As a part of Turian Labs’ D’IVE (Design Thinking and Innovation meetup) initiative, we hosted Hardee Shah-Vora, Senior Vice President - Innovation, Aditya Birla Group. Our speaker for the day, shared interesting short and long term perspectives on consumer behaviour post COVID crisis.

Opportunity, which the Indian market and emerging markets in general offer, are far too lucrative to invest in optimizing the user experience. Success is all about speed, scale and surprise. Customer Experience in the classical sense, is dead. Long live customer.

As India lost plot of ‘Make in India’, even after China losing the ‘Factory of the World’ tag, focus on ‘design’ is a natural outcome. Design, and not ‘R&D’ alone, is the new trump card that can help India leap ahead. Apart from the external benefits, there are a host of internal reasons, why India must pick up the slogan ‘Design First’.

Will it be business as usual after a few months? Yes. Will the pandemic topple our future strategy? No, but it will alter that. The world is undergoing a situation currently like never before and the effects will last not just for a few days or months but this event is likely to change the course of several things around us.

Takeaways from the D'IVE session on ‘Digital Transformation & Design Thinking’ – 25th May 2019

Organizations are devoting significant time, effort, and money to digitally transform. But, effort does not necessarily translate into benefit and we see many organizations continue to struggle on account of poor strategy & implementation. It is much more than implementing discrete technologies which has been the mandate of the software industry so far.

Over a few past months, the focus of several UX research projects at Turian Labs has been around mobile data management, internet search behaviour, mobile entertainment consumption, online shopping experiences and digital advertisements for the Next Billion Users. Here are some essential learnings from the mind of the NBUs.

Stories of positive change from a recent Agritech project.

Being a good ethnographer is not enough to have a good interaction during ethnography. The fact that I was a woman, probably younger than most of the farmers, was not going to help. Every time I asked a farmer a question, he would look to my male partner and answer.

Megatrends study is increasingly becoming a tool of choice for organizations around the world, to chart out future innovation strategy. Turian Labs uses megatrends to help organizations build a tangible scenario of future and build desirable products, culture and experiences. It is one of the few companies in India that generates authentic Megatrends Reports for the Indian Market every year, which results in annual workshop IndiaNxt.