In the first of a series of interviews with our selection panellists, Molly Norris, an Innovator at Ideo.org, shares her thoughts on the importance of user experience design.

Why is user experience design so important?

Why is product design important? Experience design is the product more and more. Whether we like it or not, it is also increasingly the brand.

What characterizes a successful design?

Equal measures of utility and delight.

How can UX design improve women’s lives?

By unlocking more advanced features that can improve their authority over their own communications, finances, and quite simply, the managing of their own lives like any fully connected individual.

What is the role of research in UX design?

Put your designs into the hands of poor women as soon as possible. Let them show you what meets their needs and what doesn’t. Listen. Iterate. Don’t be precious. Bring .jpgs and .pngs if you can’t build a prototype. Stop conceptualizing and talking and start testing. If you want to be fancy, monitor the transactional data shadow cast by everything we produce in a digital realm to track progress, but always come back to the women and let them use it.

What are some examples of innovative UX design in emerging markets?

Solar lamps have been a real hardware success while Ushahidi has been a software blockbuster.

Why should the mobile industry invest in women as customers?

Beyond equity, women tend to hold the reigns of household spending while ascending to the professional class once the basic barriers of biological circumstance and the resulting cultural burdens are removed.

Why is the Design Challenge a worthwhile initiative?

Competitions are a way to let talent speak for itself no matter where it comes from or who it is affiliated with.