Supporting Startup Design Studio of September with Mohit Yadav
As the market has moved towards an experience economy, the demand for innovative, experiential solutions is rising rapidly. To keep up with the market demand, a design thinking mindset is crucial. It enables designers to understand the complexity of the problems faced by the users and redefine how those problems are approached. It can lead them to craft innovative experiences that resonate with the users and amplify business value. So how can designers redefine problems with a design mindset? To know more about this theme, in this episode, we interact with Mohit Yadav, Founder and Chief Design Officer at Wolffkraft Design Studio. It is an Experience Strategy & Product Design studio, serving customers globally in domains like healthcare, travel, fin-tech, complex enterprise products, and emerging technologies. They assist businesses to identify opportunities for action, redefine how problems are approached, and help deliver complete resilient solutions. Let’s know more about their journey on our episode for “Supporting startup Design Studio of September.”
Rohit Lalwani: As an icebreaker, our audience would like to know about Wolffkraft’s strategy and design studio. What solutions do you assist your customers with and how did it all start for you?
Mohit: Wolffkraft is a product and experience design studio. We help startups and large corporations leverage the power of design to craft experiences that generate value for the businesses and their end-users. In the last five years, the team at Wolffkraft has delivered high-quality design solutions for many new-aged startups and large organizations, these include strategic and UX interventions on various complex enterprise solutions direct to consumer applications, large platforms, communities, and more.
Majorly, we have, our expertise in four areas, that is Investigate, Innovate, Disrupt, and Inspire. The terms are self-explanatory, but, Investigate where we bring quality insights on the users and scenarios, etc. Innovate is where we try to help businesses leverage design to come up with innovative solutions in their respective domains.
In Disrupt, we leverage design to rethink and come up with new-age ideas to re-look at how things are done today and try to help them disrupt business models and user-facing solutions, etc. Inspired is my favorite one where you use design to create something that inspires the audience or the newer generation where you could be a leader in space or, it could be a new way of doing business, a new way of engaging customers, or making a statement basically peeking into the future.
Rohit Lalwani: There are very few companies that go out and set up their operations abroad. Wolffkraft has its operations in the United States of America as well. How does it help in being based out of the USA in serving your customers better?
Mohit: We had been operating in India for the initial three to four years and after that, we took the decision of setting up a base in the United States as well. The main reason for this is the first thing is that it is always easier and convenient for a business to interact with a provider in their corporate structure with their legal bindings in the local country. Secondly, as Wolffkraft puts equal emphasis on the quality of design minds that we offer being global helps us interact easily with the global talent as well. Bringing in fresh perspectives, diverse cultures to the mix, and hence a very differentiated offering for the businesses. Lastly, the sensitivity that the West has towards the value of design and designers is still unmet. Overall it is exciting, cost-effective, and most importantly it is very easy to do business with customers in the United States. Therefore, these are some things that drive us to do business there as well.
Rohit Lalwani: User experience, is an important aspect, especially for any digital platform or product. Surprisingly, it is seen as an expensive investment by many early-stage companies of startups as well. What is your view on this and how can this bias that it is expensive, be addressed and it is more of an investment and not an expense as a mindset can be brought in?
Mohit: In my accordance, I do not think it is expensive. If you look at the opportunity cost of not having a good user experience for your products and services. The rise in UX debt is incredibly difficult to get rid of once you accumulate it, therefore it is always best to have a UX strategy at the earliest. We have had case studies where we have got in touch with startups, right from the MVP stage and we have seen their growth versus startups that do not leverage design in that early stage. We have substantial evidence that it works, and we have worked with many startups in our five years of existence. Startups need an agile UX process. It has to be with a custom-defined process, depending on the unique positioning and the roadmap this brings design participation in a very cost-effective way. Brands do not lose on quality design thinking in their businesses and products at an early stage. One of the activity is always seen as an expensive proposition, but participating for a long-term roadmap that is not very expensive, it also cuts on costs and adds a lot of value. All this is subjective to interacting with the quality design team which understands design in and out, a die-cut process of the commoditized offering will always feel expensive because you are not getting the right ROI not just from the cost point of view, but also in the outcome that you generate based on those activities.
Rohit Lalwani: What are some of the common user experience design or strategy mistakes that customers and clients land up making. How could they be more mindful of this fact and avoid some of these common mistakes, which at times can land of being quite an expensive process?
Mohit: The most common mistakes that I have come across in my journey of design entrepreneurship until now is one not investing very early into the design, not having an open mind towards design and treating it as a one-off activity, not questioning designers on their design, and getting carried away by only the visuals or maybe only the UI, not having a design mindset in the solution process or the product definition stages.
Creating the design as a commodity and designers as pairs of hands is the most rampant one because we all can think creatively.
And then there are a lot of biases that kick in and you just get carried away in that direction without even knowing that you are going. The other one could be, not using design as a cohesive strategy and focusing on areas and siloed. That is also one of the most rampant ones where you individually look at something, but you do not look at the bigger picture together. These are some common ones that I have seen in my career.
Mr. Yadav has given us deeper insights into the field of Design. To know more, head onto our full Podcast episode.
