TED Community » Sarit Arora

About Me

Sarit has more than 12 years of experience in the area of User Experience Design and Innovation. He has a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Delhi University ( Delhi College of Engineering) and a Masters in Industrial Design ( Product Design) from the National Institute of Design, Ahmadabad.

He is leading the Advertising Platforms Group’s UED team at Yahoo! Bangalore, working closely with product and engineering teams to come up with seamless user experience for platform products and online Ad experience.

He employs contextual innovation methodologies to identify new opportunities, discover users through ethnographic studies and design breakthrough and engaging products and experience. His main interest is to understand human needs, technology and come up with new interfaces, products and services that are not only easy to use but are also engaging and persuasive. Some of his clients, for whom he has created innovative products and services, include – MIT Media Labs, Intel, HP, Standard bank, Baxter, Hair, Huawei, Citibank, ICICI Bank, Columbia University and many others.


Before joining Yahoo, he was heading the Bangalore office of HFI, leading a team of user experience designers. At HFI his responsibilities included design and evaluation of products and software applications, new client aquizition, client interaction, understanding user’s requirements, leading and mentoring design teams and teaching user experience design and innovation courses to professionals. Before HFI, he was designing cars for Maruti Suzuki. One of his key projects was to redesign the Maruti 800, the smallest and the “people’s car” in India.

He has been closely associated in organising UX events in bangalore like the World Usability Day, since 2007. He is also a visiting faculty at National Institute of Design, Ahmadabad and Bangalore.


Publications and Presentations

• Design for Multiple Devices – India HCI conference , March 2011
• How to tell Compelling User Stories – India Product Management Association, April 2011
• Contributed to a book on Innovation in Emerging Markets – “Innovative Solutions: What designers need to know for Today’s Emerging Markets” – Edited By Apala Lahiri Chavan and Girish Prabhu, 2010
• How mobile money can empower women at the bottom of the pyramid in Indian urban centres – Apala Lahiri Chavan, Sarit Arora, Anand Kumar, Praneet Reddy, HCII 2009
• Washing Machine that Ate my Saree – Mistakes in cross cultural design. Interactions magazine (ACM), Apala Chavan, Douglas Gorney, Beena Prabhu, Sarit Arora, January 2009
• The Acid Test: Usability evaluation of Indian railways reservation system, World Usability Day, Bangalore, 2007
• Position Paper: Workshop on User Centred Design and International Development, CHI 2007
• "Emerging Markets- finding the right foot hold". Beena Prabhu (Human Factors International, India), Girish Prabhu (Intel, India), Sarit Arora (Human Factors International, India), Anil Paranjape (Intel, India): International Workshop on Internationalization of Products and Systems 2007, Mexico
• Process inspired creativity. Sarit Arora. Design Speak, Annual Seminar on User Centered Design at National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad 2006
• Contextual Innovation at HFI, SIGCHI Bangalore Conference, Oracle India limited, Bangalore 2006
• Remote Card Sorting: Collecting world-wide data with limited time and budgets. John Whalen, Human Factors International; Sarit Aurora, Human Factors International; Carol Bowman, ARINC. Annual Conference of Usability Professionals Association, 2005
• Integrating usability into global development teams: What have we learned? Kathleen Straub, Sarit Arora. Annual Conference of Usability Professionals Association, 2005.
• Design Studies for a Financial Management System for Micro-credit Groups in Rural India. Tapan Parikh, Kaushik Ghosh, Apala Chavan, Puneet Syal and Sarit Arora. ACM Conference on universal usability, 2003. ( It got the Best Paper Award)

Affiliations:

Member, ACM SIGCHI
Member, UPA, Usability Professionals Association
Vice Chair, CHI Bangalore

Interests and Hobbies:

Reading Maps, Sketching, Aerospace and composing new nursery rhymes for his 4 year old kid.