Safe Fail and Fail Safe with Anirudh Natuu
Designers have the means to shift human behaviour to complex problems and make a significant impact on the lifestyle of the consumers by creating unique solutions. Simultaneously, empathizing with the users and understanding their needs and desires plays a crucial role in shifting behaviour and accelerating customer acceptance. It can help create seamless experiences that can have a long term effect and amplify the business value through integration. So how can designers anticipate users’ needs and desires and create functional and innovative products?
To know more about this theme, in the 58th episode, we interact with Anirudh Natuu, Director of User Experience Design and Studio Leader India at Globant. With over two decades of experience in digital transformation projects, product development, and business strategy, he holds expertise in interaction design, user-experience design, user-centred design and much more. Let’s know more about his journey and experiences in the latest episode of the “Avantika Designeering Series Podcast,” “Safe Fail and Fail Safe”
Rohit Lalwani: While you were talking about how we create these robust products, products that are loved and when customers become loyal to some of these products. The fact that creating the soul of a solution is most essential and hopefully the most fun task for any designer to undertake. Developing unique designs and solutions allows users to relate and resonate with their vibe. The question that I have for you is what are some of the ways designers can identify the personality of their solutions and use that as an advantage to communicate with their user?
Anirudh: You said that we can identify a personality for a solution? I think that is an important aspect to understand, so as we look at personas when we design products and solutions, it is equally important for us to understand what is the service or the solution part that we are working on. What are we designing? What are we doing? And then go back two steps and say that what is the brand promise? So, what is the customer going to expect from this particular product or service or this company at the end of the day? And is my design matching that? Because at one point in time I will be promising something through design. On behalf of the company, are we matching those expectations of customers? And how true is that design is something that we need to look at and align our designs at those levels.
The essence is extremely important of identifying all these aspects and then distilling it correctly and then delivering it through exact communication in terms of the vocabulary that we use, the language in part, and then aligning it with the end customers and ensuring that we all talk the same language for the target audience and precisely deliver that.
Rohit Lalwani: Design is a crucial driver of business success and as the only way companies can stand out from the crowd, the question that I have for you is how do designers ensure that they amplify the business value that design can have beyond the product and user experience?
Anirudh: If you look at a design today, designers are not limited to only a product or service, it starts with your brand and stands with your brand language and the brand promise that you do. And every single touchpoint that the customer’s going to get connected with. It is a complete service experience that one would be going to add multiple touchpoints and also in a way what we are designing is for every single touchpoint.
Design has to work seamlessly like a concert. Every single thing that you are doing has to look and feel like orchestrated experience and it has to blend extremely well with each other.
Moving forward design and designers have to keep those aspects in mind that “I am a part of a much larger ecosystem and whatever I am doing has to gel well into a system which may be designed by me, or may not be designed by me but at the end of the day, delivers which the customer would experience as a great experience”
It could be a service, or it could be a solution that has been appointed for them. But that is something that will always be important moving forward. That is very important for us.
It is going to be a life-changing experience, moving forward with all those design solutions that we are doing. At the end of the day, somebody is investing in these designs and the approach that we take has to be sustainable. It has to be a long-term thing and ensure that whatever business changes happen, it fits into this jigsaw puzzle quite well. At the end of the day, it is a profitable venture for somebody who was investing money and time.
Rohit Lalwani: Businesses changing from a knowledge paradigm to a transformational paradigm and are using a design strategy to maximize market adoption and get a critical mass that permits a leader position in the market. I would like to know how designers create user experiences that deliver value in every touchpoint and how do they transmit the brand values during the experience?
Anirudh: As I told you, it is going to be a long journey for every one of us in terms of the service experiences or brand experiences or user experiences that we create. So at the end of the day, these have to be frictionless, smooth solutions for the end-users. The user does not matter what is the underlying adaptation of technology? How mature is your system, how robust or the solution that you thought for them? But at the end of the day, they should function seamlessly. That is where we will have to adapt to a lot of newer technologies going forward.
We cannot be shy of near things like artificial intelligence, machine learning is making a lot of impacts.
Others are giving a lot of predictive insights in terms of how the users would be behaving with the systems and making a simple meaningful suggestion. That is where we are completely moving towards from a business point of view. Technology is enabling us to move fast and rapidly. It is in a way spoiling our customers and customers are wanting that wow effect in every single thing that they are touching and interacting with.
And I think that is where we will have to sort of emerge and lead towards. So, services are emotional journeys and we need to craft an experiential story. What is the experience that this brand or the service or this design offers me? I think that is a particular style or emotional reaction that people will eventually have when they start interacting with us through these products. So, I think that is going to be a paradigm shift in a way.
Rohit Lalwani: That brings us to my last question. At Avantika university, we have coined the term Designeerning, a unique combination of design and engineering. Do you think both of this concept blend in with your work and could this philosophy help young designers achieve something exceptional?
Anirudh: Yeah. Designeering is a very unique approach and a term that you coined; I completely feel it is an interesting thing to happen. You just cannot be shying away and say that “I am a designer or I am an engineer” but the way you have just blended this, it is really interesting. And as designers, we always are used to blending a lot of things. We are always into morphing things if you morphed this term quite well and kudos to it. If I look at it more from an industry standpoint of view, I would say that we are also looking at something that we call full-stack engineers or full-stack designers. That is where it completely resonates with what you guys are trying to work with. I believe design engineering is the next thing going forward and I definitely see a great future in that.
Mr Anirudh has shared many more insights regarding the domain of design and engineering. To know more about it, head to our latest Podcast episode. For more details, do visit our profile.
