Case Study · Titan Company Limited · 2023
Titan Kaizen Mela
Designing a Virtual Innovation Platform for 10,000+ Employees — from First Sketch to Live Event
My Role
Product Design,
UI/UX & Visual Identity
Client
Titan Company Ltd.
(CTS / Innovation Team)
Duration
4-5 Months
(Internship -> Contract)
Disciplines
Spatial Design · UI/UX · Visual
Identity · Collateral Design
Contents
01 The Brief
A national event for 10,000+ employees, to be designed by two designers.
Kaizen Mela is Titan's biggest annual internal innovation ceremony. Every business division (Jewellery, Taneira, Watches, Eyeglasses, Caratlane, Accessories, etc) can present projects that have led to some improvement in the business.
My co-designer Vibhudhesh owned the 3D spatial environment. I owned everything 2D: brand identity, platform UI, all collateral, the visual language of the entire event.
10K+
Employees across India
4-5 active months
Internship to contractor
Hybrid
First physical + virtual edition
02 What Came Before
Before touching a design tool, I studied the previous three editions in detail. The pattern was not that one edition failed. It was that no edition had ever been designed with the user in mind.
Three editions. Three very different problems. All pointing to the same gap.
2019
First Edition, Inaugural
There was no designer or identity. A small offline exhibition at the corporate office.The event achieved its purpose: picking a winner. Nothing more.
2020
The COVID Pivot
The event moved online by necessity. A basic livestream kept participation alive but the platform was entirely passive. Employees could watch, not explore.
2022
An Ambitious Failure
VConfex built a 3D space that looked template-based. The stall filter had four options and one worked. The identity from the creative agency never made it into the platform.
The problem statement we inherited
The 2022 platform had four filter options. One worked. None of this was caught before the event went live.
03 Research
45 conversations across 4 cities before a single design decision.
We ran primary research the right way: messy, in-person, without a rigid script. We were designing for a factory worker in Hosur and a retail manager in Kolkata simultaneously. Understanding what that meant required actually talking to both.
A useful warm-up came from a separate Tanishq gold exchange study requiring field interviews across four cities. That prepared me to adapt when a venue fell through in Patna, to read a factory floor worker differently from a regional manager, and to separate what people say from what their behaviour reveals.
45
Interviews conducted
4
Cities: Bangalore, Patna, Kolkata, Indore
7
Business divisions studied
2
Factory visits: Hosur and Chikballapur
Composite of what we heard across 45 conversations
I only checked the platform because my manager told me to. The stall filters didn't work so I gave up. I watched the ceremony but felt like an outsider.
04 The Questionnaire
Three groups. Three completely different sets of needs.
We designed three separate questionnaire streams to ensure coverage across the groups. Rather than rigid surveys, we used them as conversation starters. Each was tailored to the group's relationship with the event.
Questionnaire 1
Project Team (Internal)
For Vibhudhesh, Gururaj, Sangeetha, and Titan CTS members. What went wrong in 2022 from the inside? What features would solve the most problems? What are the non-negotiables for 2023?
Questionnaire 2
Retail Operations
For employees who had participated in previous Kaizen Melas. What was confusing? What would make you genuinely excited to participate rather than just check in?
Questionnaire 3
Manufacturing Personnel
For factory employees new to Kaizen Mela 2023. How do you receive event information? What devices do you use? What does recognition mean to you personally?
05 Research Insights
Four Miro iterations. One pattern that kept reappearing.
We transferred everything to Miro and tried to find the signal. The first two categorisation attempts were too broad. Four passes later we landed on four actionable clusters: Spatial Design, Usability, Infrastructure, and Marketing.
The unifying insight
The manufacturing audience came to be recognised. The office audience came to learn. The platform had been designed for neither, and it showed in every participation metric.
Manufacturing employees came to see their work validated nationally. Office employees came to discover, benchmark, and learn. Designing a platform that served both without alienating either became the central UX challenge.
06 Journey Mapping
Two users. Two completely different journeys. One platform trying to serve both.
With the insights synthesised, we mapped the actual journeys. Not what we assumed would happen, but what our research showed actually happens: the drop-off moments, the friction points, the moments of genuine engagement.
Manufacturing
Came to be recognised
Technical experts who had spent months on a real improvement. Wanted their work seen nationally. Unfamiliar with virtual platforms. Needed a smooth, guided, low-friction experience.
Retail and Office
Came to learn
Customer-facing staff who came to explore, benchmark against peers, vote on favourites. More digitally fluent. Wanted depth, discovery, and the ability to find colleagues' work.
08 The Agency Decision
Six weeks of deliberation. The developer we wanted. The one we got.
This is the part most case studies quietly skip. I am not going to skip it because the agency selection shaped every design decision that followed, and sitting in budget meetings as a design intern watching a templated platform get chosen over a better one is an education no design school provides.
We evaluated four agencies: VConfex (who had built 2022), KeStone by Vosmos Events, V.Fairs, and Spatial.io. The real decision came down to two. We built a formal comparison: portfolio review, UX capability assessment, India-context fit, pricing. We presented it clearly. Management deliberated for six weeks.
Management chose
VConfex
Existing Titan relationship. Had delivered 2022. Budget-aligned. Management knew exactly what imperfect thing they were getting, which felt safer than the uncertainty of a new vendor on a high-stakes national event.
Our recommendation
KeStone (Vosmos Events)
Stronger product with real 3D customisation, not templates. Portfolio included Dell, Amazon, Tata, Google, Nvidia, and GitHub. Better aligned with Kaizen's design aspirations for 2023.
From the project documentation, pages 86-87
This deliberation stretched painfully over a month and a half, turning our project timeline on its head. We settled on VConfex: not because they held the upper hand in innovation, but because familiar comfort resonated more with the powers that be.
09 Budget Priorities
Every feature had a price. Every problem had a metric.
With VConfex confirmed, the next challenge was just as difficult: every feature we wanted had a cost to solve. We had to prioritise ruthlessly and document our reasoning.
The mosaic wall concept, where every participant's photo would form the Kaizen Mela logo, was an early casualty. One lakh rupees for a single visual moment we could not justify. The framework: list features, map to research problem statements, score for user impact, score for implementation cost, iterate. Four or five passes, each tightening scope as budget reality clarified.
The budget framework
This was design thinking with a calculator in hand. Every creative impulse had to pass a return-on-investment test. Not beautiful for its own sake. Beautiful because it solved a specific problem that enough people had.
Five zones. Five different reasons people would use the platform.
Before wireframing anything, we mapped the purpose of each zone. What does someone come here to do, and what does the design need to make possible? We researched each area then started wireframing.
Zone 01
Landing Page
First contact. Sets the brand tone, introduces Kaizen Mela to newcomers, shows the event agenda. Designed to intrigue and orient simultaneously.
Zone 02
Central Connect
The navigation hub. A panoramic bird's-eye view of the entire virtual platform. Every zone reachable within two clicks.
Zone 03
Exhibition (Stalls)
The core of the event. Where participants showcase kaizen projects. Each stall a focused single-screen experience with video, quiz, and downloads.
Zone 04
Leaderboard
Recognition mechanics. The competition. Showed finalist standings and drove competitive engagement throughout both event days.
Zone 05
Auditorium
Collective experience. Live jury sessions, speaker presentations, and the award ceremony broadcast to 10,000+ employees simultaneously.
For each zone, we documented the user's primary motivation for visiting, the key actions they need to complete, and the design constraints specific to that zone. This became our wireframing brief.
11 Building Structure
How the virtual space was planned spatially and architecturally.
The virtual environment was not just a collection of pages. It was a spatial world. The building structure, the flow between zones, and the architectural language all needed to be designed before Vibhudhesh could build it in 3D.
12 The Pivot
The Meeting That Changed Everything
Our meeting with the developers was a sobering one. The immersive walkthrough we had designed, with visitors moving between booth types and exploring business divisions spatially, was not technically feasible. The platform could only accommodate a single-screen view of each stall.
All the spatial booth research, the Inline, Corner, Peninsula, Island booth types, the visitor flow diagrams, the immersive brand environments we had planned, went in the bin in a single meeting. VConfex waited until deep into the project to surface this constraint. We had three weeks to redesign the entire stall system at scale, through an agency, without losing the visual quality we had been building toward.
The new question: how do we create 150+ stall designs that feel visually distinct, brand-specific, and on-identity, without individually designing each one, through an agency, in three weeks?
13 Stall Design
150+ stalls. 15 base forms. 7 texture sheets. Rules, not creative decisions.
The answer was a modular system: 15 base stall architectures drawing their form language from Titan's retail store aesthetics, paired with seven texture-and-colour sheets (one per business division) as handover documents for VConfex.
Each stall surface broke into three layers: Roof structure, Floor material, Finish detail. Tanishq's stores informed stalls with gold trims and marble. CaratLane contributed contemporary edge. Fastrack: youth geometry. Eyecare: clinical precision. 15 base forms multiplied by 7 texture sheets gave the agency hundreds of unique combinations with zero need for individual oversight.
14 Visual Identity
Building Blocks of Success. Vibrant, replicable, unmistakably Kaizen.
The identity had one constraint that shaped every decision: it had to work without us. 150+ stalls, hundreds of collateral pieces, two agencies executing in parallel. We needed a design system, not a look.
Explored
Empowering Winning Ideas
Illustrated narrative approach. Warm and storytelling-led. Rejected: too illustrative to replicate consistently at scale.
Chosen
Building Blocks of Success
2D gradient blocks and tumbling 3D elements. Strong Kaizen metaphor. Rule-based: the agency could apply it independently. Works at any scale.
Explored
Limitless Opportunities
Playful 3D toy-block aesthetic. Great energy but too childlike for an audience including senior management and national jury panels.
Colour Palette: Derived directly from the Kaizen Mela logo
Passionate Pink
#DA236B — Primary
Deep Purple
#65266B — Secondary
Warm Orange
#F27E20 — Gradient pair
Charcoal Brown
#2A3132 — Neutral
Off White
#F8F6F3 — Background
Primary Typeface
Transducer
All signages, headings, tagline. Slightly edgy, slightly friendly. Works at any size from factory hoarding to a 1cm badge.
Secondary Typeface
Proxima Nova, then Poppins
Proxima Nova selected initially. Licensing errors surfaced mid-development. Poppins became the production fallback. The lesson: check font licensing before committing.
Custom output: 6 Kaizen Impact Icons representing Quality, Delivery, Productivity, Safety, Cost, and Environment. Multiple rounds of exploration before circular bounds solved the clustering problem at small sizes. Without bounding shapes, icons created visual interference when grouped.
15 UI Design
The interface that had to disappear.
Designing UI for a 3D virtual event platform is a paradox: the interface must be there but it cannot compete with the environment it sits over. Both Valorant and Dubai Expo confirmed: UI colour has one job. Legibility.
The first attempt was instructively wrong. We applied the identity palette (passionate pink, orange gradients) to the UI. The vibrant colours destroyed the 3D environment. The failure confirmed: the identity palette and the UI palette had to be completely separate systems.
The font crisis: three days we did not have
Transducer had platform licensing restrictions. Proxima Nova started throwing usage warnings mid-development. We spent three days building custom type assets from scratch. Nobody at the event noticed. It cost us three days we could not afford.
Poppins became the production fallback. It was completely fine. The lesson: check font licensing before committing to typefaces. Always.
16 Platform Live
What it looked like when 10,000 employees logged in.
The virtual platform launched on day one. The identity held. The navigation worked. The stalls loaded. 10,000+ employees could see it, use it, and feel like they were part of something.
17 Offline Event
Day 1 at Hosur. The identity moved from screen to physical space.
The 2023 Kaizen Mela was the first successful hybrid edition. Physical finals and exhibition at the Titan Watches Factory in Hosur. The identity that had been designed for a virtual platform had to hold at factory-scale too. It did.
I also designed all the collateral for the event: emailers to 10,000 employees, factory floor posters, digital hoardings, bus seat handle tags, pamphlets, selfie booths, jury badges, winner certificates, and congratulatory banners. The A2 infographic alone took fifteen iterations.
18 Impact
The numbers came back. The work held.
After the event, VConfex sent a comprehensive analytics report. In their closing email to the Titan team, they specifically named me with individual gratitude for the design contribution.
| Metric | NKM 2023 | NKM 2022 | NKM 2021 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Registered Users | 13,388 | 6,137 | 4,751 |
| Users Performing Activity | 7,400+ | 3,100+ | 1,100+ |
| Activity Count | 6,800+ | 2,800+ | 1,100+ |
| Stall Visits | 3,50,000 | 40,000 | 30,000 |
| Video Views | 36,500+ | 12,600+ | 10,500+ |
| Public Comments | 14,000+ | 7,200+ | 3,600+ |
| Stall Ratings | 3,000+ | N/A | N/A |
| Bookmarked Stalls | 20,000+ | N/A | N/A |
| Stall Quiz Attended | 3,600+ | N/A | N/A |
| Auditorium Viewers | 11,300+ | N/A | N/A |
| Auditorium Comments | 1,600+ | 500+ | 400+ |
13,388
Registered users (vs 6,137 in 2022)
3,50,000
Stall visits (vs 40,000 in 2022)
36,500+
Video views (vs 12,600 in 2022)
11,300+
Auditorium viewers (new metric)
An email from E.T. (VConfex): post-event
Heartfelt thanks to @vibhudesh, who, alongside @tanya, did a commendable job launching the Kaizen landing page but also for the walkthrough of different businesses. The gallery and entire platform were beautifully designed, and credit goes to @abhishek, @vibhudesh, @tanya, and the entire Kaizen design team.
Sanjay Kumar Tiwari, Tech Lead, ET B2B (VConfex)
19 Learnings
What I would tell myself on day one.
This was not a clean, linear design project. It was a crash course in the gap between design education and design practice: budget politics, late-breaking constraints, developers who said no, and a timeline that looked nothing like what we had planned.
At NID we were trained to ask why before how, to design with rigour and intention. In a corporate setting that rigour still applies, but the resistance it encounters is different. It is not a professor questioning your concept rationale. It is a procurement team with an existing vendor relationship. Good design does not automatically win. You have to earn the room.
01
Design is negotiation
Every constraint I could not change, I worked within. Every constraint I could influence, I argued clearly for. Knowing the difference, and choosing when to push versus when to pivot, is a real, learnable skill.
02
Systems over perfection
The texture sheets, 15 base stalls, modular icons: not the most beautiful things I could have made individually, but the most scalable. At 10,000-employee scale, a scalable 80% beats a perfect 100% that collapses in delivery.
03
Documentation is design
The gap between design intent and final execution is where most real work happens. Assumptions clear to me were not clear to the agency. The handover documents were not admin. They were the design, translated.
04
Corporate conservatism is rational
The VConfex-over-KeStone decision frustrated us. Retrospectively it was a defensible, risk-managed call. The lesson is not to argue less. It is to learn the language that risk-averse decision-makers respond to.
Apart from the actual work of designing for Kaizen Mela - I managed relationships, resolved crises, bridged the gap between a 3D developer and a graphic agency that sat in different cities, visited factories to understand the people I was designing for, and delivered a virtual spatial platform that scaled to 150+ stalls and was built ofr 10k+ employees without breaking.