Formula 1 is considered the pinnacle of motorsport; for others, it may seem like a bunch of fast cars running around in circles. But for F1 fans like me, it’s a constant source of motivation which drives us towards perfection till we reach the top step. It helps you understand that being fast or skilled is not enough, but things like strategy, teamwork, mental strength and luck are required to be successful.

Formula 1 and Product design are considered two vastly different domains, but when it comes to approaches and methodologies, here are some key similarities between F1 and Product Design.

Attention to detail

In Formula 1, teams must pay attention to every detail of their cars to achieve maximum performance. For example, the above image is a picture of red bull racing 2021 F1 racing car; each carbon fibre element you see is there to gain 1000th of a second in lap time, each can significantly impact the car’s weight and aerodynamics. Similarly, in UX design, designers must pay attention to every detail of their designs, from typography to color choice, to create a seamless user experience. For example, typography in OYO’; design system has been modified line height, Letter spacing to improve readability of the copies.

Innovative problem solving

In 1978 Brabham introduced an F1 with a fan at the rear, which helped them increase the ground effect and win a race. Even though it was banned after one race because of technical regulation, it was an example of how innovation is key for f1 car development. Early, we designed and innovated a “user interface for partial payment”, which accommodated all the product requirements with great usability.

Data Driven

In Formula 1, teams rely heavily on data to make informed decisions about race strategy and car design. For example, teams use telemetry data to analyse a driver’s performance and build race strategies around a driver’s performance. Similarly, designers use data to inform their design decisions. For instance, a designer might use an A/B testing version of a landing page to perform better with users.

In Formula 1, teams constantly test new components and designs to improve their cars. For example, above is an image containing different iterations of Ferrari’s 2014 F1, which they kept updating throughout the season. Similarly, at OYO, we design multiple versions of a component to achieve the best UX. For example, our current image gallery is the outcome of multiple iterations.

Emphasis on user feedback

Formula 1 and UX design rely heavily on user feedback for continuous improvement. In Formula 1, drivers provide feedback to their engineers on the car’s handling, performance, and other factors, helping the team to adjust optimize performance. For example, unlike regular gloves, F1 driver gloves have stitches outside to avoid any disturbance during the race. Similarly, designers use user feedback in UX design to inform design decisions and improve the user experience.

In conclusion, while Formula 1 and UX design may seem like vastly different fields at first glance, they share many similarities regarding the iterative design process, the importance of data and analysis, and the need for constant innovation and improvement. Both fields require high skill, creativity, and collaboration to succeed. Both are focused on creating exceptional experiences for their audiences, whether through the thrill of high-speed racing or the intuitive usability of a digital interface. By understanding these similarities and differences, we can gain a deeper appreciation for the unique challenges and opportunities of each field. They are constantly evolving and pushing the boundaries of what is possible.

Driving User Experience: Exploring the similarities between Formula 1 and Product Design was originally published in OYO Product Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In-app notifications are the easiest way to convey information and actions to users. These are the notifications inside the app in the form of updates, actions, announcements and more.

But generally, users don’t like it. If not planned well and pushed frequently, the user treats it as a spam message and ignores it completely. Then the count of unread notifications goes infinite.

The Problem

A similar problem we decided to solve it for our hotel partner. We must convey multiple communication related to operations, payments and essential actions to our partners. And the team observed that the current notifications centre needs to be more effective.

Hence, we realised the need to design an effective notification centre which is valuable, actionable and easy to manage.

Why was the current notifications centre ineffective?

With the incremental addition of features and improvements in the app, the notification centre seemed less effective or neutral. To utilise the complete potential of notifications, notifications should be more structured and relevant.

The problems with the current notifications centre were observed below —

1. Lack of crisp communication of urgent/important actions.
2. Missing precise & clear CTAs for decision-making.
3. No Personalisation basis user type.
4. No clear identification b/w important and unimportant notifications.
5. UX Flaws related to content hierarchy, accessibility and intuitiveness.

To understand users’ behaviour, we tried to understand how users perceive our notifications first.

Sneak peek at how users perceive notifications

Push Notifications are annoying

The behaviour of users has changed significantly towards notifications because of hundreds of apps at a time on mobile phones. The bombardment of notifications is obvious.

Here is the research from Businessofapps.com on what users think about push notifications. Most users are negative about the notifications and consider them irritating or distracting.

In-App Notifications are more impactful

According to a study by Reckless Agency, In-app notifications have a three times higher open rate than push notifications.

This means In-app notifications are more productive. Because when a user opens the app intentionally, the chances of scanning notifications with good attention would be high, unlike random push notifications, which continuously poke the user, no matter what the user is doing.

Psychologically, In-app notifications cause addiction, too, if served well considering what may interest the user. Below are some examples of popular products which make users addicted to opening the app and checking notifications without any reason.

That subtle dopamine boost, you know.

Benchmarking

When we did a benchmark of various products, it was observed that In-app notifications in the B2C products are not so much used, but B2B is exactly on the opposite side.

Users consider In-app notifications as more informational, relevant and helpful, and here a huge opportunity comes to bake in. In-App notifications can help businesses reduce the ground team’s manual effort, where you need to manually convey critical information, updates, and recommendations to the clients.

Who are our users?

In the partner side products, OYO has two types of users. Typically, Hotel Owners and Managers have different day-to-day jobs and responsibilities.

Hotel Owner

They own the property and majorly acts upon critical nudges like payments, earnings, reconciliation, contract etc. The frequency of such notifications is less, and hotel owners are less likely to see frequent operational communication.

Hotel Manager

They manage the property and majorly act upon Bookings (check-in, check-out), Housekeeping, Support and Pricing at some level. The frequency of such notifications is high.

Although we have a third type of user who is a Hotel owner but manages the hotel (without a hotel manager) on their own, it is probably a small hotel with fewer rooms and staff.

Here we have to design a notification centre for the above users. Hotel owners can see important communication precisely, and the Hotel manager can track all the booking-related communication and other notifications to pay attention to the overall guest experience.

Let’s head on to the Design

So, we have clear goals.

We figured out the goals which can make users’ life a bit easy, which are mentioned below —

1. The patron can personalise what kind of notification s/he want to receive.
2. The patron can quickly identify which is the most important notification.
3. The patron can filter out notifications basis the category. e.g. Owner can find only payment-related notifications, and Manager can find booking-related notifications.
4. The patron can see the urgency of certain actions and clear CTA.

To start on the design, we picked up the easiest element, i.e. notification card first -

The Card

One of the major elements was the notification card. It needs to serve content in a meaningful manner where the patron can decide better. To add value to the notification card, we added some below elements -

Category Icon — E.g. Bookings, Payment, Support, Earnings etc

Heading+Subtext — To communicate the context in a human-centric manner

Date/Time — To give a hint about the age of the notification

Urgency status — To create awareness about important/pending action

Unread identifier —To help understand what is new

Primary and Secondary CTA — To catch users’ attention & decide better

Personalisation

Users should be able to choose what type of notifications are important for them at a time. Considering this, we managed to give Hotel Owner control over what categories of notifications they want to see and what hotel managers should see. From the ‘User roles and permissions module, the Hotel owner can easily enable and disable the categories.

A filter would play an important role here to optimise notifications further for a specific purpose. We added two most relevant filters -

Time Filter — E.g. Lifetime, This month, This Week, Yesterday, Today

Category Filter — E.g. Bookings, Payment, Support, Earnings etc

Along with Filters, A ‘Settings’ feature was added to manage how hotel owners and managers want to receive the notification on a daily basis. It covered both Push and In-app notifications, along with the categories selection.

Content Hierarchy

The most important notification should be shown upfront or very first on priority. To solve this, we have merged the entire screen into two sections. The first is for — Important notifications, second is for — All other notifications.

Along with this, users can filter out the notifications from the top itself and permanently mute or disable the notification from the settings. The notification number can be large in operational cases, so ‘Mark all as read’ was placed at the bottom, considering the frequent usage. And it will be hidden once tapped.

Below is the final layout after multiple iterations and feedback.

The Final experience caters to almost all the needs of the user, whether you need to optimise the number of notifications according to your needs or take important actions without any thoughts.

Iterations

The ideal design comes out from multiple iterations. For the above screen, there were multiple variations which came in between the journey and helped us understand the upside and downside of each element.

A few of the iterations are as below —

Old Vs New

Below is the comparison of the old vs new notification centre. The new one was high on functionality and freedom, which solved the purpose of the redesign.

Credits💎

Product Team
The brainstorming and iterations helped a lot reaching to the ideal solution, with the collaboration of talent product owners Rohit Goyal, Nishant Keswani

Engineering Team
Overall personalisations & flexibilities were only possible with the immense effort of our engineering team..

Front End — Nikhil, Alina

Back End — Parth Mehta, Rahul Kumar Yadav, Shivani, Subrat

I hope this article was helpful :)

If you liked this article sharing it with friends is greatly appreciated!

You can also click 👏 below (as many times as you want!)

Transforming notifications from annoying to actionable at OYO was originally published in OYO Product Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Charles and Ray Eames were two of the most influential couple in the modern design era. As a designer, I want to share my understanding of their work and perspectives in the design industry. American designers Charles Eames (1907–1978) and Ray Eames (1913–1988) helped shape nearly every facet of American life. From their architecture, furniture, and textile designs to their photography and corporate design. The couple has created multiple iconic items relevant to current modern contexts.

Exploring new materials and innovating with constraints.

In 1942, The Eames were approached by Medical Corps with a problem statement of redesigning existing metal splints. The standard metal splints used to brace wounded World War II servicemen were causing further injuries due to the vibrations in the metal during transport.

Charles was experienced with plywood moulding, which was very new then. The splints made of plywood conformed to the human leg, offering ideal support through its natural form. To make the splint, the design duo used Charles’s leg as the model; apparently, an excruciating process since removing the cast ripped out all his hair.

To release the stress in the moulded, they had to put holes in some bends to release the tension in the moulded plywood. They put symmetrical holes to relieve the tension of the bent plywood but also give the medic a place to thread bandages and wrappings. The splints represent a perfect example of utilizing to advantage what Eames called the constraints of a particular design problem. Recognizing and working within these constraints was always crucial to their design process. It was not always easy.” By the end of World War II, it is estimated that 150,000 splints were made and used. The design led to other wartime moulded-plywood work, including an aeroplane fuselage, an aeroplane stabilizer tail, an arm splint, a body litter, and a pilot seat.

Definition of design by Monsieur Eames.

As designers, we read many books and articles that share different perspectives on design. But when I read Eames’s design definition, it almost felt perfect.

Charles Eames responded to a questionnaire from Madame L’Amic, curator of the exhibition “Qu’est ce que le design? (What is Design?)” at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Palais de Louvre in 1972, says:

Q: What is your definition of ‘Design,’ Monsieur Eames? A: One could describe design as a plan for arranging elements to accomplish a particular purpose. Q: Is design an expression of art? A: I would rather say it’s an expression of purpose. It may, if it is good enough, later be judged as art.

Q: “Is Design a craft for industrial purposes?” A: “No, but Design may be a solution to some industrial problems.”

Q: “What are the boundaries of Design?” A: “What are the boundaries of problems?”

Design process diagram

To explain the design process, Charles Eames drew a diagram of a successful design process that needs overlapping interests from the client, the designer, the design house, and the society. And I believe this diagram is still relevant, especially in the case of a product designer.

Personally, as a product designer, I am using this principle in my work life. Where I have to work on an overlapping part where business interests, user needs, and the design team’s principles are overlapped.

Influence on India’s modern design era

The India report was prepared by the Eames in 1958. The Government of India had asked for recommendations on a program of training in design that would serve as an aid to the small industries and would resist the present rapid deterioration in the design and quality of consumer goods. The couple toured India for three months to conduct making research on the many centres of design, handicrafts, and general manufacture. It stipulated the underlying spirit needed to promote a suitable national design outlook and advocated the setting up of an indigenous design legacy that involved applications of modern disciplines and old traditions to meet the challenges of contemporary India. The report led to the creation of the National Institute of Design.

The India Report

Perspective towards design

As part of their report, they picked up an object celebrating the Indian design. A very peculiar object that is seen in almost every household in India. They went into the detailed specification of making a lotta and the versatility the lotta has to offer us.

“Of course, no one man could have possibly designed the Lota. The number of combinations of factors to be considered gets to be astronomical — no one man designed the Lota but many men over many generations. Many individuals represented in their own way through something they may have added or may have removed or through some quality of which they were particularly aware.”

To be honest, I have never seen a lot with that perspective. An object that I see in my day-to-day life. My takeaway from their writing about lotta is the ‘perspective of a designer toward design’. As designers, especially product designers, we appreciate a lot about the works of Apple, Brawn, Etc., But we need to remember to give the same level of appreciation to the things lying around us. We should go through a process of understanding where we don’t see only the end product but the process that the product has gone through, the perspective of the creator, the product’s context, the product’s evolution, etc.

The Eames: A most influential couple of modern design era was originally published in OYO Product Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

🛠 Steps that we followed

1. Benchmarking & setting up rules: We spent about a month on this. It helped us to back our decisions at every step & convince the stakeholders to implement our designs.
2. Defining the scope: We listed down every single flow in our product & mapped it with the micro-interaction required.
3. Understanding tech & physics attributes: We dived deeper into the world of motion physics to implement organic animations. We also read through android developer documentations available online to understand tech constraints.
4. Involving the tech team: Check the tech feasibility of the designs before hand. Find out the tech stack & what attributes they require to implement the designs.

Tip: Keep the tech team involved at all steps.

6. Building, reviewing & iterating.

7. Presenting to a larger audience: Feedbacks from the entire design team always help in delivering the best designs.

8. Implementation!

🐤 Sneak Peak

Below are some of our creations with the though process explained behind it.

Transformations

Some animations required a transformation on certain UI elements in order to have smooth & delightful transitions. One of the examples is the image transformation we used on the listing page.

Animating atomic components

The atomic components include buttons, steppers, icons, etc. These are the components a user’s thumb directly interacts with, hence, important to provide the most ideal feedback.

Buttons: In order to make the experience organic, we applied inertial bounce effect to mimic the real-world button-press effect.

Stepper: The slot machine animation for the stepper fit just perfectly.

Actions

There are certain actions specific to a function which may vary from product to product.

One must list down all the use-cases within the product that may require custom-made interactions unique to the product.

Custom Flow

There can be certain flows where the entire journey’s animations & transitions play a crucial role in terms of the user experience. The best example of it would be the Booking Confirmation flow, where the user has no other option than to wait for the booking to be completed.

Another example would be the Rewards Flow, where we need to provide a positive feedback to the user when reached a certain milestone.

Ratings

An organic, life like animation works really well with the interface and provides user engagement.

And much more..

Do check out our product if you want to view the motion language of the entire journey!

✍🏻 Why did we decide to dedicatedly think about micro-interactions?

1. Technical Aspect: Keeping user’s attention intact in case of API calls, errors & loading states is extremely important in order to avoid drop-offs.
2. Delight factor: Leaving the users feel satisfied at each step while using the app.
3. Lastly, because it was practically non-existent in our app.

🤜🏻🤛🏻 Team members involved in this project

I did this project under my manager Rajat Kashyap. All the transitions, micro-interactions & motion graphics used in the OYO’s products were designed by us.

Eshu Kalra, Vaibhav Chaudhary & Rohan Deshpande were the ones who made our designs a reality.

PS: Thank you so much for reading this! Here’s a flower 🌷

How we enhanced OYO’s product experience via micro-interactions & transitions was originally published in OYO Product Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How I landed a job at OYO?

Let’s start by discussing how I got into UI/UX. In my third year of Computer engineering, when coding didn’t thrill me as much as I imagined it would, I did what every engineer does: Google search for the alternatives. I didn’t even know UI/UX existed while I was studying computer engineering, and I had no idea where I would be in the next 5 years. The term “UI/UX” in that search list piqued my interest, so I did more research on it and read about the abilities required and the best ways to learn it. I’ve always been artistic, even since I was a child. I have done paintings and sketches, and I have also been the creative head of my college and handled a team of 50 students.

After completing my bachelor’s, I took a UI/UX certification course and applied for a master’s programme. I worked as a freelancer throughout to gather experience and strengthen my portfolio.

I received a few job offers during my placement, but I chose OYO because I thought the team was fascinating and there was a good work environment. Since then, I’ve been having fun, and as a product designer, I’ve gotten my first significant assignment. Since this is my first work, I’d like to share the majority of my experience.

My first project which was super critical “Secure wallet”

What is a Secure Wallet? Let’s discuss this first

OYO Secure is a prepaid wallet maintained by patrons, currently only in India. This amount is the expected OYO share for the Pay at Hotel bookings at the property for the next few days, so that OYO does not enter into a recovery stage. There is a minimum balance that patrons need to maintain in their Secure wallet, and if patrons fail to maintain this minimum balance, the property is suspended or put on Sold Out. This results in a loss of bookings expected at the property and, in turn, a CM loss for OYO. This has also led to higher churn of properties and escalations from patrons. The property becomes live only once the wallet is recharged with the minimum amount needed in the wallet.

Based on partner interviews, we understand that the majority of the patrons recharge their wallet only if the wallet balance is low or someone from OYO tells them to recharge. There are also a majority of patrons who actually do not recharge their wallet because of other reasons like pricing, recon, payments, or other similar reasons where they don’t wish to continue business with OYO.

Types of Secure recharge offers:

There are a bunch of offers that are being run offline —

1. Secure Flash Offer-Get 10% cashback if you recharge within 1 hour of notification.

2. Secure Cashback Offer — Recharge with a balance of 10 or 15 runway days and get 15% or 25% cashback.

So let me tell you how the project was handed over to me!

Officially, the project was solely handled by Ankit Guleria. Once I joined OYO, I was working under his guidance. He helped me understand the project as well as how the components work. But for some reasons, the project was handed over to me after a week or two. He came up with the idea of the Secure Wallet widget and the solution is as follows

1. How to display the wallet balance, cashback offers, current recon balance, and a CTA for wallet recharging.
2. 2. Different cases, like if the property is sold out or Future sold out.
3. 3. And a few cases of the payment flow.

When the project was handed over to me, I was totally new to the OYO OS app. Initially, it was a bit tough for me to catch up on the requirements. And here’s how Shekhar Kadam, my manager, came to the rescue! He helped me to understand the new requirements as well as how a few other components work and how to communicate with the product managers.

While working on the project, I did my own benchmarking and research to get a deeper understanding of it. I contributed towards the payment flow and other new requirements. Here, my team helped me whenever I needed their help. Everyone is really kind and always willing to lend a hand.

Once Ankit was back, I was supposed to give him a KT & tell him what the new requirements were & how I came up with the solution and what my thought process was behind it. The product is in the launch phase right now.

Also I enjoyed my work week!

So this was the first time I met my team as a hired employee after the pandemic, and it was fun meeting them. The work environment here makes me happy and excited for everyday work. Coffee breaks, meetings, and question-and-answer sessions with the manager, product manager, or coworkers make it easier to work and complete daily tasks. We had a great time hanging out, doing Karaoke sessions, bowling strikes, racing around the Go-Kart course, and enjoying nice food together.

How I went from having no experience in UI/UX to working on the most critical project as a fresher. was originally published in OYO Product Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At a basic level, colors influence how consumers view the ‘personality’ of the brand in question, so it’s important you get it right.

OYO’s logo mark; three geometric letters (OYO) inscribed in a circle filled with striking red colour, is instantly recognised and has good retention. It is a bold, energetic and lively color that can symbolize strength, confidence, and power.

Problems with the old colour palette

Accessibility: The old colour palette had major accessibility issues that did not meet the WCAG accessibility guidelines for legibility and optimum contrast against dark or light backgrounds. This caused useless cognitive load that held back users to feed on relevant Information with ease.

Unconventional mental model: There are certain proven mental models around colour which when leveraged could help in providing a frictionless user experience in your product. The earlier design philosophy at OYO did not account for leveraging such colour mental models. We were using red colour for both hyperlinks and error messages causing massive confusion on what to tap and when to tap. Critical error messages used to get masked because of the multi functional usage of red colour.

People treat clicks like currency and there’s something about the colour blue that makes people click or tap on anything written in blue. People have been conditioned with hyperlinks being blue from the day internet was born. It might sound like reinventing the wheel to think of breaking this mental model and asking the users to adapt to yours.

The solution:

First and the easiest thing to achieve was to get the functional part correct i.e. use an existing, conventional mental modal. This not only involved just using the palette but also assigning relevant functions to them in the product.
Red = Negative connotations/failure
Yellow = Caution/intermediary
Green = Positive connotations / Success
Blue = only hyperlinks
Purple = Unassigned (kept for product specific functions)

Second part involved tweaking the colour palette in a way so it adheres to a well defined colour harmony.

Last, getting the accessibility correct. We tweaked the brightness/luminosity of the colours to meet WCAG accessibility guidelines

The result

The implementation of this new colour palette brought in positive results. Users found the new design functional and devoid of cognitive load that existed before.

How we re-defined OYO’s product colour palette in less than 30 days. was originally published in OYO Product Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Here’s a sneak peak to help understand the world of patents a little better.

“I have a Patent pending on this product”, or this product is patent protected, this is a phrase you may have heard on the show, Shark Tank- A show that helps budding entrepreneurs meet potential investor.

Many investors feel confident about a product and its success when it is backed up by a patent.

Let’s dive in and understand what is a Patent and how does it help the creator?

“A patent is an exclusive right granted for an invention, which is a product or a process that provides, in general, a new way of doing something, or offers a new technical solution to a problem.”-WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation)

• The product made should be novel and should have a commercial application.
• A patent helps the designer or the creator of a product- owning a patent, protection of their invention/innovation. It gives the creator the sole right to own the product.
• It helps in preventing others from unauthorised usage- such as selling, distributing or importing the product and even manufacturing of your product.
• The creator also has the right to monetise their product through commercialisation by providing licensing rights to companies.

Sounds awesome right? But wait, there’s a catch.

If you find yourself wondering if you can obtain a patent and keep your invention a secret.. the answer is NO.

• Patents are granted by patent offices in exchange for a full disclosure of the invention. In general, the details of the invention are then published and made available to the public at large.
• Essentially, Patents were introduced by governments all around the world as they were unable to figure out secrets behind inventions and were not able to help the public grow with new inventions as they had to start their research from ground zero.

The Truth about Patents

Applying for patents is an expensive affair. It involves many steps from doing a literature review, researching and designing with various iterations, filling forms, meeting with lawyers, multiple revisions, making sure your design doesn’t infringe the rights of existing. A lot of time, money and effort goes into financing and applying for these patents.

Imagine that despite putting in such efforts your application gets rejected. In order to prevent or reduce the chances of your application being rejected, you must research previous literature.

Availability of previous knowledge/literature to public has many benefits.

1. It acts as an important source of scientific and technical literature and others can build/ make innovations based on the previous knowledge of others.
2. It avoids duplication in many ways (avoids re-invention of the wheel). It also helps to identify emerging technologies, emerging areas which can help benefit the greater good.

In order to research for previous literature, you need to do something called prior art search.

What entails a PRIOR ART SEARCH?

A prior art search involves checking different databases to find out whether someone else has already described an idea similar to yours.

Why you should do it?

1. To avoid submitting patent applications that are not patentable and will be easily rejected.
2. Making sure that your invention is novel as compared to what is out already.
3. Developing a strong patent claim strategy before you file your patent application can reduce the chances of extensive amendments.
4. Helps in close comparison of prior art — this can help convince the patent office that your invention is “non-obvious”.

You have won the halfway battle to get your patent if you have thoroughly researched!

The research stage is where many people are forced to give up on their patent claim at a later stage as they may find similar inventions already existing.

While Patent protects your invention from exploitation, let’s see how far and wide does the patent protection go!

Protects intellectual property for 20 years (After 20 years, technology goes to public domain).

Patents are territorial in nature, that means it can protect your designs only in the country you have applied the patent in.

So, if someone is granted a patent in country A, can I get the same patent in country B ?

One cannot manufacture, import, distribute, or sell your patented products in countries where you have had the invention patented. In the rest of the countries they can sell your patented inventions in other countries.

How can I apply for a Patent that can safeguard my creation internationally?

There is no such thing as an international patent, as patents are restricted to a specific territory and no single patent confers protection for inventions globally. You will have to apply to the countries of your liking individually.

Patent law is specific to each country; although regional agreements exist, there is no global patent law.

Patents are not immune to secrets spilt out.

DO NOT SHARE YOUR INVENTION WITH OTHERS.

Here’s the reason why.

• In general, any invention which is made public before an application is filed would be considered “prior art ”( it refers to any information which has been made available to the public anywhere in the world by written or oral disclosure before the filing date).
• An applicant’s public disclosure of an invention prior to filing a patent application would prevent him/her from obtaining a valid patent for that invention, since the invention would not comply with the novelty requirement.
• It is important to file a patent application before publicly disclosing the details of an invention.

What If disclosing your invention before filing a patent application is unavoidable- there’s a way!

For example, If you had to disclose off your idea to a potential investor or a business partner or even your college professor, then any disclosure should be accompanied by a confidentiality or non-disclosure agreement. It should also be kept in mind that applying early for patent protection will generally be helpful when seeking financial support to commercialise an invention.

But what if you don’t want to reveal the secret ?

There is an alternative route, called Trade Secrets.

What is a trade secret?

Trade secret is a practice or process that is not known / hidden to outside world — concealed through contractual laws and not by IPR laws. It is bound by signing NDAs.

A trade secret can be protected indefinitely as long as the secret is commercially valuable, its value derives from the fact that it is secret, and the owner take reasonable precautions to maintain its secrecy.

• The Pros- Secret Concealed
• The Cons- A trade secret may be patented by someone else who developed the relevant information by legitimate means. There is no way to save the effort you have put into your invention.

So, we can say that the cost of securing a secret is the difference between applying for a patent and a trade secret.

That’s All Folks!
I hope this article equips you with a better understanding of the world of patents and shields you from multiple revisions in your patent application!

Patents- A designer’s shield was originally published in OYO Product Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The instant answer will be “Yes” for almost all the designers, right? But if you have ever designed something with assumptions about user behaviour, you might need to reconsider your answer!

A typical design thinking process looks like this:

In the first step of design thinking, we Are being told to empathise by putting ourselves into the user’s shoes. Yeah, generally, if we are not researching in the field, then we mostly start with:

1. What if I was in their situation? …
2. As user, I would…
3. Users might want/think…

This is the moment where you are in the trap of confirmation bias. Yes, confirmation bias, a well-known phenomenon in psychology, is also applicable to UX design.

“A confirmation bias is cognitive bias that favors information that confirms your previously existing buildings or biases.”

Confirmation biases affect not only how we receive the information but also how we analyse and remember it. It can significantly impact lives, both positive and negative. Positively, it can support us in maintaining our convictions and values, while negatively, it might make it difficult for us to view situations objectively. Sadly, determining whether we are victims of confirmation bias or not is very difficult because it can be so subtle and complex to spot it.

People often try to find selective information that supports their current opinion while intentionally or unintentionally succumbing to the fact that it doesn’t help it.

Recently, I came across the post on LinkedIn about iPhone 14 pro’s “Dynamic Island”.

At first glance, one can directly comment that dynamic island is in the red zone where the thumb reachability is very poor while using the device with one hand.

This is a perfect example of confirmation bias. The person who posted this has gone through the evidence that he or she wanted to believe while ignoring the fact that it is not something that users interact with, as often as the other elements. We can consider it as a summary/status of certain actions that users took on another application, in the form of very subtle animations.

Types of confirmation bias

1. Biased search for information
   People may search for evidence in a one-sided way to support their hypothesis.
2. Biased interpretation
   People may interpret the information or evidence in a manner that supports their assumptions.
3. Biased memory
   To confirm the current assumptions, people may remember the information selectively.

How to prevent confirmation bias?

1. Research rather than validate your assumptions
   As UX designers or UX researchers, we should always start with an open mindset. We should be aiming to test our null hypothesis, not towards proving it. As UX professionals, we aim to uncover the details about the users, which were not previously known to us, not to confirm our expectations. In addition to improving your research’s credibility, using many data sources can help you avoid confirmation bias. One study finding can be easily manipulated to fit your hypothesis, but doing so with data from many sources, such as user testing, analytics, quantitative studies, or customer-service logs, is far more challenging.
2. Ask non-biasing questions
   Don’t lead the users to your expected answer. As a professional, ask generic questions related to the topic. That way, we can get more data about your research topic.
3. Involve fresh eyes in research, planning and analysis
   This is one of the most important steps that UX professionals should follow. Always ask for feedback on your research findings or designs from someone who is not directly associated with your project. This way you will be able to get a fresh perspective.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, even if we believe we are open-minded and only observe the facts before concluding, some bias will likely shape our opinion. That said, if we know about confirmation bias and accept the fact that it does exist, we can make an effort to recognise it by working to be curious about opposing views and listening to what others have to say and why. This can help us better see issues and beliefs from another perspective, though we still need to be conscious of wading past our confirmation bias.

Design thinking and confirmation bias was originally published in OYO Product Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Most of us in the design community are pretty much familiar with the concept of usability testing. One of the methods involves conducting user interview sessions with a targeted group of users in order to test the prototype of a product. Naturally, a lot of company’s resources is spent in the process which is directly proportional to the number of users tested with.

In this article I’m gonna address the question of “How many users are enough for user testing?”.

What is magic number 5?

Through his article, “Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users”, Jakob Nielsen very boldly suggests that using no more than 5 users for a user testing session can give us the best results. And using any more will only result in a waste of resources.

The basic idea is, 5 users can uncover most of a product’s usability problems.

Math behind the magic

Jakob Nielsen & Tom Landauer wrote a research paper together which gave us the following relationship between the number of users and the proportion of all problems found;

Where p is the probability of detecting a given problem. The value of p is taken to be 31%, averaged across a large number of tests conducted (data available on the research paper).
n is the number of users & N is the number of total problems in a test session.

By this relation we find that 5 users can uncover approximately 80% of the usability issues.

But what about the remaining 20% ???

Well, increasing the number of users will clearly make us reach closer to that 100. But note that the graph is asymptotic, it will never really reach there. Plus, the decrease in slope suggests that eventually, no matter now many users you add, there will be very insignificant growth in the percentage of usability problems to be found.

Lost you there? Let me explain.

Testing with 1 user will uncover approximately 33% of the total problems.

Testing with 2 users will uncover more than 50% of the total problems.

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Testing with 5 users will uncover more than 85% of the total problems.

Testing with 6 users will uncover about 87% of the total problems.

The increase in percentage is less for higher number of users.

At this point there’s a high chance of getting repeated insights. Given that our users are humans, we can’t expect most of them to uncover that remaining 10–15 percent of the total problems. We might not find that Nth user ever, and the amount of resources spent will linearly increase giving us no new information.

Should 5 be the absolute number?

NO! The point of this article was not to restrict your mind into thinking this approach is the best. I wanted to explain the math behind this concept in order to show that you don’t need 50 users to test a product.

You can definitely go further than 5 but you must stop once you see most of your insights repeat!

Don’t have a linear approach thinking more users will give more insights. Because number of users and number of problems are not directly proportional, which we can see from the graph itself.

Is this equation helpful in the real world?

Hell yes! Here at OYO, I had to conduct multiple user interviews to test out the design 2.0 version of the consumer app. And I myself observed the insights getting repeated a lot after the 5th or 6th user. Most of my tests involved 7–8 users at max but the insights I had received were tremendously useful.

This equation helps us understand when to stop worrying about the number of users and start thinking about other factors that can help us get more insights.

Other factors to help make best of the user testing

• Focusing more on the test design and complexity of the tasks given to a user.
• Targeting the persona very thoughtfully.
• Analysing the results after each user testing to look for repeating insights or patterns that may or may not seem familiar.
• Using better tools for conducting sessions and analysing results.
• Looking out for faulty data and biased feedbacks. In case you feel that a certain user was being biased with the feedbacks or the test environment was not very ideal, learn to discard that data and replace with a new user with same persona.

Thanks for coming this far! I hope this article proves useful.

Usability testing: Math behind magic number 5 was originally published in OYO Product Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

One may describe the iPhone 14 Pro’s design as groundbreaking. It serves as a great illustration of how design may improve with time and make fantastic choices. Nevertheless, one iPhone 14 Pro design choice attracted much media attention, and Dynamic Island is one of the significant reasons

What is dynamic Island?

In place of the notch that Apple first introduced in 2017, there is now Dynamic Island. It is a cutout in the shape of a pill that can change size and shape to show alerts and notifications.

The iPhone was one of the last devices with a notch because the mobile industry recently tried to maximise the available screen space and hide any unnecessary components. Apple even tried to conceal the notch in the packaging and promotional materials.

In contrast, Dynamic Island is prioritised even in packaging because it is considered as a novel design choice.

Need of dynamic island?

“Why do Apple iPhones have a notch, while Android smartphones don’t? “ All Android flagships use a dot design, which has a tiny dot for the front face at the top of the screen, such as the Google Pixel 6 Pro

Why doesn’t Apple adopt the same strategy? The reason is that Apple uses numerous additional sensors in the notch and dynamic island as part of its facial recognition system called Face ID. The Face ID hardware consists of a sensor with three modules: an infrared camera that takes an infrared picture of the user, interprets the resulting pattern, and creates a 3D facial map. The dot projector casts a grid of tiny infrared dots onto a user’s face.

A side point about user identification. Although some Android devices (such as the Google Pixel 4) have face recognition technology, most Android phones rely on finger scanning. Many Android smartphones support face unlock. The fact that Android phones only use 2-D facial recognition, which simply compares a user’s face to the photo they used to enrol, makes this technology much less safe on Android devices.

Apple made the Notch on the iPhone 13 Pro a little bit smaller by removing the speakers and microphone from the edge.

“Why Apple couldn’t just remove the sensors altogether?” Apple is currently unable to accomplish it because sensors still require more space. Apple buried the proximity sensor under the display of the iPhone 14 Pro, as can be seen if you pay great attention to the design.

Why did Apple decide to create Dynamic island?

The simple solution is that they accepted the present-day physical limitations. They attempted to use technical restrictions to their advantage rather than viewing them as limits. However, there are advantages and disadvantages to this design choice, therefore it is not perfect.

Advantages of Dynamic island

1. Animations

A collection of transitions that Apple demonstrated during the iPhone 14 Pro presentation was splendid. It’s one of the best motion languages created recently.

2. Visibility of ongoing activities and alert

By adding a new layer to the UI, Dynamic Island enables users to receive timely changes without changing context.

3. Dynamic Island doesn’t eat screen space in full screen mode

In the full-screen mode, there always be an area of the screen hidden behind the notch. It is impossible to avoid this behavior because the notch is a physical constraint.

Disadvantages of Dynamic island

1. Damage to front camera

Tapping frequently on dynamic island to access notifications can cause damage to front camera as a user we will be frequently tapping on front camera

2. Interactive yet hard to reach

Dynamic island serving as a dynamic component. Users can use their fingertips to interact with it. But in order to do that, they will need to reach the spot with their fingers. Because of its difficult-to-reach location, the dynamic island, contact is less comfortable (users have to change the grip to access the area of the dynamic island).

Conclusion

The Dynamic Island is a novel concept, and will bring change in Design world that how we perceive a constraint and how to overcome it, Somewhat apple will come with more better solution of this Dynamic island and above all that it’s a great example of how form follows function, but in this instance we don’t need more function, we need better form.

Form follow function was originally published in OYO Product Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.