Design Hybrid Meetup: July 2022

To kickstart the events of this month, we had a design meetup which was organized at the GeekyAnts premises in Bangalore. This event was different from the rest of the events that we organize not only due to the fact that it revolved around design but also because it was a hybrid meetup, a first of its kind, wherein we were joined by speakers from all over the country.

The event which was held on the first Saturday of the month was the place to be for design enthusiasts and we have multiple discussions revolving around design systems and how to set up great ones, busting myths around them as well as refining the design process.

Here’s a quick read of what had transpired at the event:

The first talk of the day was delivered by Aditya Das, the UX design lead at Frontrow, an organization dedicated to creating a platform where people can pursue their passion. His experience with creating user-centric platforms geared towards elevating the user experience gave him the arsenal to talk about setting up better systems and enhancing the way design teams work at small to mid-sized companies. In his discussion, he spoke about advocating for involving design in the production process and making designing easier for designers by increasing the enthusiasm via ownership and looking at how people work. He explained the importance of setting up a design system, the difference between a good vs great product team as well as the type of approach to take to create meaningful designs. His talk also touched on the importance of organizational design for maintaining culture.

The second discussion in the row was based on the personalized experiences of Tanisha Biswas, a UI/UX designer at GeekyAnts who has spent considerable time around design systems and wanted to bust popular myths surrounding them. She posed the audience with various questions like whether they need a design system, and the benefits they could bring to managing an organization while also touching on the topic of developing a great design system for a company. She spoke about the various facets of design systems that go beyond just visual aesthetics and aspects while also speaking about how they do not inhibit creative freedom but instead just structures design processes for an organization.

The last talk of the day was by Akash Bhadage, a designer/developer who is also the co-founder at Peerlist, who joined us live from his home city of Pune. His talk revolved around the topic of validating your idea through confidence tests which are essential processes to validate your idea and check its functionality before getting around to building it. He spoke about the importance of having a feature idea validated and how it will help designers from having to come back at a later stage due to unchecked errors. He spoke about the basic steps that are incorporated in this process which include talking to the design team, designing a prototype, recording its working for further explanations as well as conducting quick surveys with both the user base and the design team to measure outcomes and ensure that resources are being optimally utilized in the design process.

The event was brought to a close through a panel discussion about design wherein the speakers were joined by the UI/UX design director at GeekyAnts and Arun Chetty, the director of design at Razorpay. The last leg of the session was an interactive and intuitive session wherein the participants and the additional panelists discussed all things designs. They also reminisced their journeys as designers in the industry, their experiences, and milestones as well as their takebacks which have helped them to contribute to the design world. Some of the other topics that were discussed in the session were about solving problems through design, the importance of design culture, taking design decisions, and forsters a culture of feedback and criticism.