On a normal working day, Tari Rosario – On-Off Group’s Lead Experience Strategist – will gather her team to plan the week’s tasks. If you look at her from outside our post-it-filled window, you wouldn’t think that this smart and hard-working woman is only 24 years old.
Tari was heavily exposed to technology Design for eight years, half of it was User Experience. Her journey in the UX industry started when her mentor offered her a job in a startup company as a junior UX designer.
During the interview, Tari said that UX is about understanding the users’ experience with a product or service from the start of the journey until the end.
As the Lead Experience Strategist of On-Off Group, one of Tari’s responsibilities is making sure that the clients understand their products and processes, with the sole purpose of making everything better for the clients’ target customers.
Tari said that everyone can take advantage of UX. From the business owners down to the end-users, UX will make the process smooth from point A to Point B. So at the end of the day, both parties will benefit from UX. “Most of the time, the owners don’t use their own products or services. That’s why they’re so far removed from the reality of their user’s experience.”, Tari explained.
As a business owner, you can leverage UX to know the real definition and use of your products. Is it usable? Do your customers know what to do next? Are you creating a product that they actually need?
User Experience will not give in to what the users want. But it will find the middle ground to bridge the gap between the needs of both parties. That’s why this approach is a win-win situation for both the business owner and the end user.
Tari shared that most of the time, there’s a huge gap between the business owners’ idea of the whole process and the end users’ actual experience. This is where the UX process come in handy. User Research, Competitive Analysis, and benchmarking will help the business owners validate their assumptions.
At On-Off Group, the UX team starts with the question, “what does success look like to you?”. From there, the UX team will guide the business through the whole process of User Experience. From the User Research down to wireframing and prototyping.
Not all organizations are facing the same problem. The pace of work may also vary depending on the amount of work to be done. Because of this, On-Off Group customized the services needed to cater both the clients and their end users.
On one situation, a business – who offers educational videos for their users – believed that the reason why there was a low engagement rate among their users was because the customers did not know where to locate the videos on their website. However, when Tari’s group conducted a user research, it appeared that the low engagement rate was not because clients did not know where to find the videos, but because the materials were acting up due to slow internet connection in their location. This opened a great avenue for the group to help the company do the right prototype and come up with the most efficient way of achieving the goal.
UX can sometimes be a challenge for traditional organizations. But nevertheless, Tari mentioned that each company needs to have a UX champion if they want their users to love their service. She said, “UX is not just for technology, it can also be used for offline experiences.”.
UX may be a buzz word at first. But once a company starts to invest in this methodology, owners will be able to improve their process and validate their assumptions. On-Off Group works with their clients based on the KPI they want to focus on. The measurement of success is company-based and is carefully curated and personalized depending on the needs of the clients.