Work | Unique Experiences

A to Z

The Philips water purifier has been the learning of my life. Right from the stage of inception of this product idea, till the product went into production, I was involved at various stages in various capacity playing different roles.
I designed the interface of this physical product, working alongside the industrial designers.
I was the person who worked with the embedded systems team to make sure the electronics behave in the appropriate way.
I was the QA guy to make sure all the use cases were considered, and the product did not fail at any stage of usage.
many more hats i had to wear... More on this if we meet in person!

Mid-way twist

We spent 2 weeks onsite in CA working on a design concept. It was based on the brief that we had gathered during the discovery phase from various stake holders. We were convinced that we were on the right track. We had a meeting planned to explain our solution strategy to the client. It was during this presentation the fact emerged that we completely missed a key success factor which was not emphasised enough during our briefing sessions.
From there onwards we kind of steered the whole presentation spontaneously to save the day.
More on this if we meet in person!

No Clue, No Cash

I was roped into this project, had to travel to London for the discovery phase. There were people from the business, technology & of course client’s side. Had no idea as to what is expected out of this trip.
I landed on a Saturday evening, so had entire Sunday in hand and the meeting was scheduled on Monday. So out of curiosity/anxiety I scribbled a few questions and a few expected outcomes out of this meeting from design angle and sent it to the “Director of sales” of my org, who was supposed to introduce me to the client. To my surprise he sent that document as the outline of the entire 4days workshop.
The other challenge was to manage my stay at the hotel with literally no funds on my travel card due to a glitch in the bank transaction.
More on this if we meet in person!

Dynamic Component Library

As a designer at times you get emotionally attached to the work that you do. This sentiment resulted into an urge to make sure that design implementation should be carried out without any shortfalls irrespective of who does it. The best way to ensure that was to create a component library which as code ready. It would cater not only to the engineer but also to any designer who would want to work for future product features.
I ended up designing an easy to use experience to use the component library.
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Testing product prototypes

This was my 1st encounter doing ergonomic study while working on an industrial design project. This was a medical device we were designing for a Japanese client. The study was regarding blind operation of a CT scan machine to adjust the patent trolley. This device had a touch screen to control certain settings as well as some hard buttons with a joystick. We had to conduct several tests using various heights of the joy stick and simulate the environment to really finalize on the design for the touch screen and the hard buttons.
This was really an eye opener to really understand how stuff works in the industrial design world.
More about this in person.

The Turbo Mode

3 Weeks in hand to work towards a sales pitch. 2 designers deployed to build a UX strategy and a POC. Both were asked to be ready to travel to US for the pitch. The decision fell in my favour on the day of travel. The flight ETD was on a Friday evening and at 1:30PM my design was chosen, and I got to travel for this pitch.
During this short burst of experimentation and exploration I got to work with the VPs and Led Technical architect as a part of this core team which was catering to this RFP.

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A mobile game with a business context

The best situation at work is when you can combine your passion with your work. This is what happened on this project when the requirement was to build a Game for our client who was into Event management, exhibitions and logistics related to this domain. I did a little market research to find out what was trending in puzzles and games. I then built the business context into the game logic and we rolled iOS as well as the Android version in just 6 months.
In this process I ended up creating 2 new games which I prototyped with action script in Flash.
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Research and Telemetry driven Design

While designing for enterprise application there is some level of authority you have over users, but you always need to strike a balance between how much you listen to the users as oppose to how much you want to push them. When in dilemma, research and telemetry always comes to rescue a design decision.

There are instances where user demands a particular feature but, when offered, data shows that they are not interested in using it. Its not about adoption but about really understanding the underlying problem well, in order to solve it well.

Driving on the right side

Because in Canada vehicles drive on the right side of the road, which I totally did not think of. So when the logo was printed on the trucks, for another vehicle driving in the opposite direction, it looked like the logo (which is in a shape of a trailer) was moving backwards. So after the entire design was delivered, we had to change it to make it look right after it would be printed on the trucks.

Corporate Jeopardy

Designers are full of emotion and apart from the main goal which is “wanting to solve the problem for end users” they also are eager to see their design come alive. As I was working on this product along with our engineering team, we got full support from the CEO directly talking to me, explaining that we will not compromise on the experience.
But we hit a major block which impacted our entire product roadmap. The external consultant who was also our SME and a liaison between the end customer and the product team flipped on us. One fine day we get to know that we were completely misguided for 1 complete year focusing on something which our end customer did not ask for.

It was a peek into the brutal business side exposing personal agenda. The external consultant got their own design team and shifted from the design we worked on for a year or more pushing us back in time.

Three years after I left the org, I got a 1 liner message from one of the Product managers, telling me that, “After 5 years and $ 5 Million we are going back to your design”

Bring down the Hammer

In this age of customer centricity, many organisations are still engineering driven, even some of the big players in the industry. There is nothing wrong in that until you just want to build a product without keeping the user in focus. I want to quote the author of book “How Design Makes the World”. Many times, product teams forget who they are building for.
Despite of many attempts to bring the focus back to the end user, it was not working out with the engineering teams who were driving the product road map side-lining the end users and shoving in features one of the other. Some of them were valid but most of the features were just a wish list of the engineering leaders.

It’s a relief when you get clear directives from the top management which aligns with your approach and the entire product team must follow those directives which takes the product into the right direction. That feels like bringing the hammer down.

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