My project was to design an interactive mobile phone application to help users new to a city, find solutions to their smallest needs through friends and a larger community. User profiles largely encompassed people new to the city, not leaving out people wanting to feel the pulse of the city and with a passion to know more about the core areas and essence of the city.
The mobile device serves as an entry point where a user uploads local, unlisted, small but important businesses as content. This, in turn, gets small time places which are locally famous, listed on the search results and builds a vendor network for tapping larger businesses.
A typical user identifies and uploads a small business/service as an interesting or important input for a friend who might search for a similar location, for which he is given a choice of media like pictures, voice, maps and reviews from a mobile phone. Once uploaded, this data is available to his friends when they search for a place/service with a keyword and in a specific location.
The aim was to work collaboratively with the business unit(s) communicating pertinent knowledge about user centred design practice throughout the corporate Product Development Process (PDP).
Apart from corporate work culture and ethics, my learning was more to do with “how to innovate”, ”expect, understand and deliver what users want; going out in the field, investigating needs and coming up with concepts that were relevant, challenging as well as in sync with the business models for IT giants like Yahoo! A great satisfaction arose even from the fact that Yahoo!, though primarily a US based company, was keen on working closely in the Indian context and understanding Indian users.
