Great Companies: How did you get your idea or concept for the business?
Over a cup of coffee ;)
On a serious note: Our Story
Human behaviour has always fascinated me. As to why we like or dislike certain products or services as a customer. While I come from a Technology background and my partner from Creative, we found a middle ground in Research and started a company called Gravity Studio in 2012.
We became part of an investor team, often doing a lot of research to understand the pulse of the market (needs & wants) to generate ideas, create POCs, and Test Market-Fits. This led to understanding the importance of the emotions and behaviour of an end-user. Aiding Investors to deploy funds into startups & companies focused on these ideas and helping external companies raise investment close to $37M.
While researching for an Investor back in 2013 about factors that could help scale up investments for a better growth rate. What makes companies grow or fall? How best to measure the tangible & intangible variables in an organisation?
We discovered that behaviour and experience are at the heart of an organisations performance. These were the intangible elements that were contributing to the tangible outcomes. We were driven by ways to identify means to measure intangible data variables and experiment on scenarios to standardise the matrix.
We initiated an experimental audit to map user experience & behaviour for a contractor’s $150B client in 2014. It rippled on to help save 1% on application efficiency in the aviation industry almost accounting for $30B. This was the market validation we needed.
Initiated an organisational transformation while in contract to measure experience impact in a defined environment to observe the impact on productivity vs efficiency and behaviour change. The outcome was the second validation.
Starting a business solution to help businesses transform was the best way to make sense of time and effort to validate our findings (instead of just researching and studying). Why do users behave the way they do? How does design impact decisions? Why does experience matter for decision-making? How does experience & behaviour influence each other? What if we can design Behaviour? What if we can design & control experiences (holistically)? These questions led to the origin of Design Syndrome in 2015 and DesignSyndrome Experience Lab LLP in 2020.
Great Companies: What are the various services provided by Design Syndrome Experience Lab
SSO - Standard Service Offerings: We have standardised our services, solutions & pricing to help organisations transform. Perception Impact - Creating impact for a Biz/Brand’s Perception in 100 Days. Enhancing Product / Service Design, Marketing, and Leadership in early stage organisations. From creating an overall experience journey to expanding it, training your teams, and providing ongoing support. Perception Switch - Breakthroughs in digital + human + environmental transformation in 300 days. End to End optimisation of Product, Service, Operations, and Marketing in matured & saturated organisations. Switching insights into Values, Guidelines & Rules to define behaviour journey to establish an Impact team internally. EXP Lab - (Experience X Perception) - Plug-in R&D Centre for your organisation UXD - User Experience Design - Delivering breakthroughs in digitally transforming an organisation. From researching to designing to user acceptance of your products or programs. BrainInsight - Captures behavioural data. Launching in Summer 2023.
Great Companies: What makes Design Syndrome Experience Lab different from hundreds of other similar service providers?
Our Solutions and services have helped organisations from $2M-$200B upgrade to Industry 4.0. We accidentally stumbled upon our impact dealing with an International Trade Body that our solutions helped companies migrate to Industry 5.0.
Competitor: To some extent Neuro-Insight in Australia. There are hardly any competition for our service (at least in India).
We discovered this when a Group company onboarded us, they could not get a competitor match across their vendor base. Also recently when Data Magazine UK recognised as the Top 30 Innovative Consumer Research Companies in India - 2022.
Great Companies: What were the struggles and challenges you faced and how did you overcome them?
Challenge 1: We realised humanities biggest problem is humans. The Insights & Mindset of humans are defined by their past conditioning and resist change at all stages. We are creatures of habit and enforcing a new habit is a challenge. Especially when we are driven predominantly by greed or fear.
Solution: Environment is bigger than humans. We use subliminal programming using colors, shapes, designs, sound frequencies and way-finder to set up environment in a way to control desired behaviour.
Challenge 2: Getting new business/key stakeholders to understand the importance of experience and behaviour design takes educating them on our process before the closer of sales risking IP exposure and is very time-consuming to onboard a business.
Solution: SSO with pre-defined scope of work with timelines along with our proprietary methodology called ACE for a fixed price irrespective of the size of organisation reduced our onboard time. However, we still face a barrier to entry with a large organisation with gatekeepers unable to comprehend.
Great Companies: How do you plan to grow in the future? What does 5 years down the line look like for Design Syndrome Experience Lab?
We are enabling NeuroTech with AI & ML to scale our processes. In the coming years with the launch of Brain Insight, we focus on making intangible, tangible.
Great Companies: If you had one piece of advice to someone just starting out, what would it be?
Today's pain is tomorrow's power. If you believe in your idea, do it, and at the same time don't lose yourself in the process. Think big, Start small and Scale fast. Research, Test, Build, Adapt.