How designers make digital life more livable.

Almost every weekend I travel by train on the Indian Railways network, so I tend to book a lot of tickets online. Over the last ten years that I’ve been doing this weekly travel, this online booking process has undoubtedly gotten better. A lot of unnecessary wastage of paper has reduced thanks to technological improvements and because the government recognizes that a simple photo ID is good enough to prove that you’re a valid passenger. You never even need an e-ticket anymore, let alone a paper one. Even the IRCTC website is much better than it used to be.

But there’s still one thing that bothers me about it, even more so because I’m a designer. Let me explain. When you go to cancel a booking online, you find the ticket you want to cancel, you select it, and you click the “CANCEL” button. So far so good, right? A pop-up message then comes onscreen that says something like “Are you sure you want to cancel this booking”? Beneath this are two options to click. One says “Cancel” and the other says “Yes”.

Do you see the problem here? Most people who have the word cancel on their brain, will click on the “cancel” button first, without thinking. But that just cancels the action, not the booking. It just goes back to the previous screen. If someone thought about this properly, the two options would say “No, take me back” and “Yes, cancel my booking”.

This is what designers do.

Designers take something which is meant to be simply functional and they make it more human. Designers observe how humans behave and think, and they design the world accordingly. And when designers are not involved in the process, then you can clearly see the gaps. Maybe the booking cancellation problem is just a small thing in the larger scheme of the world, but there are many big gaps too and we see them every day.

A huge number of people who watch television these days watch their shows on streaming services like Netflix or Amazon. It’s just easier and more convenient to watch entertainment at the time you decide to, not when someone else decides. But if the menus and screens which you use to navigate the vast collection of shows on Netflix was confusing to use, then very few people would be using it. Something like Netflix absolutely must be easy to navigate. You can bet a lot of money that they employ a large team of designers to make sure their interface works well. It has to look nice; it has to be easy to navigate; it has to prioritize what they think you want to see the most; it has to make sure new shows are prominently promoted. Sure, there are lots of technical people — engineers, software programmers, coders, etc. — who make that happen, but there are also designers to make sure that it’s all human. To make sure that I don’t get frustrated by the menus and decide to log off and choose something else instead.

Companies all over the world, and now especially in India, are putting lots and lots of emphasis on making sure their products and services not only function well but feel good, too. Tech companies that used to hire mostly IT graduates and business graduates, are now also hiring more design graduates because they know that if you want to succeed in a competitive marketplace, you have to make it an easier, convenient, and pleasant experience to use their products.

The more and more that our lives become tied to the online world, the more such efforts will be necessary. In the physical world, we demand good design. Although we surely don’t always get it, we’ve still become better at recognizing when something is designed well or not. We can recognize good architecture and interior spaces when we walk into them. When we cook, we can appreciate a well-balanced knife that fits nicely in our hand. When sit in a car, we can appreciate how well the seats conform to our body shapes. And when we interface with the digital domain — something we do almost every few seconds — we appreciate when the interface makes sense and when it does what we want it to do and takes us where we want to go.

Even my parents… who are getting into their 70s… and who utilize their smartphones’ potential far less than I do… can appreciate whether something on the screen is easy to figure out or not. My parents and my brother’s family live on the other side of the planet, and the fact that I can interact with them by video and chat any time of day, instantly, is a miracle indeed. As more and more Indians start to interact with each other this way, do we appreciate what it takes to make all of this technology work? To make it human? Do we appreciate what designers do?

I think we’re starting to. More importantly, I think young people all over India are realizing how they can be part of this trend and start to harness their creative talents to become designers themselves and make this new world a better one, a more human one. Every day when I come to the college where I teach, I see young designers doing their best to fit into this new creative-led economy. They work hard for sure, but they know the payoff is there because they see the impact of what they do every day, directly and immediately. They know they’ve made the right choice to follow a creative career because they see how their work translates into good design, good products, and a good environment for people.

(This article was published in the Deccan Chronicle, April 25, 2019.)