Harshit Desai

I am User Experience Evangelist & New Media Enthusiast whose mission is to enhance user experience of digital devices we come across in our everyday lives and make users happy. I have proven thought leadership in 'Experience Consulting' by implementing numerous strategic and tactical initiatives for Fortune 500 companies in domains like FMCG, Telecom, Entertainment, Media, IT & Product Development While I have worked on large scale disruptive projects for online biggies like Yahoo & eBay, my international award winning work has been in Banking & Financial Services where I have worked with companies like Citibank, HSBC, Standard-Chartered, Merrill Lynch to name a few. I am a proud alumnus of Stanford Graduate School of Business and was youngest entrant into Customer Focused Innovation program. Another passion of mine, is to propagate ‘Design Thinking’ by presenting at various UX, Technology & Management conferences across the globe Although being an Electronics & Telecom Engineer, I love dribbling my spare time teaching at top B-Schools & D-Schools.

UX Can Make An Elephant Dance

18 min TED like Talk | Categeory: Business Design | Target Audience: Business Leaders, Change Makers, Innovation Leaders from Banking, FMCG, Telecom & Retail sector.

This talk emphasizes on how, even after realising importance of UX for it's business, largest public sector organizations (bank) , find it is so difficult to make things happen. I shall elaborate on how (Consulting + Business) teams plan their strategic and tactical moves to enable 'Change' in people, process, ideologies, culture across various level in these elephant organizations. Underlying thread across this talk with help business leaders understand how they can be 'Catalyst' & 'Enablers' at the same time, to help UX fructify and for people to appreciate it's value.

Three key takeaways

• How to identify what elephants needs? (dance or something else):
  >How did we use UX & Design Thinking frameworks to identify which new experiences should get our maximum attention and re-prioritise.

• How to make elephant 'learn' to dance?
  >Main challenge with extremely large organisations is that even after they zero-in on what needs to be done, making people and process aligned to that goal. Unlearn and Re-Learn is most prominent to get going.
  >Similar UX challenge was encountered and how did we 'Upgrade’ mindset of teams across organisation to be ready for next big change which was coming their way.

• How to (actually) make it dance?
  >Unlearn and Relearn is doable when you are getting started, but to imbibe a culture which will make 'User Centric Approach’ their core value proposition is very difficult.
  >From just learning to walk and make them enjoy the dance is crux of it all. Especially when it is for Elephant. Making a ‘Change’ happen by way of ‘UX’ and ensuring that it becomes part of organisation fabric was the final end-game.