Launched a Design Consultancy for new business and geo expansion.

In 2020, I was tasked with my current organisation’s market expansion in North America. We already had minor presence but the objective was to become more focused, relevant based on several interviews with the customers and research.

Drawing from our creative strengths and experience in working with multi-billion dollar organisation, vision was to build a design consultancy that would cater to specific industry and market needs that are currently unmet. This meant - a relevant business model, new skills sets, a separate team, new processes and frameworks, and all the bells and whistles required for a launching a new business.

Darjeeling Design Co. , a design consultancy for human-centered experience design needs.

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Sharing a snippet of the strategy and business model from the initial stages:

What was the elevator pitch?

The acceleration of change, the declining shelf-life of business models, and the widening gap between customer intent and behavior are all connected to one constant – human experience. We are a multi-disciplinary, independent boutique digital design consultancy managing a diverse range of projects for clients large and small.

The problem statement:

Simply put, business is being digitally reinvented and it needs to be steered in the right way by infusing design thinking methodologies at the very core of a organization. Brand strategy & marketing should be too. Because image and perception help drive value, deliver experiences, help give an edge over others in this competitive landscape; without an image there is no perception. It’s time to think beyond the funnel.

Unsuccessful strategies are piling up because these approaches don’t work:

• Focus only on implementing new digital technologies

• Try to ‘org design’ the way to digital

• Approach digital transformation as a technology implementation

• Just tell people to be more agile and innovative

• Isolated victory or bursts of activity – then declare digital success

• Hire or buy digital skills without also focusing on training existing talent in digital

Client patterns we see asking for help or facing challenges in their digital transformation journey are:

• The Competitor – The CEO gave a directive to transform. Now. How to do it?

• The Disrupted – Help! We are being disrupted. What do we do?

• The Fatigued – Our digital projects lack clear direction or real life benefit. How do I ROI?

• The One Man Show – My BU is lacking identity and appeal. How do I bring it at par with the BU in terms of positioning?

• The Spot Solution – We need a new mobile app solution. I know what I want and I need help getting it done. Let’s not boil the ocean right now, but focus on the delivery.

Industry trends and landscape:

As per a recent McKinsey research points to a set of factors that might improve the chances of a transformation succeeding. These factors fall into five categories:

• Having the right, digital-savvy leaders in place

• Building capabilities for the workforce of the future

• Empowering people to work in new ways

• Giving day-to-day tools a digital upgrade

• Communicating frequently via traditional and digital methods

Our Value Proposition:

Aligning the forces to make your goals compelling, beautiful and tangible takes a team who understands the balance of what’s possible with what’s right. We apply data driven insights, intuition and creativity to improve virtual and physical environment which our clients’ brands connect with real people.

We use strategy, design and technology to create transformative experiences that impact your customers, your employees and your business.

Business Outcomes:

• Led the business to grow 68% YoY and 5X headcount growth since 2019.

• Competitive pricing resulting in gaining more Bay Area based clients.

• Introduced new and expanded service offerings spontaneously to meet the increasing demand from clients and market trends.

Conversational UX and UI for Spikes Asia Festival 2017, Singapore.

Creative skills - User experience research | User experience design | Information Architecture | Wireframing | Prototyping | Interaction design | UX writing | Product strategy & roadmap | Product design | Product marketing & growth.

Management skills - Product pitch | Product and project management | Client and stakeholder management | Business

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At Kontiki Labs, I spearheaded Spikey, the official chatbot on Facebook Messenger for Spikes Asia Festival of Creativity 2017, Singapore. For us, as well as the organisers of the Festival, this was our very first event bot. I bagged this project through several product pitches and new initiative efforts.

Spikes Asia is a collaboration between Ascential Events (Europe) Limited and Haymarket that takes place once every year in Singapore. The Festival and Awards provide the Asia Pacific region’s creative communications industry with a platform to network and exchange ideas, bringing together the finest creative thinkers from around the world.

In this article, I’m going to cover the well thought out approach that simplified the complex program structure, setting the bot’s purpose right on point and made Spikey a success. This will also serve as a great event chatbot use case to follow!

So, here’s how we nailed it 🎯.

STRUCTURING 🎛️

Firstly, what was the need for a chatbot at Spikes? Here’s why —

1. Know who their audiences really are and what do they engage more with at the event (they usually have multiple components — the talks, awards, workshops, trainings, screening of the work, networking)

2. Make it easier for the attendees to browse through the exahustive festival itinerary and plan it in advance based on their interest areas. Events like Spikes are usually spread across multiple venues and feature a complex itinerary. This makes it difficult for attendees to plan their personal event schedules and then keep a track of everything that’s going on

3. Mobile winds up being the primary tool of the digitally savvy attendees. A bot would allow them to get quick replies in a familiar messaging/chat interface

4. Also, in today’s age, we cannot really expect everyone to download the event app. The push was to move away from app. Another point to note, app hardly gives any deep analytics around the user behavior, etc.

Secondly, what’s the problem statement —

To begin with, we outlined the central problem and challenge areas specific to Spikes after multiple discussions with the Spikes team and also taking into consideration based on their prevoius experiences. This helped us deconstructing the core and work backwards.

This made us go back to white boarding and break down all the parts involved. Doing this exercise helped us cut through the unnecessary detail and get right down to the heart of what content to serve up to our users.

Breaking the complex event structure down. White boarding to the rescue!

USER PERSONA 👩‍💻👨‍🎨

On to the next thing — ‘who is our audience?’ In this case it was folks from advertising and marketing industry. Understanding this demographic was one of the most critical steps from a conversation voice and tone perspective. This, in turn, defines the tech liberties that both developers, UX writers and designers can take.

SOUL OF THE BOT — THE CONTENT & CONTEXT 💙

Conversational Interfaces need a specific content strategy along with a special kind of Content Management System with NLP built-in.

We used our customized CMS platform, KONTIKI — that we have built from ground up. Kontiki is an AI driven CMS for voice and chatbots that powers the content using principles of existing robust CMS’s like WordPress and marrying them to conversation design guidelines and NLP techniques.

Kontiki Labs AIaaS Platform

The platform was used for establishing the rock solid foundation of the bot conversation by:

1. Linking the automatic content feeds from the web

2. Authoring conversations in a rich interface

3. Bit sized content structures suitable for bot interface

4. Providing in-chat support for emojis / images/videos

GIVING SHAPE TO THE BOT — THE FEATURES 🤖

Feature proposition during initial discussions.

Having established the big picture and the content, we came up with a list of features and core elements that would support the objectives we had defined. These were:

1. User Onboarding — Crucial because it helps set the right expectations, gives context and guides the users

2. Capturing interests for tailored recommendations — Knowing that our attendees belonged to several different domains within advertising, such as creative, digital, tech, branding, social, and so on, we created domain streams using Kontiki CMS to serve personalized content tied to these domain interests

3. Program Filters — We gave users the option to filter programs based on days, themes, speakers and tracks of the event

4. Detailed Schedule — We also kept this other channel open in case users wanted to browse through talks day-wise. (And guess what, the analytics have confirmed that this feature was very heavily requested)

5. Setting Alerts — Users could set reminder alerts for their favorite talks (5/15/30 minutes in advance) and the bot would notify them accordingly.(Another popular feature as per the FB analytics)

6. View Shortlisted Entries — During the event each day there used to be category wise shorlisted entries announcements. User could view the same in the web view format

7. Locating Venues — The event was spread across 3 different venues — main festival, award ceremony and after party. The bot could help with navigating and locating the venue

8. Hotel and Accomodation — Based on Spikes tie up with some of the local hotels which was further segmented budget range wise, bot could recommend stay options

9. Free Text Search — Users could also select to directly type out their query

Spikey’s conversation screenshot

BEAUTY THAT BROUGHT THE BOT TO LIFE — NLP 😎

• The magic sauce in this recipe was the NLP that allowed Spikey to intelligently understand whatever query users posed to it — whether relating to the event, festival program, speakers, location, food, coffee or things related to on ground support

• A question can be asked in a zillions of ways. Instead of training just the keywords we trained the phrases by first categorizing the query buckets such as — on ground support, program related, venue related, etc. — and then by creating separate entities around each of those. It could also detect the typos from users’ end and still come back with relevant response. For instance —

“Where is the festival held”/ “How to reach the festival venue?”/ “Venue?”/ “Directions to the venue” / “Where can I find the direction?” / “Directions?” / “Festival venue” / “Show me festival venue”/…

• Knowing that the audience belongs to the advertising industry, we packed some fun elements and made Spikey smarter (of course by training it using NLP techniques) to respond to greetings, its whereabouts/personality and some other questions related to bots in general. We drafted a list of questions based on the entities we mapped out earlier

• At the same time, we didn’t want our bot to take expletives or harassment lying down. Hence, training for this aspect of interaction was something we gave a lot of thought to it

• We constantly tested the bot day in and out for several days to see how differently users will ask and further train the bot accordingly before it was set to deal with the real world out in the public

See Spikey dealing with some of the user queries in the video.

The approach of neatly structuring and defining our objectives right at the outset helped us produce great results and validated our efforts towards building a purposeful event chatbot.

We were clear that our chatbot would be more helpful to the users if it could be kept as simple to navigate and browse. And, ‘keeping it simple’ is so much easier said than done!

We are not claiming this, but the numbers certainly are. That brings me to the last part of this article — analytics.

THE MAGICAL NUMBERS — BOT ANALYTICS 📊

Following the launch of our bot, user activity touched 5.9K. Besides, the bot was never turned off at any point by a single user.

Another interesting insight that emerged which indicated a healthy sign of stickiness and user engagement was that —

• Bot had sent out as many as 4.2K messages

• Bot received 789 user responses

• Bot Call To Actions were clicked 907 times

The most popular actions performed by the users were these —

> Accessing festival program

> Setting alerts

> Getting direction to the venue

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OUR LEARNINGS 📝

The bad news: Bot discovery is still a missing part of the puzzle and this insight arises from my firsthand experience at the event. Surprisingly, there were many who were not aware of the bot or the process of locating it. Even though the communication regarding bot launch and how to use the bot had been done well and circulated through the right channels multiple times, there remained a number of attendees who didn’t actually latch on it. I personally gave some attendees a demo on how to scan the bot’s M code (Messenger should probably give me some brownie points for educating their users).

The Good news: Those who did discover the bot told us they’d been glued to it and had continued engaging with it all through the event. This was validated by the numbers as well. Once again, this proves that conversational user interfaces are here to stay eradicating the need for accessing multiple and cumbersome interfaces.

There are tons of chatbots out there. But what makes a really good one? The answer is simple — a well-structured chatbot serving a definitive purpose and making the users smarter. That’s really what it all boils down to. Ultimately, the bots depend on us humans to be at their best! :)

The bot is not there in messenger now since the event is over.

However, you can take a look at the full demo on the bot functionalities in the walkthrough video below

Duration — 8:49

My talk at the AI Summit, Singapore.

In 2017, I spoke at the AI Summit, Singapore. My talk was focused on the impact that artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) technology can have, specifically in the customer experience vertical. And, yes, that is me up ob the stage.

But, before I get into it, it’s important to ask “Why is good customer service critical to any business?”. The answer — because it’s typically any customer’s first touch-point with a brand. So, it had better be good!

As we move away from screens, towards chat and voice-based interfaces, a major shift is taking place in the technology that’s enabling customer experience. Given that customers are more likely to use your product through voice-enabled interfaces like Google Voice and Amazon Alexa, or even mixed reality environments, there is a deep layer of complexity to delivering great customer experience. That’s all the more so when this experience has to be provided at all times during a user’s product journey.

It is no longer possible to bank on existing methods of providing help and support, where content is on webpages and searchable through simple indexing. If your product user is in an audio-only or experiential environment, then the experience on a webpage-based system can end up being sub-par, and can result in high product drop off.

Conversational UI for a restaurant POS.

Let’s dig a little deeper:

Let’s begin by understanding what exactly customer service is. Let’s not look at it from the point-of-view of a business or a customer, but as an onlooker:

Great customer service should translate to love and loyalty — between customers and businesses. But how often does that happen? Almost never. So, for now, it’s a pretty utopian vision.

When customers call customer service, their experience is most likely to be fragmented and frustrating when they are transferred from one department to another or just made to wait for ages until someone who can actually help comes along. We’ve all been there and we’ve all hated it, haven’t we?

Let’s look at the current problem scenarios mapped to their gaps —

1. Customers post their queries across channels: Information is fragmented and scattered, so businesses are unable to understand who their customers really are.

2. Peak time is ‘always on’ when it comes to customer service: Customer service reps are bound to make errors while trying to get the entire picture.

3. The 4 big messaging platforms together have over 3 billion monthly active users: Consumers are already gaining exposure to chatbots on smartphones and other devices

4. Inability to solve issues can quickly lead to a bad reputation(since the human tendency is to criticize rather than appreciate): This results in loss of customers to competition.

Comparing the perception of good vs bad customer service

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But how will these issues get solved?

For customers — when they have to visit just one point for prompt response on any query or issue.

For customer service reps — when they can cut down the noise and focus on the right things.

This is where AI, powered with content and conversations, comes in to bridge the gap:

As an AI application, an NLP-based chat or voice bot can:

• Understand customer correspondence

• Extract key and relevant info

• Share it with the right people

• Record the data and answers to enquiries on its own after learning from conversations

Wherever the bot gets stuck, a human should intervene. This lets the bot:

• Hand over requests to the customer service rep and learn from the way its human counterpart handles it.

• Free up the rep to build customer relationships and convert more brand advocates.

You can go through my presentation in detail here.

Launched a SAAS for building NLP based conversational interfaces.

Creative skills - User experience research | User experience design | Wireframing | Interaction design | Prototyping | Product design | Product strategy & roadmap | Product evangelising and growth | Product branding & identity.

Management skills - Product pitches | Client and stakeholder management | Product management | P&L

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Co-founded an AI startup, Kontiki AI in 2017 where I envisioned to build a SAAS platform for a Natural Language Processing (NLP) based conversational agents. An AI company focused on simplifying the use of technology and enabling it for brands and businesses. The unique value proposition for the platform was anyone could quickly build a NLP trained bot that required zero coding in a cost effective way, which was also vertical and platform agnostic.

Problem Statement:

• Peak time is ‘Always On’ when it comes to customer service: Customers want answer to most of their queries seamlessly and as per their convenience. Without having a need to interact with a human. Even better if it issues can be fixed and queries can be answered just over a text.

• Inability to solve issues can quickly lead bad reputation(since human tendency is to criticize than appreciate): Resulting in loss of customers to competition.

• How to make the right choice: Currently, there are several bot building platforms as a product. But most of them do not focus specifically into training quality datasets for building smarter conversational agents.

• Cost factor: It is not easy to build a NLP trained chat assistant for those who do not come from a technical background. Heavenly dependent on having an in-house Machine Learning team or outsource the product to a tech firm.

Solution:

• SAAS platform that enables anyone with or without technical understanding to build NLP based conversational agents. This will also be platform and vertical agnostic.

• A Content Management System for chatbots — a unique platform that allows you to plug any kind of content from the web and build an NLP capable chatbot in very short time and with less development effort.

• Enable premium subscribers to get an analytics dashboard for accessing bots’ performance analytics and real-time insights.
  
  

Insights summary from research and user interviews:

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Product Pitch Snippets:

Outcome:

Several products designed, developed, and deployed with a leading semiconductor organisation.

Built the first ever event NLP trained chatbot for a marketing and advertising event in Asia Pacific.

Open sourced the NLP platform for the developer community and also as a means to evangelise the product.

Got featured and recognized in leading tech publications.

Designed workplace collaboration.

Skills Applied - User experience research | Ideation | User experience design

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This project was part of one of the IDEO courses on design thinking that I had taken.

Project Objective:

Apply ideation methods to generate new and useful ideas

• Identify the right parts of idea to test

• Build quick and early experiments to prototype solutions

• Refine ideas by sharing them and gathering feedback

Challenge name:

How might we encourage more collaboration in the workplace?

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Phase 1- Ideation

Step 1: Plan

My challenge is to think ways to make collaboration friendlier and an encouraging activity at the workspace. The ideation methods that I am going for are:

1. Reaching out to my social network where we share common hobbies like biking, working out

2. Bringing 2 combination of places for taking references with the intent of making it more free flowing, rather than forced interactions - a pub + a workplace and a gym + a workplace.

3. Intentionally, staying away from my own colleagues for avoiding biases.

Step 2: Ideate

Generated 25 ideas. We ideated for about 20 mins. Some more ideation happened over a discussion with my friends.

The session went great mostly because here everyone was open about what works and what doesn't, since they were talking to me who is part of the same organisation. It becomes easier to provide unbiased, non-judgemental thoughts and ideas.

Step 3: Converge

Converged to top 6 main buckets from 25 ideas 

Phase 2: Rapid Prototype

Who’s the audience?

• All team members in an organisation.

What unmet need am I solving for through my idea?

• Usually most of us shy away from collaborating due to several constraints. How to motivate people to collaborate and feel good at the same time.

What's the name of the idea?

• Homegrown Think Tanks

When or where will people use this? How will people interact with the idea?

• Online as well as physical space.

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Phase 3: Reflections

Learnings about the idea, user, and the problem:

The most important part would be to get the right team in place. For eg: for any kind of collaboration, getting the team dynamics on point is the most crucial aspect. How to ensure that the collaboration within this team is also taken care?

How will the feedback inform my next steps?

One of the feedback that I got was - how to ensure that the team who is interested in collaborating to solve something real gets comfortable with each other.

Designed new products and services for today's 70 year-old.

Skills Applied - User experience research | Ideation | Service design | User experience design

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This project was part of one of the IDEO courses on design thinking that I had taken.

Project Objective:

• Identify what really matters to end users

• Solve challenges using design thinking methods

• Apply immersive technique to adopt users’ perspectives

• Synthesize learnings into an actionable insight

Challenge name:

How might we provide new products and services for today's 70 year-old?

Why did I choose it?

I am more curious to uncover and propose new kind of services that can be offered to a modern day 70 year-old. What would help them without being intimidating and by being highly intuitive keeping the age factor in mind.

What existing assumptions do I have about this challenge?​

Some of the interviewees may not feel comfortable sharing their opinion fearing it may appear they are needy or dependent due to their age.

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Phase 1 - Practiced Observing

Plan and approach:

Majority of my research is going to be offline vs online, since the project demands observing the challenge up and close for the target audience. Apart from research papers, reading up online will not be as insightful.

Offline, I would be meeting up those who I know, apart from generally observing the seniors in my community where I live, a park or a mall. I would like to weigh in the idea of developing something that can be medium (online or offline) agnostic, solving one particular instance at a time.

Summarizing what I did and saw (Observing Others):

I have been fortunate enough to have several interactions and experiences with those in the target group category. This assignment is focused around 4 of them – my father, my grandmother, my friend's neighbour and her father.

All of my observations are based on a day to day interactions, video calls done recently.

It’s important to note that all 4 of them are well traveled and have lived in bigger cities for the most part of their lives.

If there is one thing that is common among all of them is, they like their routine and they will stick to it no matter what the situation be. It’s almost like it gives them a purpose to kick start their day with.

Most of us (the working age) follow a routine, set around our jobs, children, hobbies, etc. But maybe developing a routine and sticking to a routine for 70 year olds is not as natural and easy when they are either living alone or with companions.

Reflecting on project challenge:

I have streamlined my observations around a few key areas that I believe will help in structuring my thoughts:

• Things they like to do or care about

• Adaptability quotient

• Emotional quotient

Things they like doing or care about:

My father is 70 year old. He likes being outdoors – socialising and visiting different places. He has always been physically active. Although, he has difficulty using his smartphone to its average potential but that doesn’t stop him from exploring a new city either by using public transport and relying on word of mouth recommendations or in company of someone younger.

Coming to my grandmother, she is 74 year old and runs an all women private sewing school of her own. Still works 6-7 hours a day. She quotes, she loves it because it keeps her busy and she gets to meet new customers and students coming from different walks of life. On her off days, she doesn’t like to sit idle. She will either step out to the mall or will explore some new restaurant in the neighbourhood. She does enjoy the company of younger people more than her peers.

Across all 4 of them, one of my common observation is, they have an affinity towards having a conversation at length with the younger generation to understand their opinion and gain new perspective on any particular topic of interest. However, if the topic is not of their interest, they will still listen to you but they will dial down on their interest levels. :)

They are also extremely mindful of your space when you need it, and equally considerate of the time that you spend with them. For eg: if I tell my father that I have to take his leave, he would be in more of a hurry than me to wrap up the ongoing conversation.

Adaptability quotient:

I noticed in my father’s case that the difficulty in using a smartphone is predominantly because the keyboard’s UI is not as universally intuitive as it could be. But there is a great willingness to learn and to adapt to use technology only if it revolves around their specific need. For eg: he moved to WhatsApp from SMS only because he could video call me and exchange photographs.

A few more instances on how each of them adapted to a new change:

• First instance, the neighbour, she is 85 year old who lives alone in her apartment, children are settled abroad. She has rented out a part of her apartment. Due to the pandemic, she had to rely heavily on technology. Whether it’s about ordering groceries online or making a bank transaction. It was a forced adaptation of technology for her, but she did learn it all with a fair bit of hand holding. For using a particular app or an online banking service, she made step by step handwritten notes on how to use the apps that she needs to access. She then started practicing using the apps by following those notes and steps. According to her, that’s what made her comfortable and confident using technology.

• Second instance, my grandmother, she recently moved her sewing school online due to the pandemic. Even though, she took some time initially to adopt to the online tutoring, now she finds it as the most convenient way to teach and interact with her students.

• Third instance, my friend’s father is 65 year old and owns a coffee estate. He moved to organic farming about 5 years back, when it was still not a fad. He realised that use of fertilisers and age old techniques of coffee production cannot be scaled in the long run. He adapted to the new techniques by researching offline, talking to peers and experts one on one. Dependency on the internet or technology was zero to negligible. This instance was not a forced adaptation and the force behind it was not driven by a technological shift.

Emotional quotient

Although they have come to peace with the fast paced life their children lead, it wasn’t something they were ready for. It made them shift gears all of a sudden in a retired life, faster than they expected. They do understand how busy and hard life can get, possibly even more empathetic but at the same time they also experience a certain amount of cognitive dissonance.

When they pick up something new at this age, they take it very seriously with the intent of experiencing a sense of accomplishment, independence and happiness. For eg: the 85 year old neighbour successfully made a bank transaction the first time all by herself after our little training session, she did have a sense of achievement and confidence in her body language.

Phase 2: Identifying Extremes

This is to think about the most enjoyable and most stressful experiences one could have in a vehicle, for instance -

1. What types of individuals or behaviors come to mind?

2. How do examples others are posting compare to yours?

3. Finally, when was a time you were moved or inspired by an extreme observation?

What types of individuals or behaviors come to mind? – 

Individuals:

First time drivers vs experienced drivers. Driving yourself vs chauffer. Driving in groups driving vs driving alone. Driving with kids/pets vs. driving with a friend. Older vs Young driver. Cab drivers in India vs cab drivers in the US. Four wheel drive vs a two wheel drive.
Sedan driver vs a hatchback. Rule follower vs rule breakers! 

Behaviors: 

Drivers who prefer following the GPS over asking the locals when driving in a new country. Left hand vs right hand driving. Long inter-city or interstate driving vs city driving. Driving an automatic vs a manual. Night time driving vs day time. 

Extreme Observation: 

There was this one time when I cabbed it home from the airport. My cab driver was so overworked that he was almost dozing off while driving in the highway. That was obviously one of the most extreme situations I have witnessed. To take control of the situation, I offered to drive the car and asked him to sit in the front seat. He was confused and hesitant. I told him I will not give him negative rating just so that I can reach home safe. Finally, I drove back home safe and left him with a warning. My takeaway, either call a friend or family for an airport pick up or avoid late night travel if possible. 

Phase 3: Conducting an interview

These were the interview questions that I had prepared. Idea was to identify the latent need with empathy.

1. What do you consider as the important part of the day and why?

2. Doing what makes you feel great?

3. If there is one thing that you think will make your life easier?

4. Any preference on who you would like to rather hang out and why?

5. What kind of challenges do you face while accessing technology?

6. Anything that you intentionally stay away from doing?

7. How do you plan your day?

8. What is your most comfortable way of communication – email/text/whatsapp/video calls/voice calls?

Summarizing the interview:

I interviewed my uncle and grandmother (both above 70 years of age).

These were the few things that struck me during our conversation -

1. My uncle said there is no one who would take an effort to come to him or his peers who have been successful in their long standing career. He used the word "invalid", wrt to consulting or for guidance whereas they don't have any dearth of experience and understanding around subject. He may feel a sense of accomplishment and important when reached out for any professional or life guidance at their own capacity and leisure.

2. My grandmother moved to online tutorials for her sewing class due to the pandemic. Initially she did have hiccups on adpating to technology and setting her online classes. With the help of her sons, she arranged for all the ecosystem required to run the tutorial. After a little bit of learning curve, she is able to run the whole thing by herself.

​Reflecting on project challenge

The 2 core observations make me ponder upon these whys -

1. Why can't the experience and learnings of senior executives be used as a credible source of knowledge and act as an alternate income for them post retirement?

2. Why aren't there any technology on-boarding assistance for seniors mandated in smartphones, apps, etc?

Phase 4: Empathy Experience

Things that I wanted to learn from the interview:

1. What's it feel like to do everything by yourself if living alone?

2. What's it feel like to ask for help from a neighbor or from family that's away?

3. What's it feel like to follow a routine without any specific goal?

4. What's it feel like to depend on technology and access it when you adapting it just now?

5. What's it feel like to be important and valued for your skill by someone younger?

Based on my learnings, these are the ideas I came up with to empathise with:

1. Isolate myself for a day by keeping my screens away and away from work

2. Ask for help from a neighbor to try out a new recipe

3. Go out for a walk twice a day in the park where other elderlies also visit. Walk with a stick

4. Visit a store and try to locate an aisle that has products specifically for the elders

5. Tell my team to not call me for a day asking for suggestion or opinion on any of the projects

6. Stuff my ears with cotton and try to be part of a conversation

7. Pick up a topic that I am not familiar with much or as interested

8. Join a yoga class and be part of the activity with them

9. Drive my car slowly and in the most safest way possible in crazy traffic

10. Use a gadget/device that I have never used in my life and try to figure out a way to use it without Googling. Something like a DSLR or a music instrument

My plan was to keep it as realistic as possible, something I can mimic in the limited space and surrounding.

My idea was to feel at least 10% of what they might be going through on a daily basis rather than focusing on larger than life kind of scenarios.

I wanted to utilize the 5 senses and apply it from a senior's perspective on a scenario that is common and is faced almost daily. For eg: visiting a store, driving a car, working without any team.

Highlights from your empathy experience:

First experience - Driving

It was nothing but more stressful when I slowed down because other cars wouldn't let me slow down. Continuous honking, stares followed. I tried it for 5 mins in a relatively free stretch but I couldn't continue it further. While driving in a crowded street, I could barely manage to overtake without being fast or aggressive.

Takeaway - There is no road for old people to drive in peace. Even when in good health, the driving experience itself become quite stressful. Whereas they would like it slow and easy.

2nd experience - Isolation

I called up my team to not call me for a few hours when I usually have busy hours packed with calls. And instructed them not to call me for any suggestion instead ask someone who is relatively junior to me. This was for a day.

It does feel bad when suddenly you don't have a routine to follow in the day without a set of deliverables for the day. Finding a purpose gets difficult. Calling others also doesn't really help, since you are in a way disturbing others during their working hours. If you want to call up someone of your age (70 years), then may not be as phone friendly. Meeting in person would work the best.

3rd experience - Store Visit

There are particular aisles for baby products, fitness products, vegan food, etc. but nothing for the elders. It feels neglected.

Reflecting on project challenge:

When we think of creative better designing products and services for the 70 years old, it's not something that we design by developing some codes and designing an app. It demands a systemic shift.

The emotional that is at play here is that they should be feel valued and important as a generation who have seen life the most among all of us. They are not just statistics, they also have all the right to feel empowered and seen at par with any other generation.

Phase 5: Final Insights for Innovation

Sharing one to three insight statements:

I had 4 insights to play around with.

Draft version:

• Insight 1: Seniors as mentors. An online platform to reach out to the most experienced in their fields for advise.

• Insight 2: Inclusive shopping experience

• Insight 3: Technology set up and on-boarding

• Insight 4: Custom smartphones for seniors

Final version:

• Insight 1: Connect with the best, the most experienced in life and work.

• Insight 2: Elders’ Aisle

• Insight 3: Tech Plug and play modules for the elders/ Recommended Technology for the life - experienced

• Insight 4: Smartphones for the Seniors. Smartness simplified.

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What did I find surprising, challenging, or easy about the process of crafting insights?

Best part about crafting insights is you finally get to see your ideas turning into a plausible option that can bring change in the real world. The course is designed in such a way that naturally lent itself to build a structured format into refining the thoughts further.

Below is an image of conceptualizing the insights.

Insight generation from based on research, empathy experiments, and interviews.