Who are you designing for when you’re a designer in India: Introduction
In a populous land of cultural, limbic & logical diversity, design runs, or perhaps, should run at the forefront. Why, you ask. Let’s dig right into the marvellous tale of understanding how the ‘Indian’ ser thinks.
This is the prologue to an in-depth series of literature on User Understandings & Research Methodologies. I believe it can help sharpen your axe before chopping down the comfort zones of lesser technologically-penetrated sections of the Indian society. You might wonder — why pen this now, why not 5 years ago. We’ve got Swiggy, Flipkart (you may not use it, but it has a bigger market share), and Facebook being used by different kinds of users across the country, and business is booming.
Why does this piece of information matter? I’ll tell you!
Design & Psychology cover bases for a general user group, not the Indian user per se.
When I refer to the Indian user, it instantly paints a picture of a suburban middle-aged man who drives a hatchback, switches phones every 4–5 years, is still socialising on Facebook despite the popularity of Instagram and Tiktok and has complete faith in Whatsapp forwards. Or, you might simply be picturing yourself. Well, you’re not entirely wrong, but you’re not correct either. Both these personalities, the one I described and probably you, form part of the WEIRD society.
Western
Educated
Industrialized
Rich
Democratic
This section forms only a fraction of the global population and much less when we talk about India. Yet, until now, it has been cultivating the expectations of our society, which has birthed and influenced most product decisions over the years. Moreover, this happened to such an extent that we got wound up in collecting data on the minuscule representation of people and making sense of it — interpolating and extrapolating for our understanding. And, watching that extrapolation miserably fail to work on larger sections. I’m going to go out on a limb and controversially remark that this is exactly what led to OYO’s out-and-out attempt of replicating expansion models across borders, blow right up in the face. And how the exploitation began right here at home when it reached tier 3 and tier 4 cities.
Although it’s true, the most densely populated cities, be it — Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, and so on — all form the WEIRD society. When we look at the most successful homegrown ventures — they’ve all sprouted from these places. That has worked out well for us. It laid down the foundation for design’s long-hauled entry as a business precedent, which began with painstakingly borrowing practices from the west and building on them to what we now call the Indian Design Ecosystem (sounds downright awesome every time you say it).
This ecosystem has become vivid, mature, and very learned. It has produced timeless knowledge of product adoption patterns, design familiarity, and even how emotionally vulnerable people can be about software. What lies ahead, in the immediate future, is to develop an understanding of different cultures. How they overlap, what sets them apart from each other, which preconceived notions cannot be entirely written away and which ones can be, and of the touch-me-nots, which ones deserve a chance at reformation.
There’s more where this came from, but hold your horses…
What I’m going to discuss in the upcoming parts of this series is touching base and harmonising how we can develop systems of intervention to think about the user and the socio-cultural effects of technology. In order to not let things transcend into the realms of misinformed decisions. Stay tuned for more!
The article has been curated by Pranav Gupta, UX Designer at Monsoonfish with edits by Arun George, Digital Presence Manager.
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