The interaction design function didn't exist in structured form when I arrived. Seven years later it was a 46-person practice with a defined methodology, a geographic expansion, and multiple industry awards.
The Minimalist was already an established digital agency when I joined. It had strong visual design and brand capabilities. What it didn't have was a structured interaction design practice — no defined process, no framework for how ID decisions were made, no consistent way of working across projects or teams.
I was brought in as UX Lead with a mandate to build this. What that actually meant was starting from scratch: defining what the practice was, how it worked, what it produced, how it connected to the broader agency workflow. There was no playbook. I wrote the playbook.
The first thing I built was a process framework for how interaction design decisions should be made. I called it BUDV: Business → User → Design → Validate.
Internally, I called it the Budweiser process — not publicly, but among designers, because mnemonics work and "BUDV" doesn't stick unless it sounds like something. The name was silly; the framework was taken seriously. It became the standard operating procedure for every interaction design project in the practice.
One of the commercial problems the agency faced was how to price and deploy design talent flexibly. Clients had different needs — some needed embedded designers for months, others needed a burst of capacity for a specific project phase, others needed ongoing retainer relationships.
I developed a model I called Resource Augmentation: a structured way of thinking about how design capability gets deployed against client engagements, calibrated by project type, phase, and team composition. This gave the agency a language for selling design capacity that mapped to how the work actually happened, rather than the legacy agency model of billing hours against a single generic "design" line item.
Over seven years, the practice worked across banking, FMCG, healthcare, enterprise software, e-commerce, HRMS, knowledge management, and edtech. More than 90 projects tracked. The range was deliberate — I wanted to understand what design problems looked like under fundamentally different constraints.
TATA AIG General Insurance was one of the most significant projects in this period. The brief was to redesign the digital experience for general insurance — a category that had historically treated digital as a claims processing channel, not a product in itself.
The redesign moved the entire interaction model: from form-heavy, error-prone, back-and-forth flows to a system where a customer could get an insurance quote in two clicks and complete a purchase in under three minutes. This required rethinking not just the UI but the underlying data architecture of what was collected when — which information was genuinely needed at which stage of the customer journey.
TATA AIG outcomes
The project won three industry awards in February 2020: BFSI Stallion Best in General Insurance Sector, DOD Gold Best UX, and DOD Gold Best UI. These came at the end of a year of intensive work across research, architecture, design, and validation cycles.
In 2020, as the pandemic forced the industry to rethink how and where design work happens, I expanded the practice from Mumbai into Bangalore — hiring designers remotely to serve a new geographic market without disrupting the existing operation.
This was less a COVID pivot and more a recognition that the talent pool and client base in Bangalore warranted a permanent presence. The pandemic removed the friction of making that case for in-person models. We hired, onboarded, and integrated a new team entirely remotely. It worked.
The numbers — 6 to 46, 90+ projects, three awards — are evidence that the practice was built. But what I was actually building was a culture of rigour around user-centred design in an environment where that wasn't the default.
Organisations know what they want systems to do. They almost never know what it feels like to use those systems. The consistent intervention over seven years: making that gap visible, and designing to close it.
Awards — Feb 2020
Domains covered