The Power of Specificity and Context with Sumit Rajwade

Why is it that everyone loves to be at home or misses home and when you enter that space there is an essence of belongingness, the smell of your mother, the vibe surrounding your aura, and one can just find herself’s body loosen and just submerge in the surroundings. The home is mother’s canvas, ever picked up a thing and kept it elsewhere and mom shouts in her loudest tone to keep it back in that ‘specific’ place, that too in the previously kept ‘specific’ position and the ‘specific’ angle. So picky and specific, duh! I have always heard mouths around me speak about how unaware they are about why they feel the way they do in their homes. After sessions of deep thinking and self-talk, I cracked it! It is the way or the ‘specificity’ with which the mother decorates and maintains her home. Everything is neat, clean, and organized. I was a messy bum at my childhood, my mother used to see the mess, crumple up her face, and say “ What is this mess Veda, what would someone think if they came to our house right now?” As messed up as my surrounding, my messed up brain too never understood this line, until today after I attended Mr.Sumit Rajwade's mind-boggling session. My mother meant, if things are messed up and not there at their specific places, it would ruin the ‘Experience’ of anyone who is coming home. Here is a line I always carry along with me which my mother told me and you might like it too!

“ Always keep yourself and your surroundings presentable, as if every day or every minute someone is going to visit you”.

Mr. Sumit reminded me of this scenario when he spoke about the ‘Art of Specificity’. Former VP Technology atRediff.com, Sumit is currently a founder at mPrompto, an AI powered B2B SAAS start-up company that aids businesses by providing them with AI-based tools and technologies that perfectly align with their business objectives. Having passed out from the prestigious VJTI Institute, Mumbai and certified Digital Transformation Leader from HAAS School at University of California, Berkeley, Sumit is a down-to-earth powerhouse with the right attitude. Sumit’s experiences speak volumes, earlier he led a small in-house team, and at the dawn of 15th August 1998 (Independence Day) Sumit launched a new email system ‘Rediff mail’. This new email system spread like wildfire on Indian television advertisements with the tagline, ‘Rediff mail, lightning fast!” — as quoted by Rediff.com CEO, Ajit Balakrishnan in his book The Waverider

I am glad, to be more ‘specific’ grateful and blessed to have attended Sumit’s talk at a design community in Hyderabad ‘DesignLand’. Later when I met him personally, he left me with one line carved on my mind, ‘Knowledge, big or small has to spread, it is contagious, spread it on girl’. Here I am sharing my piece of knowledge from his prestigious session.

I would keep it short, crisp and specific, because loading you all with too much information is going to increase your cognitive load, forcing you to leave this article midway.

Sumit divided his talk into seven little insightful stories. But explained down here are my favorite four of them, which have been the most insightful of all:

Story 1- “Revenue Measure” and impact on design patterns

Websites exist. For the sustenance of their existence websites need to constantly review and analyse their revenue measures. A drop or increase in the revenue measures helps them know about their website’s success at a better pace. There are, as of today seven ways of measuring a website’s revenue.

? Hits — A hit is any request to a web server. Each time a visitor downloads a page clicks a hyperlink, views a graphic, or performs any other action on a website, a call is made to the web server. The web server records each of these requests in a log file. ? Page Views: Pageviews are an instance of a page being loaded or reloaded in a browser. Pageviews is a metric defined as the total number of pages viewed. Unlike pageviews, Unique Pageviews are the total number of sessions during which a specific page was viewed at least once. ? Pages ‘Seen’: A page is seen is when a page of your website is loaded by the browser and seen in detail by a viewer. It is also defined as the number of views a website or a webpage gets over a period of time.

• User sessions: The initiation of a session occurs when a user starts browsing a site and ends when the user exits the site or after a period of inactivity, typically 30 minutes. For example, A visitor checks out your store website for the first time after finding it on Google. They visit a few product pages, then use their browser to navigate away. ? Unique Visitor (monthly): A unique visitor is a term used in marketing analytics that refers to a person who has visited the website at least once and is counted only once in the reporting time period. So if the user visits the web more than once, it counts as one visitor only. It’s also called a “Unique User”. ? Time spent: Time on site, also known as session duration, is the total amount of time that someone spends navigating through your website. It is calculated by noting the timestamp when a visitor clicks through a search engine or link to your landing page and the timestamp when the visitor navigates away from your website. ? DAU/MAU: The most recent and modern way of calculating revenue has been, Daily Active Users (upon) Monthly Active Users. ? The next modern way is still in the fog and might pop up soon, who knows it might be AI itself?!

Story 2 — “Design Pillars: Knowledge, Authority, Empathy”

Sumit says any product which has a story to offer is designed on these three pillars, knowledge, authority, and empathy, where knowledge is where the designer gets himself informed about the user knowledge, authority is where one curates the designs and empathy is where one fuses ounces of empathy into a design to make it more customer-centric. He highlighted that this art of story telling is in practice for thousands of years — ever since Mahabharata days and these were the qualities which made the Bhagwad Gita conversation engaging.

Story 3- “ Mind-map” depth of context and ladder of specificity

? Clears throat* . Here’s to my second-most favorite story. Ever noticed how humans choose, to be more specific how children choose? Sumit narrated an incident where a shopkeeper asked him and his daughter onto which umbrella they would prefer to buy. Sumit simply said, “Umm, anything, a black umbrella works”, then when the shopkeeper turned his head to his daughter and asked, “Which umbrella do you want little girl?”. “ A pink umbrella which is long and lean, with Barbies on it and a U-shaped handle”. The shopkeeper was stunned at her specificity and gave her a ‘Customer-centric’ umbrella. Her specificity gave the shopkeeper a deeper dive into her context or her actual image of her own umbrella. Therefore, the combined effort of her given specificity and his understanding of the context

elevated her experience of having and using an umbrella.

Story 4- An experience at the Reliance Digital Store

To the most favorite story, the context of this story is similar to the terms ‘specificity’ and ‘depth of context. Beautifully narrated by Sumit, “ I was on the hunt of buying myself a laptop and I entered into the Reliance digital store.” As the story unfolds, I want you all to imagine this scenario in a digital product, where you enter as a buyer. “ 2 minutes into the store, I asked a salesperson for directions towards the laptop section. Around 4 to 5 salespeople came asking me which laptop I wanted, the question was just too vague, and I couldn’t answer, leaving me more confused about the pile of laptops near me. I was wandering in there for about more than an hour, testing and using every laptop and adding more syrups of confusion onto my head, until a senior sales manager sensed my confusion, came up to me, and first asked, “Sir do you mind if I try helping you?” and then he showered me with questions, which ‘Filtered and sorted’ the clutter in my head.” Some of those questions were “ Do you want this laptop for office use or for traveling?” “ What would be the intensity of usage?” “ Are you a gamer or a normal laptop user?” Sumit continued “ After a series of questions, he brought in front of me just two, yes just two laptops from the entire bunch and said, from your specifications, you shall either buy this one or this one.” “ I was taken aback at the amount of clarity he had delivered to me just with some ‘RIGHT’ questions. That day I learnt deeper into the power of specificity. Here are some takeaways from the above

context, asking specific questions, may it be many, builds trust among users about them getting some perfect results. Right questions clear the clutter in the user’s mind giving him a better experience, lastly after so much filtering and sorting, the user is left with very few choices to choose from which makes it easier for them to make the right decisions.

Some sentences that Sumit delivered out of this story:

1. The senior manager at Reliance was not ‘selling’ his product, rather he understood the need of the person.

2. The manager did not rush into his answers, thoughts or decisions, he gave him enough room to think, act and react.

3. The manager did not impose any decision or choice on him, he put it out as Sumit’s natural choice.

4. This specification built a trust in Sumit that it was not cheap, but actual value for money.

This was it. The feeling of getting such specific knowledge was, was, maybe can’t be expressed in words. The plant in my brain was thirsty for so long and this session was like slow water dripping and getting soaked in my nerves.

Lastly, the biggest example of specificity can be AI, specificity in prompts, gives deeper level of context to the tool thus bringing out the desired results for you.

Thank you for being so patient enough to read through out, do let me know what ‘Specific’ thought you are taking away from this blog.

Until next time readers!

“Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.”