Divami Design Labs

About the Company

Divami Design Labs is a boutique User ExperienceServices firm, based in Hyderabad, India. They specialize in UX Design & Development services – essentially, UX is pretty much what they do, and all they do.
Over the last 7+ years they have provided UX services to large ISVs like SAP, IBM, and TIBCO as well as small and medium startups and post-startups like Novatium, MarketShare, and Pivotal (formerly Greenplum). They have worked in a variety of domains and technologies including Financial Services, Business Intelligence, Analytics, and Databases in the enterprise space, as well as e-commerce, social platforms, cloud OS, and retail banking in the consumer space.

Their design team, currently about 20 strong, consists of UX Strategists, Interaction Designers, UI Designers, UX Reviewers, and UI Integrators. Several of them have had formal education in design or art and others have had significant training for their roles, typically after several years of industry experience in development roles. Their development team, also about 20 strong, consists of Developers, QA Engineers, Project Managers and Architects with industry experience from 2-12 years.
 

Current Market Landscape

UX Design is a crucial aspect of any product, service, process or a system. For the past few years, there has been a sudden increase in the awareness and usefulness of principles of user experience across different domains in both small and large scale implementations. Customers are slowly becoming aware of the need and are actively seeking out vendors who have the ability to understand their users and how applying aspects of design principles can help them monetize faster and better.
Currently there is a revolution going on in the field of UX and the practitioners are adapting better approaches like Design Thinking and DevOps to help in arriving at the correct approach for a problem statement. 
With the expansion of utilities pertaining to BigData, mobile devices and Internet of Things, the need for User Experience market is also expanding into new areas. They believe that in the next few years, there would be huge demand on integrated solutions on multiple platforms and this can be possible only when there is a proper implementing of design principles and processes.
 

Addressing the Challenges

The main challenge that Divami Design Labs foresee is the right skill available in the field of Design. Though there are many vendors who provide design services, the quality and coverage is as good as the skill that the vendor organizations have.
They at Divami Design Labs have a very open culture and a robust internal processes that ensures that their employees are always in touch with the latest trends. Their internal “productathons” and design challenges keep their employees on their toes and ensure that they are always ready to meet the need of any domain and resolve complex problems.
They are very choosy in selecting our employees and constantly tour premium institutes to seek out those – who are not just with great tool knowledge, but who are also great at being a generalist. This ensures that every individual is able to assimilate the need of the customer and is able to empathize with the users to arrive at the correct solution as per the context.

The other challenge is awareness on Design and User Experience and its impact across domains. There are many customers who still believe that User Experience is just a non-functional requirement and try to treat it subjectively and at a low priority.
Divami Design Labs, have a highly experienced team who understand the need across various domains and are capable of wearing many hats to help the customers understand better.
They constantly connect with external entities and conduct mentorship and awareness sessions on Design Thinking, User Experience and other aspects of Design that can help not just the customers or entrepreneurs understand the value of Design, but also create an ecosystem where those who aspire to become great designers have the right forum to ideate and discuss with practitioners.
 

Services

Divami Design Labs specializesin implementing strategic user experience services using principles of Design Thinking.
They have worked across various domains and on various devices.
They focus mainly on UX Design for Web & Mobile applications, UI Designs for Web & Mobile layouts, UX Reviews, Logo & Branding Services, Hybrid/Cross-platform mobile app development, Web Application UI Development  (HTML5/CSS, JavaScript - Angular, jQuery, Kendo, Bootstrap, React etc.)
 

Differentiating Factors

As a culture, Divami Design Labs is focused on implementation of Strategic Designs across various form factors and domains. Their employees are encouraged to participate in external forums to contribute, debate and learn – thus ensuring that they as a Design Company are in vogue with the latest trends and technologies.

They regularly interact with Entrepreneurs and Wantrepreneurs to understand the emerging landscape of startups in India and due to their strong and fluid culture, robust processes and application of Design Thinking, they are able to provide them affordable and high quality strategic design solutions to their problems.
Their analysis is very through and they provide a very detailed documentation for easy implementation. Their processes include checks for usability and visual issues that are typically missed by standard testing. This by itself is a great value add to ensure that what they provide to their customers are of a very high quality. 
 

Clients

Marketshare, Novatium, EdgeFX, Appedo, Comtec, Tata Capital, vSoft, ClinAsia are some of the customers.
 

Organizational Culture

Divami Design Labs believe in freedom of thought, speech and expression. They have a very open environment to the extent where they have ensured that even the desks that they sit on promotes open discussions.
They focus a lot on team work and team learning/sharing. They do this on a regular basis by having various events within and outside office where they conduct design workshops and challenges internally on a regular basis to instigate and expand the thinking horizon of their employees.
As a strategic organization, their internal events are planned to promote learn, unlearn and relearn and focus on the aspect of subtle and impactful challenges for employees to participate and expand.
Their designation, roles etc., are more to fit the need of administration and completion of projects, but as a culture, they encourage every employee to contribute to a solution. This has resulted in the best of the outputs from their employees and has ensured that there is a continual movement towards converting Data into Wisdom. They strongly believe in diversity and inclusion and they understand that every individual is different and this difference is needed to grow as an individual and as a Design company.
What sets them apart is the laser-like focus we maintain on their core competency - the UX. This allows (rather, forces) them to drive everything keeping UX at the center - hiring, training, mentoring are all done keeping our motto in mind - even as they hire fresh grads, they look for and develop traits that make a good UX designer or developer.

Harboring Innovation

They have many internal programs that allows for employees to promote their own ideas and see how they can ready themselves to be a future entrepreneur.
All employees are part of common design sessions and how to apply designs in a structured manner. The structured framework based on aspects of Design Thinking is infused as part of daily work for each employee to practice on a daily basis, which in turn provides them an opportunity to apply Design Thinking on their own ideas to determine its feasibility, marketability, aspects of monetization etc.  Their open culture ensures that an employee can reach out to the highly skilled experts within Divami on areas of Process Frameworks, Interaction Design, UI Design and UI Development to discuss on aspects of the big picture and how that impacts their ideas.
They have ensured that those whom they hire are those who have an inherent interest towards aspects of how things work and have the ability to become great generalists – which is a crucial step to become a great leader and a successful entrepreneur.
So, the combination of leadership with experiences across domains, highly skilled and experienced individuals, a structured platform and framework to look at the big picture – along with an open culture and focused hiring practices ensures that every employee can continually evolve and contribute innovatively.
 

Roadmap Ahead

Divami Design Labs intend to reach out to various sectors – with a focus on ITES. This is an area where they believe that there is a huge opportunity for applying Strategic Design Solutions. They have strong capabilities of providing solutions in the areas of product and industrial designs and our focus would be to have a mix of customers from these backgrounds. This would ensure that they are able to expand their gamut of services and at the same time create an environment where design is considered as a key tool for excellence.  They have typically been able to get customers via their good work and recommendations from their existing customers, however, to ensure that they add value to the global revolution in the area of design and to reach out to new customers, they are also focusing on publishing blogs and articles and continue to provide their mentorship services to various startup communities.
Apart from their customer and community outreach, they would also have more inflows of new employees at various levels to ensure that there are new ideas being induced into their organization.

Quick Facts

1) Year of founding:2008

 2) Funding information: Self Funded

3) Founding members:Naveen Puttagunta and Srinivas Chinta

4) Office locations:Hyderabad, India

5) Company strength: 53 Employees

6) Website: www.divami.com