Designer Success Centric Design

Sometimes, I find myself forgetting who I am. It might sound strange, but I created a few slides to remind myself—and I’m going to share them with you. I come from a family that’s deeply rooted in fine arts. We sculpt, we paint—art has always been a huge part of who I am. It’s something my father passed down, and my brother now carries the tradition in our hometown in Kerala. On my mother’s side, I also have a performing arts background. I’m a mimicry artist, and I spent two years researching art and archaeology at the Indian Institute of Science before I fully embraced the world of design. With a background in computer engineering, I like to call myself a versatilist—a product designer, thinker, and facilitator.

In 2022, I had the pleasure of conducting a Design Thinking Workshop at BookMyShow. That’s right—BookMyShow! Design is something I’ve always been passionate about, but beyond the work itself, I’ve spent years as part of various design communities, including the Russian Design Foundation. These communities keep me grounded in the practice of design and its broader purpose. However, many of you might know how challenging it can be to institutionalize design within organizations. Sometimes, you have to go beyond your daily design work to advocate for design itself—through talks, panels, and articles. It’s not just about designing—it’s about teaching others to see the value of design. This is what raises the bar for design maturity within our companies.

I’ve been fortunate to work with some amazing organizations. My journey started at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, and from there, I transitioned into product design at Cloud9. I had the opportunity to help redesign over 40 e-commerce search platforms during my time at Unbxd, and later worked at Noodle.ai, developing solutions for supply chain and logistics. I’ve worked at Urban Health, a mental health startup, and now, I’m at Hinge Health, where I continue my journey as a product designer.

Let me ask you this: whom do you design for? I know many of you are designers—90% of you raised your hands when I asked earlier. But who do you design for? Most people say the users. Some of you might be thinking you design for the business, for the CEO. The truth is, you design for both the user and the business. Success-centric design means finding the balance—creating something that delights users while serving business needs. Your design has to work for people, but it also has to work for the business behind it.

Have you ever heard of the Columbia Obstruction Device experiment? It’s a fascinating psychological test from the 1940s that helps us understand motivation. In the experiment, a mouse has to cross an electric floor to reach a piece of cheese. The bigger the cheese, the more willing the mouse is to endure the electric shock. In product design, your users are like that mouse. The product is the obstacle they have to navigate, and the cheese is the reward they get from using your product. The key is simple: if the reward is valuable enough, users will endure the “shocks” of cost, learning curves, and complexities to use your product.

Let’s take a real example from my work at Urban Health, where we were working to transform an app from a mindfulness platform, similar to Headspace or Calm, into a clinically-backed mental health solution. We knew we had to prioritize key goals—improving user engagement in the first 14 days, shifting the app’s look from mindfulness to clinical mental health, and enabling users to track their mental health scores. This wasn’t just about making the app look better. It was about redefining the brand’s purpose and creating an experience that truly met users' needs.

Sometimes, the Key to Innovation Is Building on What You Already Know

But there’s more to success than just building a great product—you need a strong brand identity. I’ve worked at multiple startups, and one mistake many of them make is focusing too much on the product while ignoring the brand. The product is essential, of course, but a strong brand is what connects emotionally with users. At Urban Health, we defined our brand using the Caregiver archetype. This guided everything from our tone of voice to our color palette. We moved from blue—a color widely used by competitors—to green, which helped us stand out.

Success-centric design is about experimentation and learning. At Urban Health, we operated at a fast pace, releasing weekly updates. In environments like this, you have to be comfortable with failing fast and learning faster. Our first redesign was a mixed success. While the Recents & Favorites icons increased engagement, other elements underperformed. But we didn’t stop there. We kept iterating, and by our second experiment, we saw improvements in 14-day engagement and session completion rates.

Another key principle of success-centric design is bias for action. In fast-moving environments, you often won’t be fully satisfied with every live design. But taking quick action and making trade-offs is essential. In such cases, it’s okay to fail—every failure teaches you something new. When we completed our second experiment at Urban Health, we saw a rise in user retention, higher engagement, and improved mental health effectiveness scores. We even achieved FDA-level effectiveness rates of over 80%, which is a crucial milestone for digital therapeutics. This success wasn’t just about one big idea—it was about acting on what we learned, iterating quickly, and staying open to failure.

Watch the full video here. ⬇️