Startup DSYN builds products at the convergence of design and technology

“Good design is about solving problems for your users,” said Jim Nieters, a Silicon Valley UX expert. In addition to the barrage of UI-UX knowledge that the attendees at the recently concluded workshop received from Jim’s end, one particular point stood out from the rest: “The designer and the front end coders should work very closely. Not only does this improve the speed of development, you ensure that the design has been replicated pixel for pixel in code.”

Now, in most technology startups, amongst others, you have the geeks, UX experts, designers, and then there’s something at the point of convergence of these three. Most fabulous products, as Jim said and I repeat here, are a result of a good mixture of these three elements in its production. DSYN is one startup that has been built at the convergence of these three aspects.

What is DSYN?

“At DSYN, we make mobile apps - for the iOS, Android and Windows platforms, as well as web apps and websites. We like to think of ourselves as experts in bringing together design and technology. Our emphasis has been on creating user experiences, natural interactions and visual design coupled with technology to build solutions for our clients,” says Tanuj Mendiratta, CEO, introducing DSYN.

DSYN works towards providing creative solutions for new media platforms with an emphasis on branding, creative strategy combined with user experience.

The DSYN Story

While Tanuj and Anuj Bhargava, now the CCO, started working together on design freelance projects around early 2010, Mayank Kumar, the CTO, had been working on technology freelance projects at the same time. After collaborating for few design and technology work on mobile and web platform, they saw the exponential growth in mobile apps market due to apps store launched by Apple and Google, and decided to start DSYN in December 2010.

The DSYN Team

Prior to co-founding DSYN Media, Tanuj has worked with two startups in India. In his first company he worked as a senior business analyst, while in the second he was VP marketing. Tanuj has done his Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering from Delhi College of Engineering and later did his MBA from IIM-Calcutta.

Anuj is the creative think-tank of DSYN. He specializes in design thinking and cognitive ergonomics. He’s a graduate from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad. Advocating designpreneurship, he represented DSYN at the Asia-Pacific entrepreneurship summit, Taiwan and Future Entrepreneurs of the World Summit, Sydney.

Mayank is the chief geek in residence at DSYN. He dabbles with various mobile technologies for DSYN. A graduate from IIT-Delhi, Mayank has worked at Microsoft before establishing Jaamun – a blackberry competitor for low end mobile phones in India.

Today, the DSYN team is 35 member strong and works from their Gurgaon office. They recently opened their foreign sales office in San Francisco.

The DSYN work

The DSYN team has worked with some of the leading names in the industry in various measures.

• Infographic Solutions for smartphones - DSYN has deployed this solution to enable its clients like ICICI, Sprinklr, Climate Connect, to access real time data in summarized format while on move.
• Education Solution - DSYN has developed a content delivery and feedback application in partnership with Science Olympiad Foundation. The Android and iPhone application of this solution enables students to consume media and content in an interactive manner. Students are also apprised of their performance via various practice tests and questions/answers.
• Information management for enterprises - This is an information management solution specifically for iPads, which enables users to access documents, brand information, news updates etc.
• Healthcare solutions for smartphones - This solution helps monitor the health and nutrient consumption of users and can be customized to fit different kind of mobile applications.
• Location Services - DSYN has developed location based information delivery mechanism for Samsung, ICICI, MapMyIndia and Zomato. The solution helps users by giving them location based information like ATMs, restaurants, hotels, coupons, deals etc.

Talking about one of their products, Anuj says, “Colour Scheme Pro mobile application for iOS and Android is one such example. Asian Paints wanted to replicate the offline experience of choosing colours on mobile. We designed and developed the application with features like camera colour picker, manual colour selection using fandeck, search using colour names and codes, monochromatic, complementary colour combinations upon choosing a colour, colour wheel experience, custom colour palette builder, save and share feature for Gmail, Facebook and other services. The app has received a rating of 4+ on both the Google Play Store and iTunes App Store.”

Challenges

The biggest challenge, that the DSYN team faces, is to find talent that can make quality mobile apps. As of today, they had to refuse more than 50% project requests due to shortage of quality people.

The DSYN vision

With 50% of their projects coming from outside India, DSYN plan to further increase the number of international projects. However the plan is to cautiously scale up while maintaining quality. For this they have set up their foreign sales office at San Francisco, USA.