Ask The Experts

A new milestone, UXness has initiated a step to connect with experts and understand their thoughts on certain topics. Directly connecting with experts and hearing from their own words, doesn't it sound interesting? Yes it is. In this series, please welcome our first UX Experts panel - Ganesh Gaikwad (Director, User Experience).

Expert Bio

Ganesh Gaikwad
Director User Experience
Tata Consultancy Services

Experienced Director Of User Experience with a demonstrated business impact in the IT products and services industry. Delivered software products and projects in multiple domains from concept to market. Loving hands-on design work and practicing design thinking. Holds Master of Design (M. Des.) in Product Design from Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. LinkedIn

Usability Testing in pandemic & post pandemic world

Q. You have a big team of designers working for multiple customers and projects, how this COVID situation has impacted the work?

A. Lot of our projects were planned with onsite work components. Due to Covid19, people couldn't travel to customer locations and whoever was onsite, couldn't work at customer facilities. However, my organization facilitated the work from home to all employees at onsite and offshore locations. This helped ensuring uninterrupted delivery.

Q. The volume of projects and customers are always high with your team, how do you manage and ensure the right set of methods are being followed for given project?

A. We have one of the largest team of designers in India and abroad with people at every level. Such a large team indeed needs formal methods, guidelines, templates and resources that they can use. We had invested in developing such accelerators that help our team members to quickly start producing. Once lead designers define the approach, the activities are streamlined with the methods and templates standardised and refined over the time. That said, I must say that every project, every.

Q. What do you see as the role of technology in conducting Usability Testing and other remote research? Where do you think it is creating the biggest impact?

A. Technology has been crucial in conducting testing and research since long. In the current situation, it has become even more pivotal to carry out the UX testing as well as formative research activities. New tools are being budgeted for remote co-working and those are certainly adding value in this situation.

Q. Do you see any advantages and disadvantages of conducting Usability Testing remotely?

A. I think the biggest advantage is going to be breadth of usability testing in terms of number of participants. Secondly, the budgets and timelines are perhaps going to be smaller as everyone by then is familiar to participate and conduct testing remotely. The usually very effective methods such as contextual inquiry and field visits are going to be used less. There are some projects where these are essential techniques. Formative user research may get limited due to the current situation.

Q. You might have faced the situation where the clients are not aware about design process ex. Usability Testing, in that case how do you create the awareness about that?

A. Many customers do understand the value of design, it is then a matter of how effectively we can articulate. Walking them through case studies and demonstrating the process through a Proof of Concept helps. I feel it is a job of every designer to relate the design to business. Designing for the outcome by identifying the correct KPIs and how those KPI add to the RoI is essential. This helps people to understand the design as a whole and the process is then easy to communicate.