Naren Katakam

User Experience + User Interface + Product Designer

I'm Naren Katakam. Born in India. Made in USA. Living in Singapore. I create tailored design solutions for complex business problems. I strongly believe creativity can solve anything. I'm a former Mechanical Engineer now a UX / UI / IA / IxD Architect.

I research & strategize, create flows, wireframes, design, prototype & deliver.

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Research & Strategy

I believe design process to be highly collaborative and to ensure this, I facilitate internal product and design ideation sessions and lately 'Sprint' workshops with team leaders and other stakeholders. 'Sprint' is a method developed by Jake Knapp (Partner, Google Ventures) to solve big problems and test new ideas and concepts in 5 days.

I use a lot of post-its, colors and other interesting props required to make session alive and interactive. I document these sessions by capturing relevant post-its and sort them accordingly to distill the key learnings and derivatives. These documents later provide me enough material to create accurate user personas and help me make informed design and process decisions which would impact building an accurate product. Product that matter to users.

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Creation of Product Flows

I create detailed product flow diagrams and user journeys documents to help development teams understand the key components, functionalities and other features of the product. This helps in understanding a complex problem, breaking each segments into further detailed flows and later stitching everything together to form the complete picture. This also helps a great deal in optimizing a product and arriving at the MVP (minimum viable product).

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Wireframes, prototyping & testing

Wireframes further help us flesh out the product and give us speed and freedom. There are two aspects I keep in mind while sketching the wireframes - functionality and usability. And then there are various Human-Computer interaction laws and ergonomics principles which are very relevant and applicable in today's Mobile, IoT, AR and VR worlds as when they laid them out prior to 1960s. Wireframes help draw down the right interactions, relevant and behaviors for users.

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Design, prototyping & testing

"Design is not just what it look like and feels like. Design is how it works" - Steve Jobs.

There is a lot of insight, instinct, science and commitment that goes into designing and building something that is relevant, beautifully simple and works with target users. Affordances and Signifiers that need to be defined clearly for a better user experience and navigation through the product. Check technical feasibility of design, APIs to work with and how everything connects back. Build prototypes that demonstrate how the product works, providing value and visual delight at the same time.

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Documentation & Delivery to Engineering

Documenting my design is one of my very strong holds. Most designers love to hate and hate to love documentation. Design documentation is an artifact which squeezes down complexity and distills design into important presentable, understandable 'css' styling parts of engineering team to code product without loss (in understanding). Take a look at some of this distillation to understand the level of work that goes into my documentation.

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Product delivery presentation

SnapSell - Your neighborhood market place.

For this client, my job was to create a product concept, build a brand identity, mobile app design (for iOS and Android) and website design, product strategy, content and information architecture, basically the whole shebang in a lean and agile environment (the product name is changed to JumboSell and will be available for download soon).

Play the video below for my product design presentation.

Clients

Over the years, I have been lucky to work with many awesome clients and partners from all across the World in creating meaningful and amazing products and experiences. Unfortunately, I cannot share some of them

  • Volyty - Gift Happy Moments (Singapore)
  • Rappier - Bring your world closer (Singapore)
  • Vulume - Track and share projects together (Denver, USA)
  • Hooper - Theory of everything (Sunnyvale, USA)
  • Hamlet - Bringing communities together (Hyderabad, India)
  • Zippr - Addresses made easy (Hyderabad, India)
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Contact me

Every relationship or project starts with a conversation, connect with me by Mail or say 'hello' to my personal 'chatbot' on FB, or on LinkedIn or follow me on Twitter or read me on Medium for my random thoughts and rants on design.