My final comments on a Twitter discussion about Design & India focused startups

Here’s the starting point of the discussion on Twitter:

@avinashraghava @dkhare better Q:what is the role of design in d larger socio-eco context? Which business & consumer problem does it solve?

— Dhiraj Kacker (@dhirajkacker) January 3, 2014

Just to summarize my thought: the original referenced article talked about design being a key pillar of a startup. My contention is that that is a developed market centric view which should be applied carefully to India focused startups. It is first more important to understand the consumer’s concerns & see how design fits in there. Saying that the design sense of the Indian consumer is “not evolved” is saying that consumers haven’t yet caught up – that’s wrong. It is not the consumer’s job to “catch up”, it is the job of a company to understand what are the drivers of earning the consumer’s business. Design has become such an important differentiator in developed markets because consumer does not have issues of systemic trust.

None of this is suggesting that design is not important. But as entrepreneurs we need to allocate capital and resources correctly and figuring which problems are the biggest drivers is critical to that exercise. Design, IMHO, comes after trust has been earned, after operations are smooth … it is not a 1st order concern.

Sense of aesthetics is also fundamentally affected by surroundings: garbage on the roads, construction everywhere; the average consumer’s desire in India is just to have things work and be clean. Aesthetics is not yet a mass concern. Think of the online banking site of any Indian bank – from global standards of UI/UX they are horrible. In fact the one I use (large well known bank) is downright buggy and randomly logs me out. This has not been fixed in over 6 years; 6-long-years! You’d think this would be the death knell for the bank. But they have retail locations everywhere, they advertise heavily and for an average consumer that solves the first order problem: this bank will not run away with my money or go down tomorrow.

Take a look at these two great posts that came up in the Twitter discussion:

In short: when doing business in Rome, study Rome.

Prateek Narang

+1 for “It is not the consumer’s job to “catch up”, it is the job of a company to understand what are the drivers of earning the consumer’s business. ”
Also, I agree with your thought on producing first the most important function/functionality, without creating fuss around design. Solve the core problem, gain the Trust, and keep things simple – that’s all we need from any product, Indian or Global no matter.
Sanket Nadhani

I am going to narrate a story from my personal experience.

Back in 2002, my brother founded a company called FusionCharts which sells data visualization components for web and mobile. He was 17 then and I was 14. Today, I head marketing at the company but I played some small role or the other at the company right from day one, so am well qualified to talk about the early days as well.

Back then, India was known as the back-office of the world, not a place to buy software products from for your enterprise applications. And it you were from Kolkata, it got even worse.

But we were able to sell our products to 10,000 companies, including the likes of Microsoft, Oracle and NASA, and all of it without a single dedicated salesperson on board.

One of the key things that helped us get there was a great-looking website. Before FusionCharts, both me and my brother had spent time at our Dad’s web development company where a good part of our time went into ensuring that our work looked good. Anyone who heard of FusionCharts hit our website, checked out our online demos, downloaded a trial and then made the purchase online. We only got to know of it the next day. However, a small percentage of our customers needed to buy our products offline in which they case they wrote to us. And most of them were very very surprised when they got to know we were an Indian company in the paperwork. The good-looking website created credibility in their mind, instantly when they hit the website and helped it stay put for the long-term which helped us close the sale.

But that’s just one of the things having good design as a pillar of our startup did for us. There are 5 objectives that it helped us accomplish that I wrote about here – http://blog.fusioncharts.com/2011/02/good-looks-more-than-just-eye-candy/

I will admit though that my example talks about the importance of design when you are building proudcts for the world at large, not for the Indian consumer, which is something I haven’t worked for. But I think the tastes of the Indian consumer is evolving as they become more well-read, traveled and exposed to better designed products. I always book my tickets on Cleartrip no matter the tickets on MakeMyTrip are a couple of hundred bucks cheaper, look up restaurants and events on Zomato even if Burrp might have a larger listing, just because Cleartrip or Zomato feel good.

All in all, design has to be a key pillar of any organization.
- Dhiraj Kacker
  
  Sanket, my comments are only for companies focused on the Indian market (and possibly other emerging markets). You are dead meat if you focus on developed markets & design is not a key concern from the get-go.