Stops and Stories — Visiting the Top UX Teams in Manila at UX Crawl 2019
My first semester self would have flat-out refused to give up my long weekend trundling across Metro Manila from early morning to evening.
Yet, last Monday, February 4, I and around 40 other Ateneans found ourselves rubbing the sleep from our eyes and preparing to crawl around the city. Specifically, we joined the UX Crawl.
Organized by the User Experience Society in Ateneo, UX Crawl was a tour around the top companies with UX Design teams in the Metro. The word tour, though, doesn’t fit properly.
Sure, we dropped in on the offices of Make Technologies, On-Off Group, Globe, and Mynt where their design teams graciously brought us around, but it was more than that. In each company — whether they were housed in a gleaming skyscraper or a cozy office — they talked to us. These teams gave us a glimpse of their life as UX Designers.
1st Stop: Make by Ace Saatchi & Saatchi
Make Technology was our first stop of the day. A technology subsidiary of Ace Saatchi & Saatchi, they didn’t waste any time. Nico Encarnacion, the company’s UX Manager, gave the main talk, and he dived into explaining the different roles found in a design team.
UX being all about visuals? They rid us of that notion quickly. Visual designers are important, but not any more vital than the other members of a team. Pretty graphics are nothing without content to back them.
Nico also talked to us about what a UX researcher is; a UX researcher is someone who defines the users. Then, there’s the information architect who determines what content needs to be delivered, and then there’s the interaction designer who maps out the flow, how a user goes from one part of the product to the next.
There’s also the prototype designer who ensures that the client and team understand how the user is going to interact with the user interface.
Then of course, the design library manager. I never thought organizing files could be a job, but there are literally hundreds of ideas generated for every project, not to mention wireframes and prototypes.
It is the design library manager who makes sure that all these are organized and easily found if needed by the rest of the design team. These are various roles that various Make employees take up in the company.
Nico and the other Make employees there kept going back to one point: collaboration is key. Whatever a person’s role was, they were each a member of the team. Without even one of them, the well-oiled machine would rattle and break down. Or, in the case of a project with demanding client, they’d fail to meet a tight deadline.
2nd Stop: On-Off Group
Next on our tour was On-Off Group. On-Off Group is a company of specialists in design thinking and UX training & consulting. Since this company was small, we couldn’t fit in their office, so we used Ideaspace’s office as our venue for the talk instead. However, the team’s size did not at all impact their expertise.
The talk was casual, with several members of the team taking turns explaining their jobs and their experiences in them. The occasional outburst of dark humor only highlighted their comfortable synergy.
It is a similar synergy that they hope to nurture in their clients when they employ one of their most effective tools, design sprints.
A design sprint allows for a company to design, prototype, and test ideas with users within a matter of days. The tense, short-term environment of the sprints uncovers issues disrupting a company’s teamwork — issues that wouldn’t normally be noticed, much less tackled.
By conducting these sprints, On-Off Group’s director Phil Smithson emphasized that these unveiled problems are able to be solved.
The only way a client can create a great user experience for their customers was for everyone to be on the same page, working towards the same goal — not just the UX design team, but everyone in the company. This is where design sprints can greatly help companies.
3rd Stop: Globe Telecom
Next up on our tour was Globe. Coming from a small company, Globe was on the other end of the spectrum. I mean, as one of the country’s leading telecommunications companies, they had a whole tower for themselves. A tower partly earned by their commitment to customer experience.
Yes, Globe gets a lot of flack from their customers. They are constantly trying, though, to know both their employees and their regular customers texting and calling away.
They interview, create personas, and monitor, always monitor, to see if their services are making an impact. They know the pains of their employees and try to alleviate them, whether it’s through a car wash service or a massage at the office.
Their extensive UX research, from the creation of detailed personas, to the anticipation of the desires of regular Filipinos, allows for innovative creations like Gie to become reality.
Understanding Filipinos’ preference for friendly chatting, Gie became the female face equipped with machine learning created to answer questions and concerns about Globe Postpaid or Globe at Home Services through messenger apps.
4th Stop: Mynt
Last of all, we visited Mynt, the fintech arm of Globe. Every one of the energetic team members wore a lanyard declaring the vision of the company — “Finance for all”. And they definitely try to mean it. Through their digital wallet, the GCash app, they aim to provide accessible FinTech solutions to everyone.
But really, how do you make people use an app? When Gcash was first launched in 2004, it never really took off. Short of forcing it into Filipinos’ hands, what would work?
Then, Charz Mendoza, Head of User Experience at Mynt, presented the various steps of Mynt’s UX Design process and the elements involved in UX. However, what caught my attention was his love and need for stories.
UX designers might come up with the flow, visuals, and interactions, but they also have to be curious. They have to open their eyes and observe the environment, the culture, and the emotions of their users to come up with a story that will attract the customer like a fly to honey.
A good story is one that is so well-laid out and intuitively followable that it becomes a good experience, and these experiences travel by word of mouth. Embedding this story into your product will inspire good feelings. It’s those feelings that will bring in the users and keep them there.
It’s all about the users
At the end of the day, the underlying message from each company was the same: It’s all about the users. Customer, clients, client’s customers, whoever’s going to be using the product that’s in the works — they are the focus.
Collaborating as a team, helping clients find their common goal, creating the personas, and fostering curiosity — these are all just tools for these companies to create amazing experiences for their users. An experience so smooth, so good, so enjoyable, the users never realize how much work went into designing it.
So, as much as I yearned for those extra few minutes in bed, I would sign-up in a heartbeat if this trip was organized again, and I hope many new people would sign-up with me.
Every office we visited had a lesson to teach, tips to give, and at least one story to share — all of them about UX design. UX Crawl was an information deluge for sure, but I only scratched the surface, and I can’t wait to dive right back in.
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Rafi Ko Teh is a 1st Year BS Information Technology Entrepreneurship student in the Ateneo De Manila University. She is also currently a Member Development Officer for User Experience Society.
