In a candid conversation with Insights Success, Tanay Kumar, the CEO and Chief Creative Officer of Fractal Ink gave some insightful answers highlighting the influences made by the company to take UX/UI industry to next level.
- Kindly brief us about the company and what kind of services/products the company provides to the clients?
Fractal Ink is deeply embedded into the business of designing customer experiences around products and services. Customer Experience or CX, is defined as experience an organization provides its customer at every touchpoint of interaction, throughout its customer’s journey and the lifecycle of the business relationship. We help our clients from defining and planning their entire CX roadmap, to designing and executing each intervention as a best-in-class experience.
At 120+ people strong, we have researchers, designers, developers, and content producers who provide services across the CX spectrum – Digital transformation consultancy, Digital Strategy, UX, UI, Brand consultancy, Front end Engineering, motion graphics, IOT, Voice Experience and more.
Deep research, honed processes, a mind-set oriented towards innovation and honest hard work, combined with bursts of inspiration have enabled us to deliver compelling solutions consistently –some of which have become gold standards in industry.
- What was underlying bedrock idea behind incorporating the company?
Fractal ink was incorporated in 2010 and the sole reason was to own the new landscape of Digital Experience in the country. In the early days of the company it was hard for us to make the clients see customer centricity as the bedrock of their strategy. They were always driven by technology which was easier to adopt and scale up.
Fractal ink was determined on the idea of building meaningful products rather than just innovative products. With this strong focus we built our processes around Indian context and slowly helped transform the mindset of the industry. Thanks to the wave of digital which took India from being underdogs to the forefront of digital transformation.
This revolution gave access to top notch technology- primarily mobile revolution, to the lowest customer segment, at an affordable price in the country. This established the need of specialist to look at customer centric approach towards products which also forms the bedrock of Fractal Ink as an organization.
- Brief us about the Founder/CEO/COO of the company? Please share his/her contributions towards the company and the industry.
Fractal ink is today run by three of its co-founders who are entrenched in the business with their Respective roles. Tanay Kumar, leads the creative side and holds the role of CEO and Chief Creative Officer, Priyanka Agrawal, heads strategy and consultancy and holds the role of COO and Chief Strategy Officer and Geeta Suthar, heads the business and operations and holds the role of COO and Chief Business Officers.
While we have defined roles, all three founders come from deep design educational background and their unanimous vision stands strongly to transform India’s positioning from being just technology led country to a design led country where experience leads the way to innovation.
- Mention some of the awards, achievements, recognition and clients’ feedback that are notable to you.
Fractal has been awarded as “India’s Best Digital Design Studio” Continuously for the last 4 years by POOL design magazine. We also have been winning Awards at CII Design excellence awards in the Digital design category consistently for the last 5 years. Apart from the above we have been awarded at Kyoorius, Adgully, MMA and many other organization during its journey.
Fractal has also been published as one of the fastest growing company in the design category by many technology publications. Also featured in top 50 companies to look out for.
Having said that Fractal is most proud of the difference that it has been able to make in this part of the world with its approach. Today Fractal is not only present in India but has been able to reach in developing countries such as Africa, Bangladesh and parts of Middle east where digital is taking centerstage.
- How technology is changing the UX/UI sector? What challenges are you facing as a UX/UI designer company?
Technology today is not only changing the way we work but also how we live our lives. This shift has had resulted in an exponential growth in our business, primarily because technology has always been just an enabler and not the core of experience design. Now since we have low barrier to disruption from tech perspective, companies are looking towards design to create a differentiator in their business.
Technology is a passive medium and works at the background unlike design which is an active ingredient of user experience. This understanding in the product and services world has had a massive change in the company’s perspective. We are now brought into the projects more as strategic partners than mere design vendors which I think is a great mind shift which we as fractal aspired for.
Technology internally has helped us expand our wings and we can now service customers around the globe sitting in the country. Facilities such as cross border video communication has helped us build confidence in the client abroad and exposed us to a larger gamut of challenges to solve for.
In terms of challenges, the biggest one is to create scale with this business model. Talent being the primary currency of growth here, it is getting difficult to get thinking minds around. Most of the newer generation is embedded in the philosophy of quick growth and hence we see less minds interested in investing time in learning the skill. Patience and perseverance is what is lacking and hence we always are on a lookout for the right people.
- Share your point of view on the current scenario of the sector and its future.
The market is currently under served when it comes to User experience design and the demand is increasing in leaps and bounds. This has created a whole lot of gap in the market which is now getting picked up by sub-standard design companies. In my view we are hoping to support quality design education in the country which will allow us to effectively build a strong foundation for design as a profession in the country.
Also design as a medium has undergone a whole transformation cycle where design has moved from being physical in nature to being non-tangible. This move has allowed multi-disciplinary approach to problem solving where sociologists, psychologists, architects, philanthropists and other disciplines come together.
We see experience economy taking over from information economy which ruled some time back where companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter grew to astronomical sizes by enabling on the huge amount of information flow around the world. Experience economy will see more service-oriented companies come to the forefront which will be engaged in changing the way we live, work and connect. Today Uber and Ola have changed the way we see cab as a service and for some owning a car has become a redundant dream.
Experience economy brings in user centricity and understanding amidst the huge amount of data that we today are generating. Technologies such as AI, deep learning, Natural language processing will enable us to better handle this data and bring to life a new world where we rely on more truth than intuition to solve problems or innovate.
- Kindly brief us about your strategies to tackle the competition in your sector. What steps are you taking to ensure that you continue to grow and develop?
Competition is wrong word in the current state of things. Design organizations are not built looking at competition but are built on strong ethos and principles. As an organization we have concentrated on our abilities and how to sharpen and enhance those so that we give our best to the client. Looking Inside-out is our philosophy which allows us to learn from our own mistakes rather than look at competition guide us.
Simple principles of learning and growth are applied to all walks of our operations. We simply allow and encourage people to go outside of their projects and do things which make them happy. We facilitate appreciation on small wins which has helped people look at themselves with confidence and they take on bigger challenges.
Also, Fractal is a young organization and we intend to stay that way. This brings a fresh perspective to the table everytime we enter a domain. We believe that years of experience brings maturity in thinking process and execution capabilities but youth brings a new perspectives of looking at problems in the world around us. While some of us look at technology with awe, the young ones look at it as their right hence they demand and expect more from it which leads on to innovation.
- What are you expecting from your company in the upcoming years? Brief us about the future goals of the company.
There are a few directional changes that will drive Fractal Ink in the coming years. One primary change which has already started to see some action is that we as a company are now involved at strategic level than just design. This allows us to input into the business mechanism much early and help companies chart out the path with much more effectiveness.
We also see newer tech taking centerstage in the coming few years. Heavy data driven technologies such as AI, deep learning, machine learning, M2M communications, Natural Language Processing(NLP), Natural Language Generation(NLG) will drive next generation of services for us. Need for bringing data and AI led experiences closer to Human will be one of the prime task. Defining empathy for machines will be another area of great importance for us.
We also see venturing out into ethical design practices coming into being, as system’s intelligence will grow exponentially in the coming years. It will soon surpass human decision taking capabilities, which means machines will be able to decide on matters much rationally/truthfully than us. However, the problem to solve for designers would be to effectively balance these huge data processing tech with human emotions.
As we move towards more natural mode of communication on tech, conversational experiences will rule our interfaces. It would range from voice experience design to facial expression reading to add emotions into the systems.
All the above areas are focus subjects for us to explore. Overall, we are building ourselves towards contributing more strategically towards a newer world.
