Supporting Startup Design Studio of July with Arnav Agarwal
User experience design is a constantly evolving domain that is primarily shaped by customer requirements. Understanding the problem from the user’s perspective by empathizing with them and involving them in the design process can provide valuable insights into the users’ needs. These insights can help designers reimagine the experience for the users by serving them with the pain points they are facing. So how can designers deliver great experiences based on users’ requirements? In this episode, to know more about this theme, we interact with Arnav Agarwal, Co-Founder at Embed Design. Embed Design is a research-based design organization that caters to users’ needs, keeping them aligned to the business goals for an effective outcome through its solutions. Their mission is to heavily Empathize and believe in the Design Thinking Process, catering to user needs that align with business goals for an effective outcome for the stakeholders. Let’s know more about their journey on our episode for “Supporting startup Design Studio of July.”
Rohit Lalwani: What is different and unique about the Embed organization and its designers? There are numerous design studios and startups that are trying to solve similar problems for the customers. What makes you stand out from the crowd?
Arnav: The only thing which makes us different is the young perspective, what we bring to the table. We are a bunch of young individuals with a vision to embed customer experiences with various brands out there and looking at a problem area from a young perspective in order to create a positive and meaningful output. This helps us look at various other perspectives as well and how can we actually include all of our stakeholders, making them realize that they are part of the entire process because in design, most of the other agencies happened to have the entire process done all by themselves or they divide resources in order to solve that particular problem, or in order to design a particular thing. We at Embed make sure that all the stakeholders are equally participating and this happens in a very active gamification format wherein each and every stakeholder feels equal, each and every stakeholder feels valued and they know that what is that they are participating in and what will be the predicted output or what can be the ultimate output out of it.
The more we interact with our stakeholders, the more clarity we have towards the business goals, what is what the end customers might be needing.
That is what makes us different.
Rohit Lalwani: Each startup is building a solution for another startup’s problem. Our audience wishes to know what are the typical challenges you see with your customers while defining user experiences and how do you strategically address them?
Arnav: We have had an opportunity to work with some of our clients in the recent past who wanted us to reimagine the experience for the particular audience and while the process we realized that it is so much you can do to increase the inclusivity of people like and specially-abled who are usually left apart from the world of UI.
We realized that the meter challenge line defining the needs of customers and aligning them with the product and ultimately the business goals where most of the emphasis lays. For instance, we recently have worked on elder tech domain where the end-user was above the age of sixty and while researching, we realized that there were so many things that we tend to ignore while working on a product, but might play a crucial role in the end user’s decision making.
And in this case, we had to reimagine the experience for the users by designing the entire application, which has better colors that can promote good contrast issues, better readability, and giving them freedom of choice to choose their font size, how can we have the entire information accessible and less number of clicks and how can we reduce the text face for us to generate data from the users and make it entirely gesture-based because, in order to reduce the number of times the keyboard pops up on your screen and to actually input the data by looking at one key at a time that is a time taking process and ultimately makes them feel that it is something which is setting them apart from the other users and all of these things, what we have seen over there helped us make them feel connected and have great experiences using the application for a longer time.
Rohit Lalwani: We wish to know from you, how do you see user experience as a domain evolving and what are the exciting areas that we can expect in the user experience domain in the coming days?
Arnav: All of the domains have been evolving, because if we see post-COVID, most of the organizations and most of these industries have started adopting UX into their businesses and realized the importance of online business. Ever since the term was brought to wider knowledge by Don Norman We as an industry started adopting it and it is how a user ultimately interacts with your product, service, or system.
Ultimately this is a customer’s perception of the utility, how easy your product is, to use and how efficient your product is.
Improving UX is important to most companies, designers, and creators when creating and refining these things. We are also doing this to avoid any kind of negative user experience that can actually diminish the use of these products and thereby having a major impact on your business goal but in my opinion, a major improvement we all get to see is in the world of health tech where post-COVID in order to reduce any possible touchpoints people started valuing these markets and actually braided a trust towards the same. If you and me, if we have any kind of a medical requirement or anything that we have to do with medical, there is a data product which is available out there using which we can actually look into various kinds of medicines, we can order them online, we can consult a doctor online without having to meet them, we can see how we are doing, if we are isolated, etc, all of these things are out there and slowly and gradually, even the awareness is coming to people’s mind. We see many startups right from the finance industry, for instance, UPGRAD, to social media like clubhouse these are the industries that are following a German methodology and implementing UX strategy even before they launch a product.
The way they define their customers, the competitors, the cost leadership, how can they be cheaper in terms of their prices as per the competitors, and ultimately the idea they want to sell is all changed and everything is getting better and more data-driven. In order to create an MVP or MAP, which is the minimum viable product or minimum awesome product. They do these things to raise the appropriate funding or in order to actually do user testing and all of these activities actually fills up this concept and due to the awareness which is created out of the competitors, the kind of market where it is leading right now, even the word of deliveries has a huge impact because if you see post-COVID most of us might have seen various kinds of businesses going down but delivery has been there, it has never fallen. Even in that industry, we see many applications and data products, which are actually helping users, how to track all of their data in a single place without having to actually shift from various platforms and COVID has changed multiple things for us and how people are adapting to it is really different. This awareness and people trying to keep up with the trends make things, getting excited day by day.
Our speaker Mr.Arnav has given us deeper insights into the fields of Design and UX. To know more, head onto our full Podcast episode. For more details, do visit our profile.
