serendipity to the entire event, finding a decent match on Tinder/insert-any-other-app, is as much a chore as trying shoes in a mall, whilst trying not to get emotionally attached just in case its outside your budget.

Personally, I have nothing against dating apps, and I feel quite optimistic about technology when people do find potential partners on these sites, but the effort and patience is required to deal with so many people to find something that is fine tuned for you, is a lot. However the pro is clearly that you get to meet someone your own social circle was incapable of providing without external help and if your date doesn’t work out, at least you’ll find some cool people to be friends with or a great story for your grandkids; with whom, maybe in a parallel universe, you would have hit off instantaneously, and taken things in a different direction. For someone who is more fast paced, and knows exactly what they are looking for, these applications maybe a great launch pad to beat away the social awkwardness otherwise.You could also get enough fodder to make a viral YouTube video on the Tinder Traumas you had to deal with, or just pass off this adventure as a comment on our society under the pretext of research like me, or this one. :)

Disclaimer: All views are personal.

Data killed my Desire (Part 1) was originally published in Fish Tank on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Feminism simply means removing the stereotypical gender roles from the society and considering men and women individual equals on the same parameters. So this should be called equality right? But we call it feminism instead of equality because it is the ‘feminine’ traits that both men and women are shamed for. It is the feminine traits that the society needs to accept and look at people as a spectrum rather than just their biological gender. This holds even more importance today than ever before as we move towards a more individualistic society where gender identity holds a lot of importance.

Design has often been discriminatory and caters mostly for the people in power. Sure that makes sense, because the people in power are our clients who will execute the product after the design has been finalized. Before design started becoming an intrinsic part of the entire product development process, designers had a limited role which was doing what the brief asked them to do, and handing over the design for production.

The lack of participatory design practices have often overlooked women’s needs, wants and preferences and catered for products from the male point of view.

Dictation of how women need to view their bodies:

Chastity, humility and dignity are ‘considered’ the assets of a lady. We don’t talk about our personal health & hygiene, menstruation and sexuality in public, as it makes us ‘profane’. For years, women’s bodies have been dictated by how men would like to see how women’s body. Coincidentally male view also happens to be the societal view of the ideal woman. Because women’s needs are often subdued because their sheer lack in numbers and domination we can see this view seeping down to bad policy making, bad retail practices and bad designs for women. Be it a lack of over-the-counter contraception pills, or the ease of getting an abortion without the society making their decision on it. The inaccessibility to basic needs like sanitary napkins at cheaper prices, to poor design/ unavailability of public toilets; the lack of body positivity in clothing and the catering and promoting an ‘ideal size’ in a particular role is another rampant area where design plays a huge role. Women are iconized and often objectified as sex symbols, but very rarely are they allowed to have their own sexuality. The lack of providers working in these domains causes them to have a market monopoly and often the outreach is limited.

Outdoors are not for you, Babe:

The women section is usually limited to a small corner in a two storey sports retail store, says a lot of about the perception of women being interested in sports and outdoor activities. Often women’s sports are dismissed, and aren’t taken seriously by our policy makers and even the media. The women who do want to enter sports are often considered masculine, which is unfair towards them. Moving away from competitive sports, the general perception is women are not outdoorsy as compared to men; outdoorsy women have to make do with men’s products because they are offered so little in their own range.

I had to come face to face with this reality recently when I recently moved to the campus and had to buy a cycle for commute. Among the best options to cycle in, you could choose a ‘step-through frame’ with thin profile tyers (popularly known as the ladies cycle) or a Y-frame/unisex bike/mountain bike with wider profile and thicker tyer threads. Ideally the Step-through frame is faster for flat terrain, and the mountain bikes faster in hilly terrains. but bicycle companies only offer ‘Miss India’ and “Ladybirds’ in a generic female pallete of various shades in pink/mauve. Similarly if you went to look out for a mountain bike in pink, you’d find none. See how a colour is associated with a bias, that if you wear flowy clothes (which often girls outfits do) you must love pink, and if you love pink you must not be the girl who likes to cycle on difficult terrains.

Similarly with automobile industry, cars are primarily designed and sold as men’s product which ‘coincidentally women tend to drive’. Over the ages the gap is slowly fading, but the stereotype still remains that ‘women can’t drive’. The advent of adjustable seating and power steering has made commuting a lot easier, but a low car seating with lesser visibility of the road often rules out many cars for women. And if god-forbid the car does breakdown in the middle of your solo trip with a flat tyre, you know how difficult it is for someone with a weight of 50-60kgs to unscrew those bolts from the tyre. At any car show, a female size zero model will unfold the latest car, ever seen a muscular male model do the thing? But hey, the automobile industry is dominated by men, and the only place where most women are seen is the color and trim department.

Dumbing down everything Tech:

When we’re in school, we see a good number of girls graduating , however as we go higher up to where the research is conducted, and ideas turn into reality and where the business happens, we start seeing the lesser number of females in the picture. There are a number of reasons for this: the hardhat culture, the lack of opportunities, women considered as bad employees etc. but as a result, when designing happens,the products become more male-centric.

Good HCI practices asks technology to rehabilitate all types of cognition, and kinds of user. More often than not while considering user personas for uni-sexual products, women tend to be under-represented as compared to men by the use of maybe a single persona to represent the needs of all types of women. Also their goals seem to be more superficial and aesthetic oriented than men. A reason why our mothers have a harder time with technology than our fathers, is that technology was not wired keeping their cognition in mind. It was ‘assumed’ that women weren’t as interested as men in tech. The practice of good HCI has shifted these patterns and slowly we are bridging these gaps.The presence of only female voices as Voice Assistants except when the role needs to dominate (eg: IBM Ross, IBM Watson) is a shocking realization on how deep-seeded our patriarchy really is.

Sexism in our Culture

I would particularly like to cite that we are in a unique point in time, women definitely enjoying the best time in their own history. Design can help reduce this gap at an even more faster pace, as it can help overcompensate where nature cannot. It can identify particular instances where a design interventions can help moving away from pre-historic roles, and stereotypes and biological shortcomings. Game design is another place, which currently caters mostly towards entertaining men. The female characters are highly sexualized and hence finds very less takers among women. Cities can start becoming much safer once the urban planning policies look at women reclaiming the community spaces and the nights.

The higher presence of feminine qualities like nurturing, listening, caring in our culture could significantly reduce the stress, depression, and other mental illnesses in our society. Teams which have good number of women are in general better performers.

Power of Design

The unique power of design to change cognition and rewire us to form new habits may one day eradicate the way we look at gender roles. Design has power to empower and make everyone feel like an intrinsic part of the society. With sensitive design we can break stereotypes, and for that designers need to look beyond cognitive biases, political biases, gender biases, social biases and start a dialogue on why should we exclude a particular group from our target users, but rather provide them with the power to choose. Through the ages, the greatest role of design has been to make life better; designers need to identify political movements which question the supremacy and the privileges of one group over the other. Feminism is just one movement that is asking the questions of inclusiveness. As we move towards a more global and diverse society, these questions expand to diverse gender groups,ethnic minorities, linguistic minorities, economically underprivileged, specially-abled and so on.

We really can’t gain equal footing as women in the society if we don’t get men standing by us. You can give feminism any other name for your convenience, but that really is a refusal to address the ‘elephant in the room’ and calling it a fox, as the elephant feels to large to accommodate. We need feminists in design. After all, the things we shape, in turn shape us.

Why Feminism is Important in Design was originally published in Fish Tank on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Alright, alright, from a tech enthusiasts & designers point of view, I have to congratulate Apple on the iPhone 7. iPhone 7 is truly revolutionary.Why? Not because any other phone can beat Apple’s camera and its super-efficient processor, and that its beautiful. The iPhone 7 is revolutionary because it fits somewhere two years ahead of today when we IoT’ed the sh*t out of everything. Two years down we’ll start living completely wireless world, and intuitive technology will start becoming more central in our day to day life. And of course in another KeyNote presentation like the one held yesterday, they’ll axe the battery socket as well. Just exactly like today, people will grumble in shock about the death of the beloved headphone jack, and the silent death of buttons on the device. I appreciate how boldly Apple didn’t care for the user today and slowly but surely would compel them to a wireless future of tomorrow ( that is the Apple Universe for the Apple users). Surely others too had this technology, but Android being more open source in nature makes sure its designers don’t go way too imaginative and stick with the wants of a regular user from today. The iPhone 7 is certainly aimed at tech enthusiasts, who need cutting edge technology and for those who can afford to keep up with such an expensive taste (&lifestyle of the Apple Universe). Yes, Apple is revolutionary and yes, Apple is inventive, and yes, apple delivers the innovation it promises. The ‘cult-following’ which Jobs created years ago, and the Apple Universe strategy which makes Apple users aloof from us minion Android users was visionary, because Apple users WILL always adapt their lives around the new iPhone, no matter how painful it will seem. And the changes will be much faster than our shift from CD’s to USB’s.

As an android fan girl and general observer of the world, my angst is against those people who cannot afford an iPhone, but would go out of their way to buy it because they want to be a part of the Apple cult. They watch the keynote speech with such enthusiasm, as if their lives depended on the power of the new processor. Then go stand in line to buy an iPhone that was sold last year. Or those who will buy the new iPhone 7, when there were so many things you could do without feeling that pinch in the pocket.
These users who bought that beautiful phone, but never unveiled its true power, by buying the lowest model (16 GB previously and 32 GB now). They will still use the same apps that any basic Android could perform with the same ease, and also allowed you a trip to Thailand. 16 GB or 32 GB can hardly fulfill anyone’s daily needs in the age of apps. Your phone really cannot hold any music or pictures which are two main needs of any regular user. And if trends are to be believed, your apps will get heavier, and 32GB will be the new 16GB again.
My annoyance is with those iPhone users who will never experiment with how affordable has technology really become, and look twice and the gazillion option Android is offering for their needs, because every other magazine will slot iPhone on its top position, and ‘its an iPhone yaar’.
What further frustrates me is not that these people don’t complain about the lowest model, but then they act like Android was way too below their crowns to use (Pairing phones with an android over Bluetooth? who does that!)
But if you did ask the user of this 16GB iPhone that why didn’t they just go for another phone instead, they would ramble on about how great their Apple iPhone is, like the next tech/design gurus, and how they didn’t really have a choice. That too while simultaneously transferring photos to their laptops because their phones run out of memory during vacation or looking or another iPhone fellow for their charger. The ones who make sure you know they own an iPhone. The ones who would set their desirability over needs, affordability and universal usability, and really prioritize a phone to that an extent.

This is the Apple cult. This is the kind of cult, which Apple uses to fund iPhones research and innovation, as they keep the next cutting edge iPhone 8 on their Keynote, two years later. But hey, Apple does consider this cult while decision making, they keep the camera constant for your narcissistic needs. And pictures really do satisfy the ego, and make you feel better. Notice, how the camera specs are constant in all the models? And that my dear friends is how Apple’s cult of 16/32 GB phone owners is extremely important to compel their users to swallow their next innovation like a bitter pill because the cult blindly believes in Apple rather than switch to more comfortable options. Apple needs this cult as much as this cult wants Apple. My only advice, don’t go for the lowest model, if its heavy on the pocket give Android a chance too, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

P.S. I have nothing against apple, maybe I’ll buy an iPhone too if I had the money, but till then I’ll enjoy my Pumpkin Lattes as I marvel at the chaos of the Apple fanboy on the iPhone release date outside the Apple store, also a part of the vision Jobs created. I’ll still struggle with my old USB cable’s head and the tangled wires of my headphone, but I’ll wait patiently before I have enough money to plunge to newer technology.

Disclaimer: The views are authors own and not endorsed by Fish Tank.