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The year 2019 ended on an exciting note for us. On December 21st, 2019, we organised our first design meet-up — Driven by Design (D/D) in our office in Mumbai. The highlight for us was the massive response we received from our beloved design community for something which started out as an experiment. We will draw inspiration from this to move forward and organize more D/D meet-ups this quarter. Here are a few of the insights from the event.
Driven by Design Meet-up was envisioned to create a community of product designers who are interested in sharing ideas and innovations. A place where managers, designers, and developers can inspire each other. As designers, our days are spent creating meaningful experiences for various end-users. We believe by exchanging our learnings we can each become better at what we do.
We had already received around 80+ pre-registrations from design enthusiasts in and around the city for the event. On the day of the event, we started early and welcomed the audience at the registration desk with D/D merchandise. The attendees were from an array of disciplines ranging from Design to Development to Sales.
Our Co-founder, Sreeraman Mohan Girija (SMG) welcomed the crowd and addressed the speakers. He shared his experience about the Open Learning culture that we have built at Fynd — the importance of learning, the benefits of giving away our legos, and the values that have driven us to become what we are today. From starting up 7 years back to becoming a Reliance — backed startup — he reminded us that we have come a long way, but still have miles to go.
It was my turn next! To help everyone understand the concept of Driven by Design, I shared an intriguing scene from the movie — Founder, where they design the most efficient system to take an order, prepare and deliver a burger at McDonalds.
For us, Driven by Design is the process of crafting great user experiences by defining problems, empathising with users and providing workable solutions that have a positive impact eventually leading to the best possible design solution.
Next up was Harsh Vijay, Chief Designer, Co-founder & CEO of Brucira, a Mumbai based studio that has worked with the likes of Google, Hotstar, Oppo, Titan, and DHL. He shared his views on how good design can help grow businesses.“A product is not sustainable if it is useful, popular, and engaging but not making a profit.”
The focal point of his talk was how business and design go hand-in-hand and he made his case with the help of many interesting examples. Using the chart above he was able to draw parallels between business design and service design. His talk was peppered with examples of how design has helped businesses, directly and indirectly, reduce expenses and improve profit.
From the world of streaming media and IPL, Ananth Pai, the Product Designer from Hotstar, spoke about his experience in building the Hotstar Sports Bar. Cricket in India has always been a community experience. On the other hand, streaming videos is pretty-much an individual activity. Ananth with Hotstar Sports Bar has successfully brought these two experiences together. In the app he has created a social watching experience where friends can watch a match together.
With gamified features such as Social Feed, Hotshots, Emojis and Watch n Play user engagement has increased significantly along with possibilities for monetisation. He highlighted how a simple filter and sort on Social Feed led to a positive user experience signifying the importance of even really small incremental design improvements.
After the 2 thought-provoking sessions, it was time for questions from the audience. This was a fun Q&A session that brought out some interesting perspectives of the product world. Our speakers were asked questions about decision-making processes, the importance of stakeholders, user-centric designs, and design principles.
We had our first successful meetup, all thanks to our speakers and the awesome group of people who attended the event.
Apart from the interesting talks, we also had an exclusive product showcase from Love&Glue. Love&Glue is a brand created by our very inspiring Design Leas at Fynd- Pearl Mendonza!,
AML Team at Fynd has been developing cutting-edge AI tech, and they showcased their huge collection of products like Fynd Trak, Fynd Now, EraseBG, GlamAR, Witi etc. To know more about our AML team, visit Fynd Research.
We always welcome constructive feedback, so that we can continuously learn and improve. We were overwhelmed by the feedback from the audience. Here are a few of them.
As part of the community of product designers around Mumbai, we thank everyone who attended our first meetup. We hope you had a great time, met interesting people and feel inspired. We encourage all design enthusiasts to engage in conversations and contribute towards the meetup so that we can all grow together. We love to talk about design. Join us if you do too!
Kudos to our design team who planned and managed the event.
We hope to see you at our next meet-up which is going to be updated, more informative & full of new things.
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