DEV Community: Growth Copods

Designing Right: When to Choose UI Kits & When to Go Custom

Growth Copods — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 09:57:27 +0000

Whether you are a major corporation or an emerging startup, you would have to decide which design system to utilise for your UX mockups.

Do you choose a tried-and-true one like MUI or Carbon, which has a wide variety of created and produced components that are quick to implement but lack your brand's distinctive feel and representation?
Or
Do you choose an entirely original system that you build and install from the ground up to best represent your brand in terms of colour, font, iconography, and other elements that really set you apart?

Let's examine the peculiar argument between Sir UI Kit and Captain Custom to see what works best for you.

Consistency vs. Uniqueness

88% of users anticipate scalability and smooth multi-device experiences from UI Kits, which also save developers time with defined patterns. Faster delivery and brand consistency are advantageous to businesses.

Although they take more time and money, custom components provide distinctive, unforgettable experiences that are essential for standing out in crowded markets. The choice depends on whether efficiency or uniqueness is more important.

Accessibility vs. Flexibility

From a business perspective:  UI kits speed development with built-in accessibility features like WCAG-compliant colors and keyboard navigation, ideal for tight deadlines and consistent designs. However, their standardization can limit originality.

Custom components, while more time-intensive, create unique, tailored experiences that captivate users, especially in creative or luxury markets. They may require additional effort for accessibility but offer unmatched adaptability.

The choice depends on project goals, audience needs, and resource availability.

Customisation vs. Speed

From a commercial standpoint, UI Kits are perfect for companies looking to grow quickly because they can reduce time-to-market by up to 40%. Because of their simple integration and lighter workloads, developers are able to concentrate on functionality.

Custom components serve firms that require specialised solutions, which are crucial for differentiating themselves in competitive marketplaces like the luxury or creative industries. Although they require more time to develop, their customised approach can leave a lasting impact on consumers, since 46% of consumers base a brand's reputation on its distinctive visual style.

The lesson is that both Sir UI Kit and Captain Custom offer their own enchantment, regardless of your goals—speed, consistency, or adaptability. It all comes down to selecting the appropriate instrument for the appropriate task!

Source Link: https://www.copods.co/blog/designing-right-when-to-choose-ui-kits-when-to-go-custom/

Accelerating SaaS MVP Development: A Guide to Fast-Tracking Your Web App

Growth Copods — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 09:50:27 +0000

Launching swiftly is frequently the difference between success and falling behind in the competitive world of SaaS. Before committing to full-scale development, companies may test their ideas in the marketplace, get insightful feedback, and iterate with a well-executed MVP (Minimum Viable Product.) But how can you guarantee quick development without compromising quality in a time crunch?

With an emphasis on the strength of full-stack frameworks, the best platforms for hosting and deployment, and a few crucial traps to avoid, we will examine crucial tools and techniques for expediting the creation of a SaaS MVP. The sooner you can create a functional MVP, the sooner you can begin improving and expanding your offering, regardless of whether you're a startup seeking to validate a fresh idea or a company anxious to launch a new product.

Faster Development with Full-Stack Frameworks

Building applications fast without sacrificing quality is crucial in today's fast-paced digital environment, particularly when creating an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). By offering all the tools required to create an application's front end and back end, full-stack frameworks provide an integrated environment that streamlines the development process. These frameworks are an excellent option for MVP development since they enable quicker iterations, more efficient processes, and enhanced teamwork.

2.1 A Full-Stack Framework: What Is It?

A development environment that enables the creation of a web application's front-end (client-side) and back-end (server-side) components in a single system is known as a full-stack framework. It assists developers in producing all-encompassing apps without requiring distinct tools for various stages of the development process.

Full-stack frameworks greatly reduce complexity and save time by combining the essential components needed to create, test, and launch a web application.

2.2 Why Develop MVPs Using Full-Stack Frameworks?

When it comes to swiftly and effectively creating MVPs, full-stack frameworks offer a potent option. When speed is a top concern, they provide a number of tools that streamline and expedite the development process.

1. Simpler and Quicker Development

Time is of the importance when creating an MVP. By offering an all-in-one solution, full-stack frameworks simplify the management of disparate front-end and back-end technologies. In the past, development teams had to choose and set up distinct tools for each side, frequently utilising a different language or technology for each application layer (e.g., utilising Express for the back-end and React for the front-end).

Everything is managed in a single environment when using a full-stack framework:

Unified Tech Stack: There is less tool and language switching when developers work with a single technology stack (such as JavaScript) for both client-side and server-side code. This makes the development process more smooth and frees up teams to concentrate more on creating features rather than overseeing several environments.

Full-stack frameworks significantly reduce development time by combining the development process into a single environment, enabling you to produce an MVP more quickly.

2. Integrated Features and Enhancements

The fact that full-stack frameworks have many built-in tools and capabilities is another benefit. MVP developers don't have to spend time creating basic components from scratch because these frameworks are made to be ready for production right out of the box.

Server-Side Rendering (SSR): By default, full-stack frameworks such as Next.js and Nuxt.js provide server-side rendering. For MVPs that depend on organic traffic and must provide a seamless user experience from the outset, this enhances performance and SEO. SSR speeds up client-side content loading by pre-rendering the pages on the server.
Static Site Generation (SSG): MVPs may benefit greatly from both frameworks' support for SSG. Your application can offer content more quickly, with less server load and better scalability from the start if static pages are pre-built at build time.
Routing: Developers don't need to set up a separate routing library because full-stack frameworks include an integrated routing system that makes it simple to set up and maintain various application pages. Once more, this shortens the time needed for development and eliminates the need for specialised coding.

Instead of starting from scratch with standard application capabilities, these built-in features enable developers to concentrate more on creating distinctive functionalities unique to the product.

Extended Features with t3 and Wasp

For developers looking for more than the basics, t3 and Wasp offer additional features that further accelerate MVP development by handling many common tasks automatically.

t3: The t3 stack includes TypeScript, Next.js, Prisma, and TRPC. This stack offers strong type safety across both front-end and back-end, thanks to TypeScript and TRPC’s type-safe APIs. TRPC eliminates the need for REST or GraphQL APIs, simplifying API calls and making the back-end communication more efficient. With Prisma, database management becomes easier with schema-based migrations, and the stack ensures smooth integration between the database and the front-end, all while leveraging Next.js for rendering and server-side functionalities.
Wasp: Wasp is a declarative framework designed to automate much of the full-stack setup, handling tasks like routing, authentication, and database management out-of-the-box. It abstracts these tasks with simple declarative syntax, so developers don’t need to spend time configuring or writing boilerplate code. Wasp works with React on the front end and Prisma for database management, offering a minimal yet powerful framework that reduces complexity and accelerates the entire development cycle. Both t3 and Wasp bring more built-in features to full-stack development, providing faster, type-safe APIs (t3) and a declarative approach (Wasp), making them ideal for developers who want to build MVPs quickly without worrying about repetitive configuration or setup.

3. Enhanced Developer Collaboration

When front-end and back-end development teams are working within separate environments, it can lead to communication gaps and integration challenges. Full-stack frameworks address this issue by uniting both front-end and back-end development in a single codebase. This facilitates better collaboration between teams.

Monolithic Structure: A full-stack framework allows both front-end and back-end code to reside within a single codebase, forming a monolithic structure. This unified approach simplifies development, as developers can easily coordinate their work, track down bugs, and resolve issues efficiently without needing to manage multiple repositories or systems.
Faster Iteration: As the entire application is built in a unified environment, changes can be made more efficiently, without the friction that comes from maintaining multiple codebases. This also means that features can be rolled out faster, and feedback from users can be acted upon more quickly.

This tight integration between teams and systems improves the efficiency of the development cycle and reduces friction in communication, making it easier to iterate on the MVP.

4. Strong Community Support

One of the most significant advantages of using popular full-stack frameworks like Next.js and Nuxt.js is the large community that backs them. These frameworks are widely used and well-maintained, which ensures access to:

Extensive Documentation: Both frameworks have comprehensive documentation, making it easy for developers to get started and find solutions to common issues. This is especially valuable when building an MVP, where there isn’t always time to dig deep into complex problems.
Third-Party Libraries: Full-stack frameworks have large ecosystems, offering plenty of third-party libraries and modules that can easily be integrated into your project. This makes it easier to add features like authentication, analytics, and payments without custom coding.
Active Community: If you run into issues, chances are high that someone has already encountered the same problem, and a solution is readily available on platforms like GitHub, Stack Overflow, or forums dedicated to the frameworks.

This level of community support not only speeds up development but also ensures that your MVP is built on a solid, tested foundation.

Building on the Right Platform for SaaS MVPs

The platform you choose for your SaaS MVP plays a crucial role in how quickly you can develop, deploy, and scale your product. It provides the foundational infrastructure for hosting your application, managing your database, and handling authentication. The right platform allows developers to focus on building core features rather than spending time configuring servers or databases from scratch.

3.1 Why Choosing the Right Platform is Critical for Your SaaS MVP

Selecting the right platform is a crucial decision in the development of a SaaS MVP. The platform acts as the backbone for your application, impacting everything from development speed to scalability and future growth. The right platform can accelerate your development process, while the wrong one can lead to inefficiencies and future roadblocks.

Here’s why choosing the right platform is so important:

Ease of Setup: In rapid MVP development, time is of the essence. A platform that offers quick setup and minimal configuration allows developers to focus on building core features instead of spending days configuring servers or managing infrastructure. Platforms like Vercel and Fly.io provide seamless integration with modern web frameworks like Next.js and Nuxt.js, enabling you to go from development to deployment in a matter of minutes. Their streamlined workflows reduce the amount of time developers need to spend on deployment, allowing for faster iteration and continuous delivery.
Scalability: Even though you’re starting with an MVP, it’s essential to think long-term. Your MVP may attract more users than expected, or it might evolve into a full-scale product quickly. Platforms that automatically scale, such as Vercel and Firebase, ensure that as your user base grows, your infrastructure can handle the increased load without significant changes to your setup. This flexibility is key to avoiding downtime and performance bottlenecks when user demand increases.
Cost-Effectiveness: Early-stage SaaS products often have limited budgets, so selecting a platform with a scalable pricing model is critical. A good platform offers a pay-as-you-grow structure, meaning you only pay for the resources you use. For example, Firebase provides a generous free tier for small projects, which allows startups to launch their MVP without incurring high costs initially. As your user base grows, the platform scales with you, with costs increasing gradually as needed, making it a budget-friendly option for MVPs.
Developer Experience: A good platform should enhance the developer experience by providing useful integrations, documentation, and a user-friendly dashboard. Platforms like Supabase and Firebase offer built-in features like real-time databases, user authentication, and serverless functions, all of which help reduce the amount of custom code developers need to write. This results in faster MVP development, fewer bugs, and more focus on building the product’s unique features.

In summary, the right platform should not only support the rapid development of your MVP but also provide a pathway for future scalability and growth. By choosing platforms that prioritize ease of use, scalability, cost-effectiveness, and a great developer experience, you set your SaaS MVP up for success from the start.

3.2 Database and Authentication

Managing data and authenticating users are two key components of any SaaS application. Choosing the right tools for these functionalities can greatly impact both the speed of development and the user experience. Two popular choices that offer a combination of database management and authentication are Supabase and Firebase.

Supabase

Supabase is an open-source alternative to Firebase, built on top of PostgreSQL. It is a complete backend-as-a-service (BaaS) that provides a full suite of tools, including databases, authentication, storage, and real-time updates. What sets Supabase apart is its adherence to open-source principles, giving developers more control and flexibility over their application infrastructure.

Real-Time Database: Supabase offers a real-time Postgres database, meaning any changes made to the data are instantly reflected across clients. This real-time feature is particularly useful for MVPs where live updates (e.g., chat apps, collaborative tools) are a necessity.
Built-In Authentication: Supabase provides an integrated authentication system that supports multiple methods such as email, password, OAuth providers (e.g., Google, GitHub), and more. Developers can easily set up user authentication without having to implement custom solutions, which accelerates development.
Scalable PostgreSQL: Supabase uses PostgreSQL, a powerful, scalable SQL database, allowing developers to run complex queries, create relationships between data, and access full-text search capabilities. This is beneficial for SaaS MVPs as it enables advanced data handling without requiring a migration to another database system as the app grows.
Open Source: One of the biggest advantages of Supabase is its open-source nature. This allows teams to host the service themselves if needed, offering more flexibility and avoiding the risk of vendor lock-in.
Storage and Functions: Beyond databases and authentication, Supabase also offers file storage and serverless functions (currently in beta), making it a versatile option for building out additional features as your SaaS product grows.

Firebase

Firebase, a Google-backed platform, provides a robust suite of tools for building and managing web and mobile applications. It offers real-time NoSQL databases, authentication, analytics, and more, making it a popular choice for fast MVP development. Firebase simplifies backend operations so developers can focus on building features.

NoSQL Database: Firebase’s Firestore is a NoSQL document database that scales automatically with your application. It’s great for handling large amounts of unstructured data and offers real-time syncing across all connected clients. This is perfect for SaaS MVPs where collaboration and live data updates are needed, such as chat apps or real-time dashboards.
Real-Time Sync: Firebase’s real-time database allows for instantaneous updates across all connected devices, making it ideal for applications requiring real-time collaboration or data updates (like messaging apps or collaborative SaaS tools). This is especially useful for MVPs where immediate user feedback and interaction is critical.
Authentication: Firebase offers a fully managed authentication system that includes email/password logins, phone authentication, and social media logins (Google, Facebook, etc.). Firebase Authentication is easy to implement, making it a top choice for MVPs where quick, secure user management is essential.
Serverless Functions: Firebase integrates with Cloud Functions, allowing developers to create server-side logic that automatically runs in response to certain events (e.g., database changes, API calls). This serverless approach is a big advantage for MVPs, as it eliminates the need to manage your own servers.
Scalability: Firebase is designed to scale automatically, meaning that as your MVP grows into a full-fledged SaaS product, Firebase can handle increased user load without significant changes to your infrastructure.
Cloud Storage: Firebase offers easy-to-use cloud storage for handling user-generated content like images, videos, and documents, making it a great all-in-one solution for SaaS products that require large file handling.

Choosing Between Supabase and Firebase

When to Choose Supabase: If you need a more powerful relational database, full SQL support, or want to have more control over your backend infrastructure (especially with open-source flexibility), Supabase is an excellent choice. It’s ideal for developers who prefer PostgreSQL and are building apps that need complex queries and transactions.
When to Choose Firebase: If you’re focused on rapid development, need real-time syncing out-of-the-box, and want a comprehensive suite of managed services, Firebase is a great fit. It’s perfect for MVPs that need speed, simplicity, and scalability with minimal setup.

3.3 Deployment and Hosting

Deploying your SaaS MVP quickly and ensuring it’s available to users with minimal downtime is critical. Platforms like Vercel and Fly.io streamline the deployment process, making it easy to push updates and ensure continuous delivery.

Vercel: Vercel is optimized for Next.js applications, offering a seamless integration and an exceptional developer experience. Vercel provides automatic scaling, serverless functions, and edge caching to ensure fast performance across global regions. Its automated CI/CD pipeline pulls directly from your Git repository, automating build and deployment processes. This makes Vercel ideal for SaaS MVPs built with Next.js or other modern web frameworks.
Fly.io: Fly.io is an excellent platform for deploying full-stack applications, offering global server locations and the ability to run applications close to users. It allows you to deploy Dockerized apps and supports various languages and frameworks, including Next.js, Rails, and Node.js. Fly.io automatically scales your application, managing load balancing and database replication across multiple regions. Its focus on edge computing ensures low-latency performance, making it a great choice for MVPs that need reliable and geographically distributed services without complex configurations.

Both Vercel and Fly.io provide a smooth, automated deployment experience, allowing developers to focus on building features while ensuring their MVP is fast, reliable, and scalable.

Technical Dangers with SaaS MVPs

Avoiding typical technological errors that could affect long-term success is essential while creating a SaaS MVP. Rushed development can result in poor code quality, which can cause maintainability problems and technical debt. Over-reliance on outside services can speed up development, but it can also reduce future flexibility and control. Performance problems may go unnoticed due to inadequate monitoring and logging, which makes it more difficult to find and fix errors or improve the application. Early attention to these technological details guarantees a more reliable and flexible MVP.

In conclusion

Developing a SaaS MVP quickly is essential for product validation, but it's important to strike a balance between speed and thorough preparation. You may create rapidly while preserving scalability by utilising databases like Supabase, platforms like Vercel, and frameworks like Next.js. You can make sure your MVP is stable and flexible for future expansion by avoiding dangers like overcomplicating the tech stack and insufficient monitoring.

Source: https://www.copods.co/blog/accelerating-saas-mvp-development-a-guide-to-fast-tracking-your-web-app/

Principles of UX Design in a No-UI, AI-Driven World

Growth Copods — Thu, 29 Jan 2026 09:34:54 +0000

The field of user experience offers exciting prospects for research as AI develops. Although AI is very good at processing data, consumers frequently find it difficult to understand its results, which might result in a simplification loop.

As we move towards chatbot-style interfaces, it becomes increasingly important to embrace UX in a No-UI environment. Instead of concentrating only on aesthetics, designers are creating engaging conversational experiences. The focus now is on using speech and text to create emotionally resonant, intuitive, and captivating encounters. As a result of this progression, UX designers now play a wider range of roles, including language design, integrating user feedback, skilfully handling errors, creating microcopy, and creating adaptive systems that can be used in a variety of user contexts.

Following guiding principles that guarantee efficient and user-centred design becomes crucial as the work of UX designers changes to meet these new expectations. By incorporating these ideas, designers may more adeptly negotiate the intricacies of conversational interfaces and AI, guaranteeing that the user experience stays engaging and intuitive even in the face of design changes.

1. Design Responsibly: Put the requirements and problems of the user ahead of the technology itself. Users may not be familiar with AI's potential because it is a relatively new UI paradigm. To effectively advise and support users, it is crucial to establish simple beginning points, define possibilities, and make clear the constraints of the application.
2. Design for Mental Models: Reduce the learning curve during AI interaction by utilising well-known product constructs and aligning with current mental models to enhance user experience. This method offers a strong basis for more in-depth investigation and interaction.
3. Design for Appropriate Trust & Reliance: In order to foster user trust and aid in decision-making, it is essential to identify source materials and provide justifications for AI results. When users can see the underlying work, they are more likely to value and trust the results. Establish this confidence by letting users engage with citations for supporting references and showing analytical stages during loading states.
4. Design for Co-Creation: Help users define effective outcome specifications and provide explanations for AI decisions to enhance trust and understanding. When AI misinterprets or hallucinates, it’s important to empower users to correct mistakes. With the AI assistant, users can view the steps taken by the AI and have the ability to inspect and modify results for more precise outcomes.
5. Design for Imperfection: Manage uncertainties strategically and offer ways for users to recover from errors. To improve AI performance , provide users with subtle options to submit feedback.

The importance of UX designers has increased as we negotiate the changing terrain of AI encounters. By adhering to these rules, designers may turn obstacles into opportunities and create user interfaces that provide more than just functionality.This change pushes the limits of conventional design techniques and calls for a new degree of ingenuity and flexibility. In the end, integrating AI successfully depends on our capacity to strike a balance between technological advancement and a deep comprehension of the human condition.

Source: https://www.copods.co/blog/principles-of-ux-design-in-a-no-ui-ai-driven-world

Designing for Enterprise as opposed to Consumer products, is it different?

Growth Copods — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 10:48:10 +0000

Written by Anish Bhuwania

Over the last few years the distinction between designing experiences for Enterprise products versus Consumer products has significantly narrowed and in few scenarios is undistinguishable; thanks to the fast evolving and adopted trend for ‘Consumerization of Enterprise Products’, and the change in user behavioural patterns as well as expectations.

Today, Enterprise users are exposed to a wide array of consumer products as well as social applications in their day-in-life at work and home. Flexible Enterprise policies like ‘BYOD – bring your own device’ and ‘CYOT – choose your own tool’ has fuelled employee exposure to common productivity/communication tools in their work life and has proven to enhance employee productivity. Growing collaboration and accessibility needs (from anywhere and anytime) owing to the change in business dynamics as well as user behaviours have forced enterprise product creators to reshape their strategies (e.g. Microsoft Office vs. Google Docs) and imbibe social platforms as well as features. The overlapping experiences have uncovered an open design canvas for us ‘the experience designers’ and there is a noticeable change in the design thinking and approach. Mobile, gaming, etc. design paradigms have become a stimulus and seemed to be widely embraced for shaping intuitive and personalised enterprise product experiences.

User interface standardization between consumer and enterprise products is imminent and I believe if design paradigms are embraced responsibly and judiciously can significantly improve product adoption, engagement and user efficacy.

In view of my collaborations with several fortune 500 companies as well as product start-ups serving enterprise as well as consumer needs, there have been interesting learnings, and I believe there are several challenges which still exist in front of us while shaping enterprise product designs. Following are few aspects which may be worth keeping in mind while strategising solutions;

Design innovation is important and equally risky if not considered judiciously – as designers we enjoy shaping new design patterns, offer newness to each and every product experience we engage with, and thereby always push boundaries for creating a difference. Yearn for design innovation at every opportunity may at times result in expensive outcomes.Enterprise products usually have significant legacy in terms of front-end / back-end technologies, house features and functionality that have matured with time; are backed by notable customer loyalty and a sizeable end-user base that may have fallen prey to ‘learnt helplessness’. The dynamics places us ‘the designers’ in a tricky situation as weaving radical and rapid innovation to the conventional and learnt interaction patterns may serve detrimental to the perceived product usability, overall user acceptance and bloat support costs.Over the last few years I got several opportunities to shape user experience design experiences for enterprise products in the ‘cloud computing, data centre, networking, enterprise security, insurance and banking, employee productivity, healthcare, law and litigation, etc.’ domains and realised that no matter how innovative an experience designers create, certain conventional interaction design paradigms have become an established and comfortable industry norm which are easily accepted by enterprise product companies and well understood by their customers and the product end-users. This could be owing to the fact that many established Enterprise products are progressively migrating to web/thin client and mobile versions. The situation many-at-times brews frustration and is considered as a creativity dampener. Having said that, in my experience it’s better to accept the norm and invest our energies and creativities in other areas of the product experience such as the overall information architecture, user journeys, micro-interactions, messaging, contextual help, etc. which could create a significant difference in the overall product experience. Offering playful and radically new interaction paradigms such as collapsed drawer/hamburger menus which may hide primary gateways under a click, creative iconography based slide-in/out menus which may get hard to relate with thus hamper discoverability, cards as a primary alternative to data-grids which may hamper the data consumption scale, etc. are received as being ‘good looking’ and ‘cool’ by product and marketing teams, however may be perceived as being counter intuitive and inefficient during design validation studies with prospective/actual users and resisted by engineering teams, thus a futile effort. A change from customary often induces significant unlearning and learning and may result in being detrimental to overall end-user productivity. As designers we need to be sensitive to the enterprise product ecology and acquaint ourselves with ‘when?’ and ‘where?’ to adopt conventional vs. innovate paradigms thereby keeping existing users happy as well as lowering the barrier for new ones.

A ‘T-shaped’ profile is essential – being a designer for a consumer product of which you yourself may be or are a user such as ‘Facebook’, WhatsApp, etc. will be easier to connect with and design for, as opposed to designing experiences for enterprise products which may be full of unknowns. Designing for specialised user profile/s situated in unique environmental setups will require sound domain, technology and contextual understanding. For acquiring complete understanding about the product ecosystem and experiencing what end-users experience, the designer should have the knack and motivation for conducting research studies with Stakeholders as well as End-users. As a result, for designing successful enterprise products being a competent designer may not be enough as ‘the experience designer’ will need to have the qualities of a researcher, understanding about front-end user interface development technologies and its influence on the design, and possess good analytical skills.
Success criteria’s are identical and have a long life-span – shaping a consumer product offers the designer quick gratification in terms of public visibility and acknowledgement from thousands of users and hence is usually a sought-after space. As designers we often draw-a-line between business and end-user goals, try and identify commonalities and create a design strategy which will cater to both their needs. In the case of consumer products it so happens that the originally conceived product user interface design experience gets often skewed and diluted with time owing to the disparity between business and user goals resulting in conflicting opinions. e.g. a multimedia product company may focus on monetisation via ads and hence channelize the users experience in a manner that may manoeuvre them in traversing as many ads before accessing the a/v content or intrude with splashing ads while the user is viewing the content. While a end-users goal will be to view a video of interest as quickly as possible without interference.An enterprise product development life cycle could be long and challenging and may take more than a year or two for the complete product to see the light of the day. Having said that, the best part about designing an enterprise product experience is that the business and end-user goals for the majority are identical and remain meaningful for a long time. e.g. employee productivity is directly proportional to enterprise savings/revenue. Hence you will be designing for a common vision with a lasting impact.For a consumer product short-cycles of updates are imperative for survival, while in the case of enterprise product design longevity is the key for success. As a result, it is extremely important to identify the business as well as end-user success criteria’s for an enterprise product carefully and shape the design paradigms with a characteristic of scalability and futurism.
End-user profile’s as oppose to persona’s – we generally use the word ‘profile’ and ‘persona’ interchangeably, while their meaning and relevance for intended outcomes are different. ‘User Persona’ being the more commonly used verbiage are descriptive in nature and a semi-fictional representation of an ideal product user. Persona’s work well when the unknowns are high and the product direction has to be shaped on assumed facts about the probable target groups. User Profile’s are prescriptive as they are outlined basis facts and known user data.The user/s for Enterprise products are known and hence outlining a user profile is more relevant in this context as data for each aspect about the specific user will be readily available in the Enterprise. In a recent project engagement we went to the extent of talking with HR representatives for actual job descriptions of targeted user profiles. Subsequently, we also connected with the actual users for contextual understanding and ratification. The exercise gave us a deep-rooted understanding about the end-users psyche, goals, motivations and uncovered few extremely insightful day-in-life nuances which otherwise could have been overlooked, resulting in skewed outcomes.

Design paradigms with a characteristic of futurism – Enterprises could have a world-class looking web product, a friendly mobile application, and an awesome CRM system, having said that if you were to ask them ‘Are your int./ext. product ecosystems connected?’ the answers would usually be ‘NO’, ‘NOT REQUIRED’, ‘NOT YET’, ‘HOPEFULLY SOON’, ‘THAT’S WHY WE ARE TALKING TO YOU’ and so on. As designers we invest a lot of our time and energy acquiring a holistic perspective about the product ecosystem during the very early stages of a project engagement, and in the case of a legacy enterprise product you would have often made suggestions such as ‘Shaping an omni-channel experience will increase user productivity and save operational costs’, ‘A responsive, adaptive or hybrid experience may be more suitable from a futuristic product adoption/usage perspective based on foreseen changes in user behavioural patterns’, etc. While the stakeholders will appreciate all suggestions and personally would have loved to pursue the ideal path, more often than not, the design scope usually gets curtailed by a myopic need owing to budgetary and time-to-release constraints. Thus, resulting in adopting a blinkered and tactical approach for shaping the product user experience design. More so, the race against time often steers designers towards cutting-corners for faster outcomes.Learnings from past project experiences have made me believe that as designers we should always shape design paradigms for futurism despite the immediate/near-term needs thus mitigate impending risks. If we adopt basic design fundamentals about adaptive/responsive grid structures, atomic and modular design components, fluid layouts, as well as scalable graphic and font libraries, the product design foundation will be robust and prepared for absorbing future needs. There may be a delta from originally planned effort/time, having said that, the quality of outcomes will be worth every penny invested.

Primarily mouse/keyboard driven behaviour – The advent of touch-enabled interfaces has significantly influenced the design language of products (e.g. large tappable areas/objects, gesture-driven interactions). By virtue of everyday digital interactions we tend to ignore the usage of mouse and keyboard as an integral input device for enterprise applications, thereby leading to overlooked behaviours, and not the most optimum layouts for immediate to near-term needs, etc. The situation would often result in cycles of negotiation with the product owners and engineers, and skewed outcomes.While, there is nothing wrong in designing for the future, as experience designers its critical to ensure that our decisions do not compromise the immediate and near-term goals. In a past project we mitigated a similar situation by introducing viewing modes (alike Gmail – Comfort, Cosy, Compact) and adopted adaptive design constructs for fluidity and scale. In doing so, easily accommodated immediate, near-term and long-term goals from the business as well as users perspective and offered a higher level of control.
Accessibility – Have you ever experienced customers shooting back about the interface colours being washed-out and not appealing at their end. Our fondness for Apple Mac machines is the cause. As designers, we diligently conduct all colour anomaly tests in our systems before delivering the artefacts to our customers and many-a-times tend to forget that the customer/end-user machines in the enterprise world are mostly Windows-based PC’s/Laptops. Try viewing your visual designs on a standard Windows-based PC and you will realise the reason for customers straining their cords. As a process its important you test your visual designs across different machines and displays including standard windows-based PC’s and Laptops. The traditional test for colour contrast wherein you take a B/W print-out of your designs works well as well.

Intensive training and specialists for customisation is passé – How many times have you really needed to scan help files or seek long-hours of assistance while interacting with a consumer product? Generally your answer will be none or insignificant. In a situation wherein the assistance required is high, the product adoption curve is extremely low and a high drop-off rate is experienced. In today’s day-and-age, customers and end-users expect a similar experience while interacting with enterprise products. Customers of your product would not like to create heavy dependency on their vendors for smooth functioning of their enterprise applications and business. While end-users would like an experience that aligns with their innate behaviour, and reliance on training, as well as support channels for everyday work-life needs is considered as a barrier.

Looking forward to learning about your experiences.

Source - https://www.copods.co/blog/designing-for-enterprise-as-opposed-to-consumer-products-is-it-different

Automated digital experiences need an outside-in approach.

Growth Copods — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 09:08:31 +0000

Written by Anish Bhuwania

What could be better when you have someone else doing all the thinking and churning for you, making your life decisions and interactions easier and quicker. The new smart person is called ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI)’, and the invisible machine learning (ML) algorithms/data-models are developed by the coolest of engineers. ‘AI’ quietly and tirelessly works in the background capturing human digital interactions. The intelligent algorithms/data-models convert the pool of continuously flowing data into meaningful patterns, and channelize relevant streams of focused information and interactions in-context to a human’s behavioural needs. So next time you receive out-of-the-blue recommendations for connecting with folks on Facebook/LinkedIn you know where it’s coming from.

Interestingly, the intelligent algorithms/data-models are developed by humans, and the AI engine is only as good as the interpretation of data captured from humans, for shaping meaningful experiences for humans. Hence, in my opinion for shaping seamless and meaningful experiences, algorithms/data-models have to be developed in tandem with human experience designers. There are a lot of moving parts, and the intent of the algorithms/data-models have to align with the intent of the solution designed for humans.

Try purchasing a product on your preferred e-commerce platform. Having purchased the product, you will still see ad snippets of the product along your search/browse paths and on social platforms such as Facebook for a couple of weeks, if not days, enticing you to purchase the product. Can get annoying, is irrelevant, and at-times embarrassing depending on what you have purchased. Ever wondered why? It’s because the data-models have been developed to blast ad campaigns based on end-user click behaviours irrespective of last-mile human transactions.

Reference: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/510646/racism-is-poisoning-online-ad-delivery-says-harvard-professor/‍

Have you been followed by restaurant ads based on your search criteria’s when at NYC, all the way to when you were back home in India and later?

Automation can be delightful as well as scary, and questions about data confidentiality as well as ethical practices are all over. Moreover, algorithms often can be misleading.

I’m sure many of you must have reached a black-box when conversing with virtual agents like Siri, Cortana, etc. and often received responses such as, “I don’t know…”, “I’m not sure…”, “I don’t understand…”, and so on. This is because, in order for the agent to seamlessly respond it has to first understand what you are saying, what are you telling it to do, and how to improve to make your life easier.

Reference: https://www.fastcodesign.com/90132632/ai-is-inventing-its-own-perfect-languages-should-we-let-it

It’s extremely important to understand the data source/s, the type of data, the age of data, the data segments, and for what purpose it’s going to be used, and for whom. Designers are usually kept at bay from the data details and are made to focus on shaping engaging features and functionalities. Typically, automation products use pre-built algorithms/data-models and the quality of responses are an outcome of its inherent design.

Data has become a critical element for designing desirable, feasible and viable digital experiences for the future. Automation product developers should work in tandem with experience designers for shaping relevant, meaningful and trustworthy digital automation experiences.

All these years’ engineers have made good use of available data and developed intelligent algorithms for automated digital product experiences inside-out. It’s about time we start building digital products outside-in for customer value creation and seamless end-user experiences.

Looking forward to hearing your views and experiences.

‍Source - https://www.copods.co/blog/automated-digital-experiences-need-an-outside-in-approach

Software Innovation versus returns? How Copods has solved the puzzle with its unique approach to future-proofing businesses

Growth Copods — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 09:01:39 +0000

Copods, founded in 2017, believes it has cracked the code for effective human-computer interaction by building on the idea that the right way forward is a meaningful mindshare of multidisciplinary teams, fostering innovative software design and engineering.

Artificial Intelligence is rewiring the way we visualise customer interactions across sectors. But there’s a lot more to effectively leveraging this technology in your business than a simple plug-and-play option. Think of Jarvis from Iron Man…the legendary AI character who is not only a superhero’s trusty sidekick but also has the sass and personality that appeals to Tony Stark.

While AI systems of the real world are far from achieving this level of autonomy or intelligence to be personally attuned to the ‘human’ style, there are innovations that significantly enhance how a business operates and communicates with its customers. These innovations aim to bring us closer to the dream of having our own “Jarvis” for business needs.

One of these is Copods, a trailblazing services company that is transforming IT solutions with its innovative ‘collaborative pods’ approach to software design and engineering. Hence, the name ‘Copods’.

In a conversation with YourStory, Co-founder and CDO Anish Bhuwania says that the idea was to create a “human co-pilot delivering digital experiences that drive results.”

“Software products are often over-engineered or over-designed, resulting in feasibility, viability, and desirability issues with an untapped opportunity to leverage collective intelligence. We saw the need for a more strategic and collaborative approach, leading to the development of our unique pod-based framework,” he explains.

Founded in 2017 by Anish Bhuwania, Sumin Shah, and Kamlesh Munot, Copods is focusing on creating transformative experiences. “We focus on the critical 40% that drives 100% business success, ensuring our efforts create meaningful and lasting impact,” says Bhuwania.

Copods “one-team” philosophy and “pod” structure bring together diverse expertise to drive innovation and ensure practical, relevant solutions. It doesn’t just deploy advanced technology; it bridges the gap between tech and human needs, creating solutions that resonate on a human level.

The early days

Today, Copods is a comprehensive digital solutions provider, specialising in research, design, engineering, branding, and marketing. It leverages emerging technologies like AI/ML, IoT, and advanced data analytics to deliver solutions across various domains such as cybersecurity, data and analytics, supply chain and industrial automation, ecommerce, healthcare, BFSI, and many more.

However, like most companies, Copods did not find overnight success. It has been a seven-year journey, growing from just three founders to a formidable team of 60+ people.

“We set out to transform how people interact with digital products on one side, and how software companies work with services companies on the other. As hands-on founders, we focused on the art and science of delivering value-by-doing. We leveraged our network and secured our first client within a few weeks of inception — a pivotal moment that validated our business model and demonstrated the demand for our services and approach. This early success laid the groundwork for future growth,” Bhuwania says.

Recognising the evolving needs of clients, Copods soon expanded its service portfolio to include software experience engineering as a service. This diversification helped attract a broader client base and nurture deeper relationships with existing clients.

For a company so attuned to customers’ needs and requirements, managing limited resources in the early days while striving for rapid growth demanded meticulous planning and prioritisation. “There needs to be a fine balance between short-term needs and long-term goals,” Bhuwania says.

True impact

Traditional, siloed and hierarchical approaches often stifle innovation and efficiency. Copods has solved some of the world’s toughest challenges where traditional methods have failed.

For instance, a major North American retail chain struggled with inventory management and customer loyalty due to outdated, fragmented methods, leading to overstocking, stock-outs, and wastage, impacting ROI.

Copods introduced a smart, data-driven tool that analysed historical inventory data and real-time AI-driven in-store experiences. This created a Single Point of Governance (SPOG) with actionable insights, resulting in increased sales, customer footfall, loyalty, and a 72% reduction in perishable product wastage.

A product manager at one of the Big 5 management consulting firms, said Copods helped rethink their product structure, improving user experience and supporting business goals. The VP, Head of Design at a leading fintech company, shared that it never felt like Copods was an external team — it took full ownership of projects, went the extra mile to earn trust, and really understood the target customers.

The tangible results delivered for clients validate the company’s strategic approach. Significant returns on investment and glowing testimonials highlight the profound impact of its solutions.

Copods’ journey has been characterised by domain expertise. “Our teams, comprised of specialists from various fields, tackle complex challenges with unwavering confidence, reflecting our commitment to excellence. This allows us to deliver desirable, viable, and feasible solutions that drive client success,” Bhuwania says.

Looking ahead

As Copods scales new heights, its commitment to the founding principles of collaboration, innovation, and trust only grows stronger. This unwavering dedication forms the foundation of its ambitious vision for the future.

“We’ve set a high bar, targeting a 95% client satisfaction rate and recognition for exceptional service. To achieve this, we’re forging strategic partnerships with leading technology companies, academic institutions, and industry bodies. These collaborations not only keep us at the cutting edge of technology but also expand our influence within the industry,” Bhuwania says.

So could Copods be our real-world ‘Jarvis’? Perhaps, it can be even better than that!

Future-proofing by design.

Growth Copods — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 09:08:44 +0000

Written by

Anish Bhuwania

In this article we would like to share our learnings and insights about how effective design thinking plays a vital role in preserving a data-driven product’s experience and value proposition as it matures with time.

Every sector is seeing a massive growth in data, influencing their digital business transformation strategies, and empowering technologies such as ‘Artificial Intelligence (AI)’, ‘Machine Learning (ML)’, ‘Deep Learning (DL)’, and so on . It’s important for digital product design experiences empowered by data and connected technologies to be malleable for easily accommodating the rate of data scale and change, for delivering meaningful experiences.

Don’t worry about sounding professional, sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later it will take care of itself. It always does.

It enables envisioning a robust strategy on which the current and future roadmap of the product will reside. Thereby, significantly reducing strenuous working hours, and the need for expensive talent to repeatedly re-engineer the product for meeting the current as well as ever-evolving business and end-user needs.

In our recent partnership with a cloud-based B2B solution provider we crafted a scalable design experience which can gracefully accommodate the ever-growing data needs of business, new features and functionalities, as well as the platforms intelligence with the empowerment by smart technologies such as Artificial (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and Deep Learning (DL), without the need to re-write the user interface.

The challenge was to envision a product experience that was unique and effective for managing a legal firm. If the product failed to do so, the attorney could simply turn to a regular project management tool just like any other organisation.

The business stakeholders wanted to design an intelligent product that could observe and truly understand the end-user’s behaviour, in doing so deliver a personalised and an efficient experience to each end-user. In order to achieve the intended experience, we conducted a thorough study about the ecosystem and realised that its a multi-tenant data-intensive transactional application. Since, acquiring and synthesising behavioural data-driven insights will take time, a progressive experience design strategy for ensuring a seamless journey to the end-users was adopted as an optimum solution. As the system continues to learn from acquired data, 3 levels of intelligence will get empowered progressively – the first being ‘Artificial Intelligence’ , second is ‘Machine Learning’ and finally ‘Deep Learning’ algorithms will get trained for delivering an optimum experience.

Artificial Intelligence

Effective collaboration and coordination between the firm’s personnel was the key to business success. A manual messaging system on ‘Day 0’ for assigning tasks, status follow-ups, scheduling meetings, etc. was enriched with a AI bot driven experience on ‘Day N’ for automating frequented interactions based on acquired data, without the need for altering the products design framework.

An ‘AI bot’ worked well for this function since the system could be fed with the user’s trending interactions from a database that would get richer over time; leveraging the product’s maturity to its advantage.

Machine Learning

On studying the end-user’s behaviour the system will be able to predict frequent end-user interactions and therefore contextually customise the end-user’s interface for a tailored experience. Percolating this principle, even the user’s launchpad and workbenches were customised to match their style of work.

Deep Learning

One of the most tedious workflows within the product ecosystem consisted of uploading physical scanned documents, which further had to be manually segregated by a dedicated team. The team would have to go through each and every detail in the document thoroughly to understand which category it belongs to, so that they could tag them accordingly for association and future discoverability. The manual process was prone to errors, leading to skewed decisions, loss of time, and significant increase in operational costs for the firm. The attorneys in the firm had to wait a couple of hours for the matter documents to get categorised.

The introduction of a deep-learning algorithm early in the product architecture helped eliminate the need for an entire team and several hours of dogmatic work in the future. Moreover, redesign and redevelopment of the user interface was not required as it was already envisioned to accommodate the products maturity curve.

The aforementioned project displays how it is imperative to think-through current as well as future business, end-user, as well as technology scenarios early in the product design and development lifecycle for delivering a differentiated digital experience and a lasting value proposition as the ecosystem matures over time.

The secret recipe resides in strategising a framework that allows the system to progressively evolve for continuously optimising the end-users experience with usage. Not being able to stay in-tune with the ever-growing changes and advancements, is a major reason why many products fail to preserve their user loyalty as well as acquire new users over time.

Our design thinking approach is in tandem with our philosophy ‘partners in your digital journey’; as your success is our success.

‍

Scaling Design Systems: A Journey to Consistency Across Teams

Growth Copods — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 08:54:03 +0000

Picture this: You step into a role at a rapidly scaling enterprise launching multiple products simultaneously. Initially, team autonomy feels efficient. Everyone builds their own UI elements and moves fast. However, as the product suite grows, fractures begin to appear. You start noticing inconsistent visual styles, duplicate code, and misaligned user interfaces.
As the developer responsible for creating cohesion, you realize the solution isn't just "fixing bugs", it’s implementing a Design System. This system serves as the anchor that keeps all teams aligned, regardless of how fast the organization grows.

Bridging the Gap: The Birth of a Unified System

The journey begins with an audit. You gather the teams and discover a chaotic reality: three different versions of the same button, slightly varying modal windows, and inconsistent card layouts. To solve this, you need a Single Source of Truth.
A robust design system unifies these scattered fragments. It is more than a component library; it is a shared language that eliminates translation errors between designers and developers.

Cooperation is essential: Developers and Designers Working Together

It's crucial to emphasise cooperation as the key component of a good design system before delving into the specifics of design tokens. When engineers and designers collaborate, they may produce a seamless user experience by combining their special talents and viewpoints. By coordinating their efforts, they guarantee that designs become useful, reusable parts that function flawlessly in the finished product.

Design Tokens as the Building Blocks of Consistency‍

You can’t build this system alone. You pull in the design team, and they provide you with everything you need: a Figma file with components, color schemes, typography, and spacing. You look at the designs and see that every component and design token has been carefully planned.
But translating those designs into reusable code requires collaboration. You work with designers to ensure that the handoff is smooth and that the design tokens—colors, fonts, and spacing—are consistent across all components. ‍

‍## Managing Design Tokens Across Projects
For single projects, a basic CSS or JSON file may suffice. For multiple projects, a single source of truth becomes essential. The Design Tokens Format Module W3C Community Draft offers a standardized format for defining tokens, promoting consistency and collaboration. The draft provides an excellent breakdown of tokens, helping teams understand how to structure and think about them effectively for scalable design systems.

Design Tokens Format Module
Design Tokens W3C Community

Design Token Translation Tools

These tools help manage, translate, and implement design tokens, ensuring consistent branding and styling across multiple platforms, enabling seamless collaboration

Theo
Style Dictionary
Diez
Specify

Building from Scratch vs. Using a Pre-built Library

As you start thinking about how to build this system, you weigh your options. Should you create everything from scratch, defining each component from the ground up, or could you leverage a pre-built library? For example, if you’re using React, you might consider a library like MUI. This approach allows you to customize components to fit your design system while benefiting from the time-saving features of a pre-built library.
A general principle is to strike a balance between efficiency and flexibility. Combining a pre-built library with tailored customizations ensures time-saving benefits while maintaining consistency and aligning with your brand’s identity.

Choosing the Right Library

Understanding the types of UI libraries is also crucial for aligning with your project goals:

Styled Libraries: Predefined design language with ready-to-use components.some text
Examples: Material-UI, Ant Design, Bootstrap
Pros: Quick setup, consistent design.
Cons: Limited flexibility for custom designs.
Unstyled Libraries: Functionality-focused with no predefined styles.some text
Examples: Radix UI, Headless UI, React-Aria
Pros: Complete customization.
Cons: Requires more effort and time for styling.
Semi-Styled Libraries: Basic styles with easy customization options.some text
Examples: Chakra UI, Tailwind UI, Base Web
Pros: Balanced flexibility and efficiency.
Cons: Some design constraints.
Fixed Design Language Libraries: Strict adherence to a predefined design system.some text
Examples: Material-UI (Default Mode), Ant Design, Foundation
Pros: Ensures consistency.
Cons: Minimal flexibility for unique branding.
Web Components for Multi-Framework Support: A powerful choice for building reusable web components or meeting requirements where multi-framework compatibility is essential.some text
Examples: Stencil.js
Pros: Enables framework-agnostic components, reusable across different projects and frameworks.
Cons: Requires expertise in web components and potential overhead for simpler projects.
What consideration you should make while choosing base component library
Customizability: The library should support easy customization and theming for consistent alignment with your design system.
Design Language Alignment: Ensure the library’s style aligns with your design system to avoid excessive overrides.
Accessibility: Ensure the library supports accessibility features like keyboard navigation, screen readers, and WCAG compliance.
Scalability: Ensure the library has all needed components, scales with your project, and supports integration with frameworks or styling tools like Tailwind or Sass.
Performance: The library should support tree-shaking, lightweight components, and lazy loading for optimal performance and efficiency.
Community and Support: Opt for a library with an active community, frequent updates, and accessible support channels to resolve issues, ensure longevity, and stay aligned with evolving standards.
Documentation: Choose a library with clear, comprehensive documentation for easy usage, customization, and a smooth developer experience.
Styling Approach: Choose a library compatible with your project’s styling needs, whether traditional CSS or CSS-in-JS, ensuring smooth integration with legacy systems or modern workflows.

Scaling the System

As your design system grows, organizing and reusing components effectively is key to scaling. Wrapper components provide a flexible way to manage cross-cutting concerns like styling, state, or shared functionality while adhering to SOLID principles, particularly the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP).

Why Wrapper Components Matter

Centralized Control: Wrapper components allow you to encapsulate common functionality or styles in one place, reducing duplication.
Reusability: By abstracting shared logic or behavior, they make it easier to use the same functionality across multiple components.
Extensibility: Wrapper components enable easy customization without affecting the core component structure.
Adherence to SOLID Principles: They align with SRP by ensuring that each component focuses on one responsibility, keeping logic modular and maintainable.

When to Use Wrappers

Wrapper components are valuable for managing shared functionality, styling, or behavior across child components. Key use cases include:

Applying consistent styles or themes across multiple components.
Centralizing logic for tasks like event handling or state updates.
Encapsulating error boundaries to handle errors in specific parts of the application.
Conditionally rendering child components based on props or state.
Providing a consistent structure or layout for related components.

Sustaining Uniformity Among Teams

It gets harder to keep teams consistent as your design system expands. Developers may design components that don't adhere to the system's standards or interpret them differently.
You present Storybook as a central repository for documentation in order to solve this. It offers customisation choices, comprehensive usage instructions, and real-time previews of every component. This guarantees that all developers can follow the same rules and best practices without jeopardising the integrity of the system, whether they are working on new features or maintaining existing products.
All developers may now adhere to the same set of rules and best practices, regardless of whether they are creating a new product or maintaining an existing one. In order to allow teams to modify components without compromising the integrity of the system, you even add customisation options.

Source: https://www.copods.co/blog/scaling-design-systems-a-journey-to-consistency-across-teams/

Designing for Enterprise as opposed to Consumer products, is it different?

Growth Copods — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 06:17:49 +0000

Written by Anish Bhuwania

Design innovation is important and equally risky if not considered judiciously – as designers we enjoy shaping new design patterns, offer newness to each and every product experience we engage with, and thereby always push boundaries for creating a difference. Yearn for design innovation at every opportunity may at times result in expensive outcomes.Enterprise products usually have significant legacy in terms of front-end / back-end technologies, house features and functionality that have matured with time; are backed by notable customer loyalty and a sizeable end-user base that may have fallen prey to ‘learnt helplessness’. The dynamics places us ‘the designers’ in a tricky situation as weaving radical and rapid innovation to the conventional and learnt interaction patterns may serve detrimental to the perceived product usability, overall user acceptance and bloat support costs.Over the last few years I got several opportunities to shape user experience design experiences for enterprise products in the ‘cloud computing, data centre, networking, enterprise security, insurance and banking, employee productivity, healthcare, law and litigation, etc.’ domains and realised that no matter how innovative an experience designers create, certain conventional interaction design paradigms have become an established and comfortable industry norm which are easily accepted by enterprise product companies and well understood by their customers and the product end-users. This could be owing to the fact that many established Enterprise products are progressively migrating to web/thin client and mobile versions. The situation many-at-times brews frustration and is considered as a creativity dampener. Having said that, in my experience it’s better to accept the norm and invest our energies and creativities in other areas of the product experience such as the overall information architecture, user journeys, micro-interactions, messaging, contextual help, etc. which could create a significant difference in the overall product experience. Offering playful and radically new interaction paradigms such as collapsed drawer/hamburger menus which may hide primary gateways under a click, creative iconography based slide-in/out menus which may get hard to relate with thus hamper discoverability, cards as a primary alternative to data-grids which may hamper the data consumption scale, etc. are received as being ‘good looking’ and ‘cool’ by product and marketing teams, however may be perceived as being counter intuitive and inefficient during design validation studies with prospective/actual users and resisted by engineering teams, thus a futile effort. A change from customary often induces significant unlearning and learning and may result in being detrimental to overall end-user productivity. As designers we need to be sensitive to the enterprise product ecology and acquaint ourselves with ‘when?’ and ‘where?’ to adopt conventional vs. innovate paradigms thereby keeping existing users happy as well as lowering the barrier for new ones.

Success criteria’s are identical and have a long life-span – shaping a consumer product offers the designer quick gratification in terms of public visibility and acknowledgement from thousands of users and hence is usually a sought-after space. As designers we often draw-a-line between business and end-user goals, try and identify commonalities and create a design strategy which will cater to both their needs. In the case of consumer products it so happens that the originally conceived product user interface design experience gets often skewed and diluted with time owing to the disparity between business and user goals resulting in conflicting opinions. e.g. a multimedia product company may focus on monetisation via ads and hence channelize the users experience in a manner that may manoeuvre them in traversing as many ads before accessing the a/v content or intrude with splashing ads while the user is viewing the content. While a end-users goal will be to view a video of interest as quickly as possible without interference.An enterprise product development life cycle could be long and challenging and may take more than a year or two for the complete product to see the light of the day. Having said that, the best part about designing an enterprise product experience is that the business and end-user goals for the majority are identical and remain meaningful for a long time. e.g. employee productivity is directly proportional to enterprise savings/revenue. Hence you will be designing for a common vision with a lasting impact.For a consumer product short-cycles of updates are imperative for survival, while in the case of enterprise product design longevity is the key for success. As a result, it is extremely important to identify the business as well as end-user success criteria’s for an enterprise product carefully and shape the design paradigms with a characteristic of scalability and futurism.

End-user profile’s as oppose to persona’s – we generally use the word ‘profile’ and ‘persona’ interchangeably, while their meaning and relevance for intended outcomes are different. ‘User Persona’ being the more commonly used verbiage are descriptive in nature and a semi-fictional representation of an ideal product user. Persona’s work well when the unknowns are high and the product direction has to be shaped on assumed facts about the probable target groups. User Profile’s are prescriptive as they are outlined basis facts and known user data.The user/s for Enterprise products are known and hence outlining a user profile is more relevant in this context as data for each aspect about the specific user will be readily available in the Enterprise. In a recent project engagement we went to the extent of talking with HR representatives for actual job descriptions of targeted user profiles. Subsequently, we also connected with the actual users for contextual understanding and ratification. The exercise gave us a deep-rooted understanding about the end-users psyche, goals, motivations and uncovered few extremely insightful day-in-life nuances which otherwise could have been overlooked, resulting in skewed outcomes.

Design paradigms with a characteristic of futurism – Enterprises could have a world-class looking web product, a friendly mobile application, and an awesome CRM system, having said that if you were to ask them ‘Are your int./ext. product ecosystems connected?’ the answers would usually be ‘NO’, ‘NOT REQUIRED’, ‘NOT YET’, ‘HOPEFULLY SOON’, ‘THAT’S WHY WE ARE TALKING TO YOU’ and so on. As designers we invest a lot of our time and energy acquiring a holistic perspective about the product ecosystem during the very early stages of a project engagement, and in the case of a legacy enterprise product you would have often made suggestions such as ‘Shaping an omni-channel experience will increase user productivity and save operational costs’, ‘A responsive, adaptive or hybrid experience may be more suitable from a futuristic product adoption/usage perspective based on foreseen changes in user behavioural patterns’, etc. While the stakeholders will appreciate all suggestions and personally would have loved to pursue the ideal path, more often than not, the design scope usually gets curtailed by a myopic need owing to budgetary and time-to-release constraints. Thus, resulting in adopting a blinkered and tactical approach for shaping the product user experience design. More so, the race against time often steers designers towards cutting-corners for faster outcomes.Learnings from past project experiences have made me believe that as designers we should always shape design paradigms for futurism despite the immediate/near-term needs thus mitigate impending risks. If we adopt basic design fundamentals about adaptive/responsive grid structures, atomic and modular design components, fluid layouts, as well as scalable graphic and font libraries, the product design foundation will be robust and prepared for absorbing future needs. There may be a delta from originally planned effort/time, having said that, the quality of outcomes will be worth every penny invested.

Accessibility – Have you ever experienced customers shooting back about the interface colours being washed-out and not appealing at their end. Our fondness for Apple Mac machines is the cause. As designers, we diligently conduct all colour anomaly tests in our systems before delivering the artefacts to our customers and many-a-times tend to forget that the customer/end-user machines in the enterprise world are mostly Windows-based PC’s/Laptops. Try viewing your visual designs on a standard Windows-based PC and you will realise the reason for customers straining their cords. As a process its important you test your visual designs across different machines and displays including standard windows-based PC’s and Laptops. The traditional test for colour contrast wherein you take a B/W print-out of your designs works well as well.

Looking forward to learning about your experiences.

‍

Automated digital experiences need an outside-in approach.

Growth Copods — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 10:46:45 +0000

Written by Anish Bhuwania | Copods

Reference: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/510646/racism-is-poisoning-online-ad-delivery-says-harvard-professor/‍

Have you been followed by restaurant ads based on your search criteria’s when at NYC, all the way to when you were back home in India and later?

Automation can be delightful as well as scary, and questions about data confidentiality as well as ethical practices are all over. Moreover, algorithms often can be misleading.

Reference: https://www.fastcodesign.com/90132632/ai-is-inventing-its-own-perfect-languages-should-we-let-it

Looking forward to hearing your views and experiences.

How gaming could teach us about UX onboarding

Growth Copods — Mon, 18 Nov 2024 09:05:51 +0000

🎮 What if onboarding felt as engaging as playing a game? In this video, we're exploring how gaming insights—like subtle nudges, progressive learning, and natural exploration—can elevate user experiences.

Stick around to discover how small design choices make a big impact on keeping users hooked and happy!

https://www.copods.co/post/how-gaming-could-teach-us-about-ux-onboarding

Copods #UXDesign #GamingInsights #UserExperience #DesignInspiration

Software Innovation versus returns? How Copods has solved the puzzle with its unique approach to future-proofing businesses

Growth Copods — Wed, 14 Aug 2024 06:49:00 +0000

One of these is Copods, a trailblazing services company that is transforming IT solutions with its innovative 'collaborative pods' approach to software design and engineering. Hence, the name 'Copods'.

In a conversation with YourStory, Co-founder and CDO Anish Bhuwania says that the idea was to create a “human co-pilot delivering digital experiences that drive results.”

Copods "one-team" philosophy and “pod” structure bring together diverse expertise to drive innovation and ensure practical, relevant solutions. It doesn’t just deploy advanced technology; it bridges the gap between tech and human needs, creating solutions that resonate on a human level.

The early days

However, like most companies, Copods did not find overnight success. It has been a seven-year journey, growing from just three founders to a formidable team of 60+ people.

“We set out to transform how people interact with digital products on one side, and how software companies work with services companies on the other. As hands-on founders, we focused on the art and science of delivering value-by-doing. We leveraged our network and secured our first client within a few weeks of inception—a pivotal moment that validated our business model and demonstrated the demand for our services and approach. This early success laid the groundwork for future growth,” Bhuwania says.

For a company so attuned to customers' needs and requirements, managing limited resources in the early days while striving for rapid growth demanded meticulous planning and prioritisation. “There needs to be a fine balance between short-term needs and long-term goals,” Bhuwania says.

True impact

Traditional, siloed and hierarchical approaches often stifle innovation and efficiency. Copods has solved some of the world’s toughest challenges where traditional methods have failed.

A product manager at one of the Big 5 management consulting firms, said Copods helped rethink their product structure, improving user experience and supporting business goals. The VP, Head of Design at a leading fintech company, shared that it never felt like Copods was an external team—it took full ownership of projects, went the extra mile to earn trust, and really understood the target customers.

The tangible results delivered for clients validate the company’s strategic approach. Significant returns on investment and glowing testimonials highlight the profound impact of its solutions.

Looking ahead

“We've set a high bar, targeting a 95% client satisfaction rate and recognition for exceptional service. To achieve this, we're forging strategic partnerships with leading technology companies, academic institutions, and industry bodies. These collaborations not only keep us at the cutting edge of technology but also expand our influence within the industry,” Bhuwania says.

So could Copods be our real-world ‘Jarvis’? Perhaps, it can be even better than that!

By YourStory Media