Note: This is an opinionated piece exploring the current state of design innovation in India. 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.
India has emerged as a global technology and IT powerhouse, yet we are often perceived as lagging in digital product design innovation. Compared to design leaders in the United States, Europe and East Asia, our tech products are rarely cited for cutting-edge user experience or aesthetic excellence. This piece explores the potential reasons behind this innovation gap across multiple dimensions: from education and corporate culture to market forces and talent flow, comparing our situation with global peers. I’ve also found some promising trends showing that there might be a better future ahead.
India’s digital economy reached $402 billion in 2022-23, representing 11.7% of national income, with internet users now exceeding 750 million (as of 2025). The government has set an ambitious target of achieving a $1 trillion digital economy by 2028. Ideally, this massive user base and rapid growth trajectory should by default, drive well-designed digital solutions. Also, India is the third-largest home to unicorns (startups valued at over $1 billion), after the US and China. But somehow, we’re still not known for breakthrough UX.
The Education Problem: More Schools, Same Issues
Let’s start with the basics, design education in India is improving from a terrible base. For decades after independence, we had basically one design school worth mentioning: the National Institute of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad, founded in 1961, plus a handful of programs at IITs. That was it for a country of over a billion people.
Things started changing in the 2000s. Design institutes multiplied, reaching over 70 programs by 2016. But here’s the thing: quantity doesn’t equal quality. Most of these new programs are still focused on traditional graphic design, industrial design and other design domains. When it comes to UX, Human-Computer Interaction or digital product design, we’re still playing catch-up.
I’ve spoken to hiring managers at major Indian tech companies, and the story is consistent: we produce about 5000–8000 design graduates annually (including all courses), but the market needs way more UX professionals. Even worse, according to a recent industry survey, 70% of hiring managers say fresh graduates lack basic user research and usability testing skills. They know the tools Figma, Sketch, Adobe but they don’t understand users.
Looking to the US, a significant chunk of design programs have specialised UX curriculum, or China, which invested heavily in design education over the past decade and now produces companies like ByteDance that are genuinely innovative in UX. We’re not there yet.
The bigger issue is mindset. Our design education still follows a rote learning approach: learn the tools, copy the patterns, get the job. There’s little emphasis on questioning why users behave in certain ways or how to solve problems through design. I regularly see portfolios full of beautiful UI mockups that look like copies of Dribbble shots, templatised double diamonds but very little evidence of thinking through real user problems.
This doesn’t mean we lack talent. I know several exceptional Indian designers doing world-class work. But the numbers are too small compared to our demographic scale and market demand.
Corporate Culture: Design as Decoration
Outside the classroom, design has historically been treated as window dressing in most Indian companies. The IT boom that put India on the global map was driven by software engineering and outsourcing services, not product creation. In that world, design requirements came from clients abroad and we were just executing someone else’s vision.
Even today, in most Indian tech companies, design is not embedded at a strategic level. I’ve had conversations with leaders across orgs to know the pattern, business and engineering teams decide what to build, then bring in designers to “make it look good.” If deadlines are tight or budgets are cut, UX work is the first thing sacrificed.
The numbers tell the story. While the majority of Silicon Valley startups have dedicated UX teams, only a small number of Indian startups do, though the number is slowly increasing. When Indian companies do have design teams, they’re typically 3-5 people trying to support full products serving millions of users. Compare that to companies like Airbnb, where teams of 1:8 to 1:12 design-to-engineer ratio work on products with similar user bases.
Most Indian businesses see design as a cost centre, not a value driver. Leadership focuses on quick monetisation and feature delivery. I’ve heard variations of this conversation countless times from people in the community: “We need to ship this feature next week for the board meeting. Can design just clean up the UI in a day or two?”
The McKinsey Design Index found that companies integrating design throughout development outperform industry benchmarks by up to 200%. That insight is slowly reaching Indian boardrooms, but we’re still years behind in actually implementing it.
Here’s an example of a difference in approach: Paytm vs Google Pay. Paytm achieved massive scale but became known for its busy interface with ads everywhere, confusing navigation, and features stuffed into every corner. The focus was clearly on monetisation and user acquisition (this can also be attributed to the SuperApp concept from China). Google Pay, meanwhile, kept things clean and simple, and guess what? It still achieved strong growth while users enjoyed using it.
This isn’t just about aesthetics, it’s about fundamental product philosophy. Are you optimising for short-term revenue gains or long-term user satisfaction? Most Indian companies still choose the former.
Startup Mantra: Clone, Scale, Monetise
Our startup ecosystem has produced 119 unicorns as of June 2025, a remarkable achievement. But when we look at these success stories, the majority of them have followed a “clone and localise” playbook rather than creating original experiences.
The pattern is widely known: pick a successful Western app, adapt it for Indian users, execute well, scale fast. Ola copied Uber’s model. Flipkart started as an Amazon clone. OYO borrowed heavily from Airbnb. The list goes on.
No, I’m not saying these companies didn’t execute brilliantly – they solved real problems and built massive businesses. But none of them redefined their industries through design innovation. The innovation was in business models, local adaptation and scaling, not in creating new user experience paradigms.
There is a specific reason for that: investors and market pressures reward growth over design refinement. VCs in India push startups to acquire users and monetise quickly. Show me your DAU numbers, your retention rates, your revenue per user but nobody asks about user satisfaction scores or design quality metrics.
In multiple scenarios, I’ve seen this firsthand. Startups under pressure to hit growth targets end up prioritising features that drive metrics more notifications, aggressive pop-ups and growth hacks. While skipping the hard work of user research and iterative design improvement. As a result, we see Apps that function but don’t delight.
It’s no secret that most Indian startups allocate only a small fraction of their budgets to research and development. By contrast, among the world’s top 500 companies, those in the US invested €524 billion in R&D in 2024 alone. For these giants, research spending averaged 6.1% of revenue last year, a drop from 13.2% the year before, but still a world apart from what we see at home.
But It Gets Interesting!
Regardless of all these challenges, I’m seeing pockets of genuine innovation that come as a silver lining. Indian startups are starting to realise the potential of solving India’s unique UX challenges, which can prove to be a competitive advantage and even a source of globally relevant innovation.
Designing with constraints paves the way for creativity. Indian startups operate with infrastructure limitations (patchy networks, low-end devices, first-time digital users) that force us to think out of the box. We can’t term them as just limitations, as these constraints are driving innovations that even developed markets can learn from.
Take Paytm’s Soundbox, it came from a hilariously specific Indian problem which our western counterpart might not even think of as a possibility in today’s time. Merchants weren’t getting payment confirmations because their SMS inboxes were full. Instead of just fixing the SMS issue, Paytm created an entirely new product category: audio-based transaction feedback. Now it processes over 100 million transactions monthly and the innovation has been adopted widely across the industry.
CRED transformed bill payment from a boring activity into an engaging and delightful experience through thoughtful gamification not just random badges and points, but rewards that to an extent that actually matter to their target users. Those extended animations are not always about design, but functional, to mask functional background activities.
Then there’s Aarogya Setu, India’s COVID contact tracing app. Sure, it had privacy issues but from a UX perspective, it was remarkable. Supported 12 languages, worked on feature phones and accommodated users with limited digital literacy. Downloaded 200+ million times, that’s a scale requiring serious, inclusive design thinking.
These aren’t just business successes, they’re genuine UX innovations born from understanding unique user contexts.
The Recognition Gap
Here’s what frustrates me: why don’t these innovations get global recognition? I think there are several reasons:
We’re terrible at documenting and sharing our design stories. Indian companies underinvest in design case studies, thought leadership and conference presentations. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley companies turn every minor UX update into a Medium article and a conference talk.
There’s a definition bias in what counts as “innovation.” Creating new visual design languages gets celebrated more than solving complex user problems in emerging markets.
Global design awards favour aesthetic innovation over contextual solutions. A beautiful interface redesign gets more attention than solving the SMS inbox problem that led to Soundbox.
We’re not present in global design conversations. How many Indian designers speak at major international design conferences? How many Indian products get featured in global design publications? We’re not telling our stories to the right audiences.
A silver lining (Finally)
The good news is the ecosystem is maturing. I’m seeing real shifts:
Design hiring grew 35% in 2024 according to LinkedIn data. More importantly, I’m seeing design leadership roles Chief Design Officers, VP of Design finally appearing in Indian companies.
VCs are starting to evaluate design quality during due diligence. Not consistently yet, but it’s happening. Some are even bringing design partners into their teams.
A new generation of founders who care about design are helping to shape the ecosystem. They’ve used great products globally and want to build similar experiences in India.
User research is finally getting investment. I know companies that hired their first user researchers in 2024. It’s late, but it’s happening.
The way ahead
Let’s be real, we’re not gonna become Silicon Valley overnight, and we shouldn’t try to. Our strength lies in solving contextual problems that global companies miss. As the world becomes more focused on inclusive design and accessibility, India’s constraint-driven solutions become increasingly relevant globally.
The transformation is already underway. We are seeing growth in design education, increasing corporate investment and design-conscious leaders. We’re positioned to become creators of design trends, not just consumers.
But we need to be honest about the challenges. Design education needs fundamental reform, less tool training, more problem-solving thinking. Corporate culture needs to elevate design from decoration to strategy. The startup ecosystem needs to balance growth metrics with user satisfaction.
Most importantly, we need to document and share our innovations with the global design community. The world needs to know that India isn’t just producing cheap software, we’re creating genuinely innovative user experiences for the world’s most complex digital market.
The question isn’t whether India can innovate in digital product design; we already are. The question is whether we’ll get the recognition we deserve, and whether we’ll build on these early successes to become a genuine design leader.
Next, we will explore the bigger question is why the market allowed mediocre design to flourish for so long and what’s finally changing that dynamic. Looking into how user expectations, talent flows and global competition are reshaping India’s design landscape, along with the success stories that prove we can close the gap when the conditions align.
Update: Part 2 is now live here.
This is a work in progress. I’m curious, what have I missed? So if there are factors or examples you think belong here, I’d love to hear about them. If you’re a designer or product thinker working in India, your perspective would be especially valuable. Feel free to share your thoughts.
Sources and References
- India’s Digital Economy Growth – TICE News, January 2025
- Government Digital Economy Targets – Deccan Chronicle, May 2024
- NASSCOM Design4India Report 2024
- LinkedIn Workforce Report 2024 – India Tech Skills Analysis
- Design Census India 2024 – Skills Gap Analysis
- McKinsey Design Index Study – “The Business Value of Design”
- LinkedIn Economic Graph Data 2024 – Design Hiring Trends
- Coursera Global Skills Report 2024 – India Chapter
- Companies worldwide increase their spending on Research and Development