Note: This is part 3 of an opinionated piece exploring the current state of design innovation in India (find part 1 and part 2). It is mostly based on my personal experiences, conversations with the design community and research across available resources. I’ve tried to back up my observations with data where possible, but this remains fundamentally a reflection on what I see happening in our ecosystem.
In spite of all the systemic issues, Indian hasn’t lost digital product design battles. Some remarkable cases demonstrate where things can go when ambition, talent, and market sense align. These aren’t one-offs; they’re beacons that provide hints on how to narrow the design innovation gap.
Consider Unified Payments Interface (UPI), perhaps India’s greatest digital product of recent times. Launched in 2016, UPI simplified sending money as just sending a message. It didn’t depend on catchy graphics, but on addressing a deep pain: cumbersome, inconvenient payments. In one virtual ID, customers could sidestep clunky bank information and pay instantly. Now, UPI drives over 10 billion monthly payments a month and has even been an imitation catalyst for countries such as Singapore and France. That wasn’t merely an app design victory, it was system-level design thinking, where technologists, regulators, and designers conspired around scale and usability.
Or take CRED, the fintech product that was released in 2018 and made paying a bill as dull an activity into an aspirational experience. Bold design, lighthearted copywriting, gamification, CRED made finance pretty much premium and fun. It proved that users in India do pay attention to design when it improves their experience, and that design-sensitive leadership top-down can shift industry mindsets.
It’s the same with Zomato and Swiggy. Both put a lot of money in design in an effort to organise something chaotic – food delivery in Indian cities. Zomato created a brand identity that was full-blooded and funny, where Swiggy banked on reliability, real-time tracking, and considerate niceties for Indian users. Both set the bar for UX in India where when startups fight on design, they all win.
Even government platforms have scaled up. Aadhaar provided a digital identity for more than a billion individuals and empowered whole classes of fintech innovation. Co-WIN, constructed during a pandemic, managed over 2 billion doses of vaccine across several languages and apps. Perfect? No. But working, iterative, and got-the-job-done. These demonstrate that when the stakes are great, India can scale usable, effective design at a population scale.
Scanning back and forth across these examples, the patterns emerge. India’s greatest winning designs originate from:
- User-first approach: tackling actual pain points.
- Buy-in: founders, regulators, or government support design.
- Iterative development: speedy improvement by feedback.
- Cosmic inspiration + ground-level context: applying other countries’ success models to the realities of India.
But when we pull back a step and contrast India with the world’s leading designers – the US, Europe, and East Asia – the contrasts grow sharper.
In the US and Europe, design has been respected as a full-fledged discipline for a long time. Students can pursue HCI at Stanford or go to first-class design schools in Europe. East Asia constructed its talent pipeline fast, with Korea, Taiwan, and China creating dozens of design universities in a mere two decades. India is yet to catch up. Design schools are on the rise, but on a per-head basis, the pool of talent is still unexplored, and the majority of the brightest still migrate overseas.
On the industry side, Silicon Valley established a culture where the product has a seat at the table. Apple, Airbnb, and IBM aren’t tech companies first; they’re design-driven companies. Europe integrates user-centric design across everything from furniture to fintech. East Asia’s trajectory is remarkable: Japan has always valued craftsmanship; Korea resuscitated itself by establishing global design labs; China shifted from imitator to innovator in less than 20 years. India, traditionally, didn’t have that culture. Most companies were engineering- or sales-led with design as an afterthought. That dynamic we’re shifting away from, but it hasn’t yet achieved scale or maturity of global peers.
The startup ecosystem shares the same narrative. It’s common in the US for startups to engage design advisors prematurely. Europe’s fintech capitals, in London or Stockholm, are the world leaders in smooth UX. China excelled in new product development experiences – such as swipe videos (TikTok/Douyin) – later duplicated in the West. Our startup ecosystem is younger. Investors have long been concerned with growth first and foremost, with design only now entering the discussion. Still, when we do get it just right – such as with UPI – the world takes notice.
Consumer attitudes also determine outcomes. American and European consumers were always willing to pay for convenience and quick when they dislike poor design. Accessibility laws nudge inclusive innovation further. East Asian customers are just as demanding as Japan’s compulsion with reliability or China’s affection for super apps that do everything. Indian consumers began at a lower level, but expectations are growing rapidly. The next 100 million Indian users will not put up with clunky tools, and that in itself could push companies up their design game.
And then policy support counts. Korea, Taiwan, and China regard design as strategic and invest in design centres and billion-dollar initiatives. Europe invests significantly in design culture and research. India didn’t recognise the economic value of design until 2007, when the National Design Policy and the India Design Council came on board. Certain initiatives since then – such as I-Mark recognition or MSME design clinics – are however, meek compared to global equivalents.
The positive note on the Indian front is that now it’s redesigning its policy on designing digital inclusion and an ethical framework. With real resources, if supported, this could tilt the playing field. So where are we now? India is a decade or two behind the leaders. But on the same trajectory they too had traversed once upon a time. The US had its tech-first, design-after phase before Apple reversed the script. It took China a period of around 15 years to go from copying to creating, once designing became a national agenda. India finds itself now at that turning point. Ingredients abound – young energy, large market size, enhancing infrastructure, and exposure abroad. The deficit is evident, so is the promise. The existing stories – UPI, CRED, Zomato, Swiggy, Co-WIN – demonstrate the possible. Scaling up that kind of condition so that design becomes the rule rather than the exception in India is next.
Sources and References
NPCI / UPI transaction data: NDTV (2025). UPI sees record 20 billion transactions in August, valued at 24 lakh crore. Link
Payments Journal (2024). How India’s UPI rose to dominate real-time payments. Link
MageComp (2024). UPI Statistics 2024. Link
GrowthX (2021). CRED’s business model explained. Link
BIS (2022). India’s Co-WIN platform: Lessons for public health digital infrastructure. Link
LinkedIn (2024). Where design stands in India, Krishna Gilda. Link
ResearchGate (2023). The Impact of User Research on UX Design Outcomes in Indian Startups: A Qualitative Study. Link
LinkedIn (2024). Reimagining India’s Design Policy: The Next Decade, Manoj Kothari. Link