Designing Pixels to Designing Careers with Sandeep Karmarkar
Human psychology greatly influences human behavior, which makes it a key factor in understanding user needs. Studying the way users think can assist designers in empathizing with the users. It helps see things from the user’s perspective and dig deep into the problem to find the best possible design solution. How can designers understand human psychology to provide memorable customer experiences?
To know more about this theme, in the 51st episode, we interact with Sandeep Karmarkar, Director of Design at Nutanix. With over two decades of experience in design management and leadership, he holds expertise in coaching and mentoring, design operations, user-centered design, data visualization, and much more. Let’s know more about his journey and experiences in the latest episode of the “Avantika Designeering Series Podcast,” “Designing Pixels to Designing Careers.”
Rohit Lalwani: Our mindset frames how we see the world, we have to be an optimistic learner who seeks understanding as a way to guide our actions. Could you brief us on how we can adopt a learning mindset to explore the process more deeply and to come up with the best design solution?
Sandeep: Design is problem-solving. In my accordance when we talk about coming up with design solutions, and in order to arrive at the best possible solution, one needs to understand the problem well. Do we have to understand what is the problem that we are trying to solve? Who are we solving this for? Are there any existing constraints about this problem getting solved? How our users are going to solve this, or if they are already solving it in a particular fashion, all of these are cues will help you understand what is a better, or probably the best design solution.
In that process, one has to be curious by asking all the right questions and also observe continuously what is happening. If you end up coming up with a design solution, you need to check if it is working well? In the end, the most important part is showing empathy towards the problem and also people who would get happy with the solution. These are the ways to arrive at, or, coming up with the best possible solution to a particular problem.
If users are happy, they talk about it, you will hear it and if users are sad you will hear about it much more than when they are happy. You will get different cues based on which industry you are a part of, but definitely, the feedback always comes back to you.
Rohit Lalwani: We design in the era of the customers and customer’s participation design process leads to better products and solves real-world problems for people. I wish to know how we can involve users in the initial stage of the design process that usually revolves around immersion, observation, and contextual framing?
Sandeep: These days, the common practice is going towards creating these design workshops with end-users or it can be called collaborative brainstorming sessions with the end-users. Depending on the industry that you are part of, it becomes sometimes extremely easy for you to interact with your end-users and have this common shared understanding of empathy with not just end-users, but also the stakeholders. The meta point is to see how best you could involve your users in the process of making with people who are going to make it. In that scenario, the users feel elevated thinking someone is being helped by me to do something because the person or the organization is going to do something for me ultimately. When such ecosystems are created in the form of customer advisory boards or user testing or contextual inquiries, visiting the end-user, spaces.
As designers, you increase your empathy about not just users, but their environments and in the profile in which they would be using your product or service in this particular fashion.
Having this active ecosystem is extremely important because when your users start feeling that they are being heard first and there is a company who is actually investing time and energy in me to understand what my suggestions are, you are actually creating a system, which is super scalable. You would then see a lot of these folks who will actively participate and give full support, in evolving what you otherwise would have created just sitting in isolation. So, it is a very important aspect and it goes a long way to have this active participation from the entire user community.
Rohit Lalwani: Designers have superpowers, they understand people on an intellectual and emotional level and can make people think, feel and act in a certain way and they help users to readily process the visual stimulus that they will receive in an easily digestible format. I wish to know how can designers create digital products specifically designed according to these psychological perceptions of the human brain?
Sandeep: When we talk about these digital products it is still important to know that no matter what we end up doing is ultimately for people and people have certain ways in which they perceive information because most of the human brain is going to function in a particular fashion. In this context, it is important for designers to understand and study a little bit about the human brain, how certain information is going to get perceived, thinking about simplicity, why simplicity is more important than the cognitive overload and the complexities hard for average but also some of these individuals in your user base might be with special needs thinking about people and inclusiveness about things like accessibility, which now is becoming a very well matured topic in the design industry, but there is still a lot more that we will have to do, especially if you are designing interfaces and products for people with disabilities or special needs, or people with limited motor skills.
All of these individuals from their own perspectives are never wrong, it is only how we look at things that could be wrong.
If you understand all of these, the perception of how your product or service is going to be used by a specific human being in this particular case might vary slightly, but there are a high level of some patterns of some grouping that you can think of. It is then important to say when you are creating your user groups about a particular product or service, how do you make sure that for a normal user base or a type, what is that you have in the system and for someone who is having some specific requirements, what is that you can do? For instance, on the phones you have increasing contrast, increasing fonts, or having those accessibility features. It is a good way of making sure that you are being inclusive and taking care of multiple user types in your design.
Rohit Lalwani: At Avantika University we have coined the term ‘Designeering’ which is a blended approach towards design and engineering and this is how our students are being at the university. Do you think that all of these ideas could be weaved together and help young designers to create something outstanding?
Sandeep: Firstly, I liked the term, I always believe that designers should definitely know the technology in whichever space that they are in to understand, and then create better design experiences. If printing as a technology is being talked about let us say a graphic designer who mainly interacts with printers day in day out, or perhaps would be working in that space it is paramount for him/her to know how to offset printing works. If you do not know the printing industry, you perhaps cannot do much. Similarly, architects cannot ignore the knowledge of civil construction and all the nuances of that. In the user experience space, I have always been a believer that as a designer you should be familiar with coding and if not coding, you should at least know the limits of what is out there, what is possible. From what I understand, your university is actually trying to combine these two, otherwise not-so-connected spaces. Another place is IIT Gandhinagar where they also actively encourage their students to take on a design course, at least one design short course, irrespective of their disciplines that they come from, which could be chemical engineering for that matter. According to me, overall it is a great initiative and I would hope that combined knowledge, not just about design, but even engineers coming from the engineering side, having design knowledge and can go back to this common goal that we spoke about and with that common goal then create an immersive, memorable experience to solve some very critical problems that we are all going through and are going to come across in the future.
Our speaker Sandeep has given us deeper insights into design and psychology. To know more, head onto our latest Podcast episode. For more details, do visit our profile.
