Qubole at the Bangalore Design Week’18
Reimagining UX for Big Data- A Design Thinking Workshop
Earlier this month, Qubole design team hosted our first ever design thinking workshop for external participants in Bangalore. As a Design Thinking Coach, I have had the chance to host several customer workshops, however this was the first of its kind with an eclectic audience ranging from experienced professionals and entrepreneurs to design students.
We at Qubole have always wanted to engage with the design community in Bangalore so when 2018 edition of Bangalore Design Week was announced, we were only too excited to join!
Qubole is a company with growth in the high-speed lane. Our Design team has learnt immensely from each other, our product teams as well as our customers. We conceived this interactive Design Thinking Workshop as a great way to share our knowledge and design leadership while also learning from the experiences of the design community.
T-1 and Workshop Day
Pumped up by the response we had received (All booked within 12 hours!) we worked hard for weeks to put together the best possible workshop. There were collaterals to be designed, content to be arranged and logistics to take care of. It makes me immensely proud that such a small team as ours was able to pull off its first external event so smoothly!
So, who joined us for the event?
A variety of people!
- Budding designers from academia like NID Bengaluru
- UX, UI Designers from consumer and enterprise companies
- Non-design professionals: Big data experts, developers
Strangers before the workshop, all the participants showed enthusiasm to work together in groups. The pictures show how design thinking can help people from any background to come together, bring in their expertise and add value to the project at hand.
What matters is we need to have an open mind in any design activity, let go of any bias we may have as individuals and focus on the given problem.
Key Insights and takeaways from the event: Here’s where the Gold is!
1. Empathise with your users through Data:
Designers often think of user research in terms of traditional methods such as ethnography, interviews, and shadowing. However, the need of the hour is to think in terms of what a user’s digital behaviour is telling you.
It is important to bear in mind that empirical data is not always cold-If you put on your empathy hat, you can see what a user’s behaviour is telling you about their future needs.
2. Theory-Meet Practice!
Learning from examples of designing while leveraging Big Data:
When talking about big data how can we not include applications that all of us are addicted to (or at-least can’t live without?) These guys have got it right: Netflix, Lyft, Shazam, and Fortnite- Did you know this famous game collects 92m events per minute?
To complement the theory with hands-on practice, we divided the group into teams and asked them to do a role play of some popular applications focusing on how these applications use user data to give great end experiences. This proved to be an eye opener to participants as they got new perspectives and understanding about their day to day applications on how they use data and it was super fun to watch too!
3. How to access the data:
We observed an increasing need of closing the gap between data needs and data access. The cross-section of participants- designers, developers, entrepreneurs, and students- as they became aware of how data can help them, enquired how they can get easier data access and understand it better. We encouraged participants to cross boundaries and work closely with different roles such as analysts, product owners, engineers in order to build a data driven point of view.
4. Design Thinking for Big Data:
This was the overarching theme of the workshop and our participant teams worked on problems to tune their thought process of designing with big data. The design problems on offer ranged from a gaming solution for casual gamers to financial assistant of a recent college graduate
We were thrilled to witness the high level of engagement and enthusiasm. As we progressed through the workshop, the participants got more and more involved and animated.
We witnessed that applying design thinking principles to practical problems can transform a diverse (even at first uncomfortable strangers) group of people into cohesive and well-oiled units.
What Next?
While conversing with participants over pizzas and beer, we received a suggestion to include insight into Qubole’s design process in our future workshops. We will soon be opening up an interest list where future participants can register their interest and suggestions on what they would like to see in Qubole’s next workshop!
Please do share your opinions in the comments below. Tell us about your experiences with Design Thinking workshops and how we can improve in our next event.
