Let’s start with a story from a session I recently conducted

The task was to build something for visually challenged users to make their lives better. The room started to buzz with ideas like empowering Siri to be proactive and assist the users in their day to day activities. I went and asked the group “How many visually challenged people in our country can afford an iPhone?”. The direction of the discussion changed immediately.

Hi, I am Kshitij and I’ve been working as an interaction designer for the last 5 years and here’s what I’ve learnt through burning my hands

UX is U + X

With so many design tools at our disposal, most designers can create amazing experiences with pixel perfect interfaces and slick animations. This is synonymous with how everyone started with novel ideas for the visually impaired, but didn’t factor in the constraints like finances and social backgrounds of their target audience.

We get so involved into the Experience part, we forget the User part.

Recently, we visited a client location for our B2B2C product, Zeta. We had a generic corporate employee in mind for our user. We were happy as most of the employees got the whats and the hows of the app. Then we started observing a pattern; most of the users who were above a certain age (45ish) were not able to figure their way around in the app.

This made us go back to the drawing board.

A little context on our product before we get to the details, we at Zeta provide digitised tax-free benefits such as meal, medical, communication, etc., to the employees of the companies signed with us. All these benefits can be spent using one single card, we call it Supercard. A Supercard acts as a smart prepaid card. You swipe it at a restaurant, your meal balance is deducted, you swipe it at a hospital your medical balance is deducted, and so on.