Tell me about introduce yourself

Thanks for the opportunity.

My story begins with a completed bachelor's degree and no knowledge about what
UX design is, but now my career is built on UX design.

I was a fresh science graduate and did a small design course in Chennai. Actually, I
started my career in design with one of the publishing companies in Chennai at that
time, as there was a huge market for UX design and web design and not much buzz
around UI and UX.

In 2007, in Chennai, I usually started off by designing in paint and Corel Draw and
then moved on to learning InDesign, illustrator, and Photoshop. My journey was
gradual, one step at a time. In July 2008, my life changed rapidly because of a good
thing that happened in my career that I got my first dream job as a UX analyst with
HP. Starting my journey as a UX designer was one of the milestones in my career.
During my time there, I learned how to identify business requirements and find
solutions to business problems, and this perfectly prepared me for a career as a UX
designer over a span of 13-plus years.

I specialize in converting quantitative and qualitative data into making the everyday
ordinary, doing something simple and easy for people to understand a little more
delightfully, and accelerating workflow for organizations and businesses. I would say
my biggest strength is that I understand what my audience wants. I am a good
listener. I advocate for users as well as for businesses through accuracy, efficiency, and
transparency.

My hands-on approach to defining product vision- crafting compelling stories and

designing seamless, human-centered experiences across complex ecosystems
empowers me, and most of my work has evolved around telecommunications,
computer hardware, and software, logistics, IoT, banking, and insurance. I had also
been fortunate enough to work for large brands such as HP, Verizon, and
Equities,CAMS,etc., and I had also managed teams to deliver the best products in
the market. I previously worked as a lead UX designer, and I was heading up an
entire design portfolio and focused on 9 to 10 applications relating to mutual fund
geographies, which were combinations of apps and websites or portals. Currently, I
am working as a Senior Lead UX designer with L & T Infotech, and the current
clients are OTIS and Microsoft.

My hobby is that I help aspiring UX design students build a career and I used to
give feedback and share my knowledge towards my passion for design, technology,
and the field of education.

How do you define UX design or What is UX design?

Suggestion: A successful UX design is about creating the best tool for a common
set of tasks and making the user experience so seamless that people can do the

tasks without really noticing they’re using the too l.

What is the difference between UX Design vs. UI Design?

The difference between User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX) is that UI refers
to the aesthetic elements by which people interact with a product, while UX is about
the experience a user has with a product or service. So, UI focuses on visual interface
elements such as typography, colors, menu bars, and more, while UX focuses on the
user and their journey through the product.

Can you describe an end-to-end UX design process?

So the process starts with understanding the users and in order to do that,
we would do user research, and this can be accomplished in many ways. But one
of the most common ways that we would do that is to interview users or do focus
groups and try to put ourselves in their shoes to understand what it is that is
giving them pain points in using the products and services. And then after that we
try to synthesize these understanding and findings into concrete UX deliverables,
such as personas and user journeys or jobs to be done so that the findings is easy
to understand, easy to communicate between different teams and even to the
stakeholders such as business owners. And then we go into the second part of the
double diamond process of design which is to then open ourselves up to ideas to
generate as many ideas as possible to do brainstorming and then doing prototypes
and wireframes. and mock-ups of these ideas so that we can then bring these
ideas
to the users and then test whether that these designs will achieve what we want
them to do. Is it understandable for the users? Is it good? Is it easy for the users
to use? And then after that, we reiterate on these designs based on the feedback
from the users testing and then hand off to developers. So, this is a basic process
that I usually use for my UX projects, but it is not a linear process. So, we would
go back to different steps and when needed."

Walk-me through case studies about your recent UX work.

Portfolio walkthrough

I worked as a Lead UX Designer on this project, and the product's name is wowtruck.
Wow Truck is the largest online truck booking platform in India.
I have broken down the content of this case study into five parts, and I am going to
introduce you to the problem and I am going to talk about my process.
Wow Truck is the largest online truck booking platform in India. In this app-based
truck With our rental service, you can hire trucks & pickups in a few minutes.
The problem is that, first of all, shipping is done with the involvement of middlemen
– freight forwarders and brokers. It is they who arrange load requests and set the
price. Then, there is the massive problem of managing shipping. We started from
scratch; we had a few more competitors at the time.
Understanding Business
Before diving straight into the process, I had to understand how the truck industry
works and who the users are! So, I tried to gather as much information as I could
from inside and outside of the company.
Firstly, I had a lot of sessions with stakeholders to find the answers, like:
What is the primary goal of Wow Truck?
Where do we want to be in six months, a year, or even five years from now? etc.?
Based on the conversation, we defined the long-term goal as increasing trip
bookings and user retention.
My responsibilities for this project included creating the user research,
conducting workshops, covering interaction design, product strategy, visual
design, designing the iOS and Android apps and responsive applications.
Regardless of the project I work on. I do not believe in any UX dogma. I see UX as
a toolbox of techniques and tricks that can be used in the context of the problem
that we have to solve. In this project ,I followed Design Thinking process to come
to my design solution, that is, solve the Problem through 5 stages - Empathize,
Define, Ideation, Prototype, and Test

Let's begin.
I kicked off the project by determining important factors. First,
Who are our users?
What tasks do they accomplish using our platform?
What devices do they use to accomplish set tasks and where are they doing
it? I also prepared an initial set of key performance indicators that we are going
to constantly measure on every iteration of the project.
I am using both qualitative KPIs, such as reported expectations, reported
performance, overall satisfaction, and quantitative KPIs, such as task success, rate
time on task use of secondary navigation and an assistant usability scale.

Empathize phase

As this App is aimed for business people and individuals who want to book the
truck for their business or personal usage.
My target audience was businesspeople and individuals in the age group of 20 to
60. Jumped into User research where I used both Qualitative and Quantitative
methods to understand the user needs, goals, and their pain points.
I had an individual conversation with 15 users to dig deeper into how the truck
industry works.
They had explained how they were managing the business and what difficulties they
faced. Simultaneously, I carried out a competitive analysis to learn about our
competition. My competitive analysis was split into two stages. The first stage was a
competitive review where I looked for strengths, weaknesses, patterns, and content
strategies used by our competitors. Stage two was competitive testing. I recruited
five participants from my target segment and ran a usability test on my main
competitors, apps and websites.
Based on some of the insights from the competitor analysis, we did a survey for 80
users to collect both qualitative and quantitative information.
After collecting all the data, we figured out some of the core features.

Take-away from User research

1. Finding the right fit with loading capacity
2. Checking the availability of the vehicle
3. Scheduling the trip over multiple days
4. Multiple stops with different and opposite routes take a long time to deliver
the products.
5. Statutes of delivery
6. Unavailability of the shop may lead to undelivered products on a
scheduled trip which has to be rescheduled.
7. unable to match the price between the customer and the driver.
In the Define stage,
The next step is putting together the actual user persona based on the research I've
done thus far to create the personas. The target audience was identified based on
criteria of truck booking experience, users who have already used a truck app, and
their domain experience. My preferred technique for creating a persona is through
qualitative research with quantitative validation. I ended up with two personas. The
primary persona is a marketing head looking for an easier and more cost-effective
way to get a truck in their respective urban jungles. The secondary persona was that
the admin staff wanted to book the truck in the simplest and easiest way with good
quality drivers. An empathy map helps to create personas in terms of understanding
deeply.
In addition to these user personas, I always put together a mental model, which is
a diagram that informs me what users are expecting and how familiar they are
with a product or a service similar to mine, the persona and mental model. They
gave me a comprehensive understanding of the user and they gave me full
confidence.
Finally, I chose to show the journey map of the primary persona, who is trying to
book the truck. This gives great insight into what obstacles the user may encounter
during the completion of the user journey, and it also gives opportunities to fix the
gaps.
Takeaways from this stage: I understood the personas of goals, needs, and
motivation, and it helped me in designing the prototype.

Ideation stage,
Next, I wrote down major concepts, sections, and tasks offered by the app and
began building the information architecture. I always do a combination of card
sorting and tree testing until I reach unanimous agreement and start catching with
full confidence. Building upon the information architecture, I can now get into more
detail and create the paths the users will take to achieve a task. The user flow tool
is my favorite tool from the entire UX process because it is, for me, at least the
technique that reveals most potential problems in the app's navigation.
Takeaways from this stage: We explore all the possibilities of achieving the
persona's goals.

Design stage,
Then I go on and complete a design system. My methodology of choice is the
atomic design system, where your first Creek atoms are molecules, organisms,
templates, and pages. And then, by combining the wireframe and the design
system.
I created a low-fidelity wireframe to place all the possible elements and components
with different approaches and finally created a high fidelity wireframe.
The Solutions we arrived at.
1. We took the prototype to the users. Here is what I learned. 1. Users were
happy that the app made the login process easier. Just enter your mobile number,
and verify through OTP. Done! Login via social/email.
2.The all-in-one nature of the application was a pleasant surprise for all the
people we tested the app with.
3.Identifying the driver's current location, we provided the solution to users
that integrated Google maps and made location selection easier.
4. We noticed that ports were being used frequently in the location, but ports
were not easily recognisable from the Google Map address. So, we made a
separate port selection for easy access.
5.Customers can save addresses and can see recently used addresses.
6.Several stop locations
7.3D truck images with proper details so that even a new user can easily select
a truck.
8. Hire a truck at fixed rate pricing.
9.Hire a truck for the whole day.
10. Book a round trip (both up and down).
11. The shipper can select additional services according to their needs (labor,
extra weight, etc.).
12.Bidding
Testing phase
We hosted user testing sessions. It is minimal. The target outcome was to
validate the new designs and to better understand the mindset and browsing
behavior of users towards responsive applications. Then we used to iterate them
based on the feedback,
Usually, we conduct user testing with 5–7 users. Roughly 45 mins per user.

Measure/Impact
To comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted and obfuscated
confidential data/matrix in this case study.
Here are some example metrics we used to measure the success of the applications.
Task completion rate — Percentage of the correctly completed task.
Task completion time — the time it takes for the user to complete a task.
Engagement — How often users are interacting.

UX Example
we try to design products and services so that is so easy and intuitive to
understand, and to use and solve the problems for the users, the best we can. So, I
made an analogy to a banana, for example. So, a banana would have a peal that is
yellow when it is ripe and good to eat, send signals to the user, very intuitively you
know when.
it is good to eat. The peel also protects the banana from the environment and it
also protects the user's hands from being dirty when they are eating it. So it's a
perfect case, very easy to understand how to use a banana. So taking that
analogy and putting it into products and services such as websites, apps or even
physical Products.

Five Dimensions of IXD

1D (Words) – Words should be simple to understand and written in such a way that
they communicate information quickly to the end user.
2D (Visual representations) – Visual representations are all graphics or images,
mostly everything that is not text. They should be used in moderation, not to
overwhelm.

3D (Physical objects or space) – Physical objects or space refers to the physical

object a user interacts with, whether it’s a mobile device, mouse, and keyboard.

4D (Time) – Time is the length that the user spends interacting with the first
three dimensions. It includes how the user might measure progress, as well as
sound and animation.

5D (Behaviour) – It is the emotions and reactions that the user has when
interacting with the system

Business Goals & User Goals

Now let's come to the actual user experience process. Now on the top level, any
product, any website, any web app, any mobile app, it is connected with two
entities. One is users and the second is business. So one side we have business
on the right side we have users. So the first step will be we need to care there
why the users want this product and why the business wants this product. So we
are going to conduct user interviews, persona journey maps for users, for
business. We are going to conduct stakeholder interviews and things like that to
get what is in the mind and what are the goals of our users and the business. So
you get the idea, we need to get into the goals.

The primary goals of users and primary goals of our business. Business goals
might be profits, market penetration. They want to bite, want to, you know, get
into the market and penetrated the more sales. They might want more signups.
So things like that. These are business goals. These are not features right now. So
we are talking about a overall goals. This is very a top view for these. The
requirements of our product. Now users, they might have different goals.
Business have different goals. For example,User might have schedule a day, easily
get a doctor, a doctor's appointment, easily book an online plane ticket easily or
things like that. So this is the goal of the user, but every goal has some triggers,
some behavior. Why do the
 users want this? So these are the triggers of the goals. So we also want to look in
those. Then we have the behavior.

Usability is defined by 5 quality components:

Learnability: How easy is it for users to accomplish basic tasks the first time they
encounter the design?
Efficiency: Once users have learned the design, how quickly can they perform
tasks?
Memorability: When users return to the design after a period of not using it, how
easily can they re-establish proficiency?
Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how
easily can they recover from the errors?
Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design

How do your typical days look like?

My typical workday starts with me getting to the office around 10 am. First
things first, I’m checking emails, calendar, prepping for the
day and reading articles about what’s happening in the international UX world.
Stand up with the team is at 10:30 am. Then work starts for the day. Depending
on where I am in the sprint, I will be doing one of the following: sketches,
prototypes, usability testing, iterations, high-fidelity designs or quality checks with
the devas. and I do have teams where I used to address their queries and
validating the ideas.Once a week we have sticky sessions. We put up whatever we
are working on; it could be sketches, wireframes, or ideas. We show it to our
team
members (devs, project managers, analysts etc.) Sticky sessions are an easy way
to prompt discussion, highlight technical early on and to make the team aware
of
our progress. We have a great bunch of devs who are always willing to help and
offer technical advice. Once a week we have a UX and UI guild. All the designers
from the teams get together to share new ideas, chat about work issues and to
solve UX / UI problems that we may have. The guilds are a good place to catch up
and discuss
all things design. We also do a design showcase once a week
 what is Personas ?

what is USER RESEARCH ?

Generative research
Generative research is a research method that provides a deep understanding of your
target audience’s motivations, challenges, and behaviors. Broadly-speaking, the aim of
generative research is to pinpoint a problem statement, identify the problem to be
solved, and collect enough data to move forward. Find out more in Chapter 3.
Evaluative research
Evaluative research focuses on evaluating a product or concept in order to collect data that
will improve the solution. Evaluative research is typically undertaken early on, and used in
an continuous, iterative way throughout and following the design process. Find out more in
Chapter 4.
 what is CUSTOMER JOURNEY?

how to measure the product ?

1. Task time
Example: Find a call-to-action button on a website. The designer can take a sample of 10
users and ask this focus group to find the location of the call-to-action button. Capture the
time each participant spends on the task and then divide the time taken with the number of
participants to find the average time taken to complete the work. If the average time taken
to find the location is higher than the expected time, designers should focus on the
information hierarchy of the application to see how it should be improved.
2. Errors
Example: Assume a scenario where the user has to make an online bill payment. Simulate
the actual scenario that the user has to go through in the application. Allow the user to
conduct the task and accomplish the goal by successfully making an online bill payment.
Observe how the user goes through the application; note any mistakes that they are
making and how they are making those mistakes. If the user is making a huge number of
errors while completing the task, the designer should look into the usability issues of the
application carefully.
3. Completion rate
4. Usability problems
5. Task Satisfication

what is the UCD process

User-centered design (UCD) is an optimistic approach to invent new solutions. It
starts with human beings and ends with the answers that are tailored to their
individual needs. When you understand the people you are trying to reach, and then
design from their perspective, you come up with unusual answers. UCD is both how
you are thinking and what you are doing. It is all about building a deep empathy
with the individuals you’re designing for. Generating heaps of ideas and building a
bunch of prototypes. Sharing what you’ve got created with the people you’re
designing for.
Failing and trying again. And finally putting your innovative solution out in the world.

Examples : Everyone who has used Duolingo understands the simplicity of the
app. By finishing one task or a game, you’ll be able to move on to the more
advanced categories. Incorporating the addictiveness of a mobile gambling app and
using it to teach the users new languages is a brilliant idea. And the amazing UX is
what keeps people coming back again and again.
what is design thinking ?

Accessibility ?

As the W3C guidelines state, color shouldn’t be used as the only visual means of
conveying information, indicating an action, prompting a response, or
distinguishing a visual element. Designers should use color to highlight or
complement what is already visible. In the form mentioned above, a designer
should give more specific error messages like, “The email address that you entered
is not valid” or at least provide an icon near the field which requires user attention.
Card sorting
Card sorting is a UX research method in which users organize topic cards into categories in a
way that makes sense to them. This research activity is an important step to creating an
intuitive information architecture (IA) and user experience.

There are three types of card sorting: open, closed, and hybrid card sorting.

In an open card sorting session, participants organize topics into categories that make
sense to them, thus generating new ideas and category names.

In contrast, in a closed card sorting you offer participants a predefined set of categories
and ask them to sort the items into the available categories.
Finally, in a hybrid card sort, participants can sort cards into categories a researcher has
already defined, but also have the option to create their own categories.

Tree testing

Tree testing is a research method that helps you evaluate the hierarchy and findability of
topics in an app or website.

The data collected from a tree test helps you understand where users intuitively navigate
first and is an effective way to assess the findability, labeling, and information architecture of
a website or app.

During tree testing, only the text version of the site is given to the participants, who are
asked to complete a series of tasks to locate items on a site or application. It’s
recommended that you keep these sessions short ranging from 15 to 20 minutes and ask
participants to complete no more than 10 tasks.

To get started with a tree testing session, you will need to:

● Define the tree structure

● Create goal-based tasks
● Conduct pilot tests with your team
● Select the participants