When a group of ambitious designers meet, you know something hot is brewing. Take a closer look and you’ll find them murmuring away about how to improve user experience on their next big undertaking.

Design thinking is related closely with, but not limited to, designers. It takes a strategic approach to design better products and can be used by people from any field – art, literature, science, music, engineering or business.

The Interaction Design Foundation (IDF) aims to make this approach more commonly known to everyone. IDF has a presence in about 85 countries where local groups get together to learn and develop new skills.

We have one such group in Bangalore, India and we had the first IDF meet up on 18^th February, 2017 at the Position² office. Our team participated and collaborated with designers from across the city. We were pleasantly surprised to have some participants from other cities as well, who came just to be a part of this discussion group. This meet up was attended by 24 people in all.

We have hosted two more such sessions on 11^th March, 2017 and 29^th April, 2017 respectively.

In a snapshot

Over three sessions, the IDF meet ups covered a wide range of topics:

1. The first session was all about introductions and networking. Everyone was getting to know each other. This session was also used to set the ball rolling for the other sessions. It was decided that in the future sessions, a common problem area in User Interaction would be identified and the participants would brainstorm and come up with suitable solutions for them.
2. The second session covered a more focused set of points – the future of interaction design vis-a-vis web, mobile, virtual reality (VR), AR and their applications. The group also discussed the present challenges of website and app design. An offshoot of this discussion led to listing the pros and cons of UI/UX.
3. The third session saw the group dive right into the nitty-gritties of user experience, taking food delivery apps – Swiggy and Hungry Panda – as examples. The group divided themselves into teams and each took up an app and analyzed it. They traced the user journey and identified user personas – slicing the apps down to the tiniest details.

Having declared Swiggy the winner, the participants proceeded to set the agenda for the next meet up – User Research. Don’t miss it!

Missed out on some good moments? No problem, join our next session for a quick catch up and more conversations #meetup4