The entire world is moving towards digitalization and UI and UX design plays a major role in any industry. When it comes to designing a page or a website, there are various factors which have to be looked upon.
One company leading the UI and UX space is Divami Design Labs led by Naveen Puttagunta, the Founder and CEO. Divami majorly focuses on digital transformation, SaaS platforms, mobile apps and enterprise products. It has been providing services across various sectors which include finance & banking, hospitality, logistics, healthcare, social media and enterprise software.
In the following interview, Naveen shares with us his journey with Divami and how it is aiding towards the development of digital world.
- Please introduce yourself to our readers and share your vision for Divami Design Labs
In my 20+ years of experience in the software industry, I’ve had the opportunity to work in fields ranging from databases, availability, to user experience. I started Divami after holding senior roles in product management and development at Sybase (now an SAP subsidiary) and GoldenGate (now Oracle). While the degrees (a Bachelor’s from BITS, Pilani, a Master’s from the University of Houston, both in Computer Science, and a Business degree from the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad) have prepared me well, none have taught me as much as I have learnt in the past 11 years working with clients in a wide variety of fields.
Our vision for Divami is to become a global leader in human-technology interaction. Technology is changing the world at a pace that even the most agile of us struggle to keep up. We believe Divami’s role in this world is to be in the driver’s seat of this change by directing our interactions with the technology to be seamless, easy and fun.
- Being a successful business leader, what difficulties and challenges do you face? What keeps you motivated?
Running a business is nothing but a constant stream of challenges that one must overcome competition. It comes from other established players as well as new entrants, pricing pressures, customer retention, projects that seem to run away from you. Finding and retaining talented people is also one major challenge that almost every business has to go through, and we are no different.
The key is in how we tackle them and keep our cool in tough times. When times get a little challenging—inevitable in every business—we remember the ‘why’ of our business. Remembering the reason we started it, what was our purpose and the mission of the company, and the goal that we have in front of us, keep the fire going. We believe in managing energy than time.
- Describe the one aspect Divami possess which makes it unique?
I will give you two. Our time-tested process and attention to detail in our methodology set us apart from others in the field. I feel that the strength of the process and our approach towards it ensures that individual designer bias is eliminated from the designs, and the result is truly a user-centric design.
Secondly, apart from a great design team, we have also built excellent development capabilities. Our ability to not only deliver designs, but also deliver a pixel-perfect working UI is a huge differentiator – as one of our customers verbalized it. Since we are responsible for the design, we are also the best people to ensure the designs come to life the right way.
- Brief about Divami and its services
We are a User Experience and User Interface design services company, creating digital footprints with our designs that are both elegant and practical. We specialize in designing UX and UI for SaaS & Cloud-based platforms, Enterprise Software products, Consumer Applications and Portals, across diverse verticals ranging from fintech, logistics, health-tech, telco, retail to social media, entertainment, education and hospitality.
- How do you motivate your team to be innovative and productive at work?
All of us share a common goal – of seeing Divami in a leadership position. We believe the best way to do that is to focus on our clients, and what is best for the project. As a leader, my job is to align the team with the goal by sharing the vision and getting people to buy into it and invest into it emotionally. Once you do that, all you have to do as a manager is to keep removing any roadblocks and hurdles so that your team can achieve their true potential. The key is to have people who truly own a problem, rest is easy. Fortunately, we have an amazing set of folks who live up to that description.
- What is your opinion regarding the current landscape of the market your company caters to?
Over the past three decades, information has become more digitized, and this has also remodeled the realm of design. Digital starts with design, thus design plays a significant role in turning ideas into reality. UX/UI development requires numerous technologies and frameworks beyond web and mobile application development space. Today, design is moving from ‘nice-to-have’ to ‘need-to-have.’ Enterprises cannot afford to have a not-so-good design; as people’s attention spans are becoming shorter and companies have to convey as quickly and clearly as possible with a cohesive and powerful design.
- Please tell us about your achievements and accomplishments
We have got numerous recognitions globally, and one of the latest one has been by CII for the best interaction design and also for the best mobile application design. Internationally, we have also been recognized among the Clutch 1000 global B2B companies and also as among top 5 UX UI design agencies by some ranking publishers.
In numbers, we have successfully completed 150+ projects in the last 11 years. I take pride in saying that our projects have reached 2.5 million end users and have served 13 countries with our projects, consultations, and designs.
- Where do you envision yourself and your company in the near future?
We at Divami look forward to a long term relation with the clients rather than just delivering the project.
Augmented reality has been a major influencer for us. Designing connected, ubiquitous experiences across multiple devices are the challenges they are looking forward to.
One thing which is constant in this digital era is that everything is continuously evolving and changing. Technology is moving at such a rapid pace that it is sometimes difficult to keep up with all of it. So we have to pick our battles carefully. What we used to see as the future, is no more the future. Everything is here, it just needs to be scaled up.
While we are already working beyond AI enabled mobile and web applications to IoT applications and wearable technology, now we have also started working upon AR/VR. Our vision is to be the pioneers in the human interaction technology. We are looking forward to partner with companies across wide domains and deliver meaningful experiences with our strong UX UI designing capabilities.
- What is your advice to the budding and aspiring entrepreneurs?
I’d say, play the long game. It’s relatively easier to sail a ship from the shore but imagine losing fuel when you are in the middle of the ocean. We often get caught up in the day-to-day challenges of running business but one must take some time every week to introspect and analyse the long-term health of one’s business. That includes training, marketing, employee development, community engagement and capital development. Small seeds if sown well will give more and more fruits in the future.
