point

March - 2015 - Special issue > 20 Most Promising Web Design & Development Companies

Echidna:Delivering Strong Engineering Experience through UX Design

Susila Govindaraj
Wednesday, March 18, 2015
Susila Govindaraj
Most digital service companies confine themselves within a small circle of technology. This compels clients to fritter away hefty amount of money, time and effort in hiring numerous specialists akin to strategist for aligning that technology to business course, and process consultant for rectifying internal process issues. Significantly improving customer's RoI by connecting all the dots of technology, business, strategy and marketing is Echidna, a full digital services agency. The company thinks along with customers in every step of their way right from strategizing growth, structuring new initiatives, understanding end-customers through user research, engineering appropriate UX, identifying & implementing right technology, optimizing processes & business models and formulating launch& marketing plans.And no, Echidna doesn't stop there. The company also continually supports customers and keeps them apace with changes in the extremely dynamic e-Commerce market.

"We study end-user's behaviours, mindsets, expectations and most importantly emotions on the products around e-Commerce website. Laying immense emphasis on UX, we engineer UX from these insights before designing UI and selecting suitable platform inline with customers' business objectives," explains Seralathan Deveraju, Managing Director, Echidna. Nevertheless, for customers with compulsion to work on specified platforms, Echidna leverages its profound technology background and vast experience in diverse e-Commerce platforms to vanquish all constrains enforced by the already chosen technology; without compromising end-user's expectations. This has enabled the company to sustain 90 percent of customers.

Echidna was founded in 2009 by Seralathan Devaraju, Adam Roozen (CEO) and Anubhav Raina (COO) as a product engineering company with just eight people in Minneapolis (Headquarter) and Bangalore with sales office in New York.After developing couple of products, the company hit the jackpot with its service ring. As every founder is endowed with specialized skill-set and over a decade of experience in spearheading nationally renowned retail e-Commerce operations in western countries, naturally Echidna's client portfolio got enriched with A-list companies in North America, South America, Mexico, UK and South Africa.

Ambitious to provide unparagoned services in every area, Echidna heedfully crafted a structure to create various specializations and dedicated domain heads to each segment to ensure accountability, reliability and commitment.To avoid scalability issues, Echidna hires people who are capable of adapting this specialized culture. Instead of being just a technology expert or a designing artist, the company expects them to interpret customer's key objective and appreciate UX.

Echidna has successfully completed phase-I of its roadmap by helping with customers' initiatives. Being at phase-II, currently Echidna has earned enough trust to be approached by customers to be part of subsequent initiatives. Phase-III, coming up next year, will embark with the goal to establish thought leadership by enabling customers to devise new initiatives; for which the company is shaping itself to build further reliability. Echidna is confident that growth will be the obvious by-product upon successful achievement of this phase. Hence, the company sheds spotlight on addressing related problems and sustaining its proven specialized culture, rather than focusing on meeting revenue numbers. As Indian e-Commerce market is flourishing enough to tempt brick-and-motor retailers, Echidna foresees playing a major role here. Hence,the 200 people strong company having 90 percent of employees in India, plans to increase its headcount by 50 percent this year. The company also wishes to dive deep within strategy and marketing offerings and expand services towards brick-and-motor retailers.

Share on Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
Share on facebook