How I Got Here.
Nine years ago I had an aha moment while reading a blog post on how to be a creative entrepreneur by making mobile apps for iOS.
I texted my husband while I was miserably sitting at my windowless office I’d been occupying for two years working at a soul-sucking job. I was fighting the tears, so I started telling him I was ready to quit my job because I wanted our lives to focus on something good. Something that had a purpose. Something that was going to make an impact on people’s lives in the best possible way.
A few months later as I was about to quit my job, to my surprise due to force majeure and a rocky economy, my position was terminated, my company was sold, and I had to take the leap of faith I never thought I would have the courage to take. Like me, many of my colleagues also lost their jobs, and clients lost their support along with their beloved project managers, designers, and engineers.
I just knew I wanted to be creative since my background was in Entertainment and in Marketing. In my core, my objective was to build projects that had a good purpose, and within just a few days Giotto Studios was born! Through the years I’ve met so many great friends with great talent. We ended up all in the same situation, and we just knew the answer to success was to join forces, and to keep supporting each other and the clients we had because they deserved to keep their business going.
Giotto Studios a Reality!
My goal is to support deserving ethical businesses that are making a real difference in the world.
Giotto Studios started as a small boutique marketing agency. We were focusing on providing affordable marketing solutions that many companies could not afford even after the recession was over. We slowly realized our clients needed to build better digital products so we naturally introduced more resources like development for web and native apps. As we kept moving forward we have been redefining our services and have been moving away from traditional marketing practices and we have now established ourselves into the UX & UI world.
Because technology is getting better and changing so fast, solutions are also becoming more intuitive and accessible. Businesses are needing to adjust to these fast-changing trends, and we’re here to help.
I love being able to make changes in our business model, it is one of the core values that we’ve kept over the years. It is what keeps us alive and on top even though we are all surrounded by so much competition.
So even though we have now become a fully flagged UX & UI Agency, our core objective is still the same to help businesses grow and continue to make an impact on people’s lives.
Though UX has been around since 1993, I’m still stunned to know that there are many businesses that are not taking advantage of introducing UX services when designing their own products and services.
These days I’m constantly getting asked: “So What is UX Design?”
This is Literally BANANAS!
I was recently at a dinner party talking to friends about Giotto Studios, and in a nutshell I talked about how UX design is about the entire experience from start to finish of consuming a product. That’s when I realized the technical jargon was making everyone very confused.
I realized I needed to find a way to help audiences out there become aware of the existence of UX design and how essential it is to the success of their businesses.
So I thought I would launch a series of articles to educate businesses about the use of best practices of UX and more. If you can understand UX, and how to take advantage of our innovative services, we can help your businesses grow.
Lately, I discovered a very funny article that helps people relate to UX design on an everyday level. This article relates UX design to the experience of a product like a piece of fruit. The article explained the UX of A Banana as one type of fruit designed by Mother Nature that allows you to enjoy a complete user experience. Not only a banana is tasty and beneficial for your health, but it also offers other factors of its design that creates the optimal experience.
The Color of a Banana Makes It Easy to Know When It Is Ripe.
Bananas have a built-in accurate visual cue. You don’t have to waste time questioning or testing to see if it is ready because it is designed to be obvious.
A Banana Can Be Eaten When and Wherever.
The peel also makes it super easy to take on the go and eat when you want. Bananas are mobile and are not messy.
Bananas Are Easy to Eat
Once peeled, eating a banana is a seamless experience because there is nothing else in the way. There are no hidden seeds, a pit in the middle, or a core to work around.
Bananas Are Widely Available and Have Meaningful Effects.
Bananas are available everywhere worldwide, are inexpensive and are available in every season. This makes them very accessible to everyone. They also contain the amino acid tryptophan and vitamin B6, which produces serotonin. Serotonin can help alleviate depression – which means that bananas literally make you happy. And have you ever noticed how it splits into perfect thirds when you press directly on the end of a banana? I know, mind-blowing!
Comparing Bananas to Other Fruit
Other fruits have their advantages, but when it comes to the entire experience like the taste, look, weight, size, health factors, mode of transportation, and mode of serving, they all have some fault that makes them not quite as nice as the full experience of a banana.
So how can you relate UX design with the tech world?
So how can you relate a UX design with the tech world? Well, let’s consider how the human-computer interaction improved in the past ten years, or even in the last year alone. Think about how complex mobile devices were more than ten years ago, and just think how easy it is to use a smartphone today. This is thanks in large part to the amazing work UX designers do. If you have navigated on an app or a website lately, and the experience brought you joy, there was probably a UX designer behind that very experience.
At the end of the day, our job is to understand the capability of a product, how the user will naturally act with that technology, and connect the two with strategic design thinking. Our hope is to provide you with the best experience that can indeed be defined as “Banana UX”.
But a product is not just a product. You have a brand and your brand tells a story. At Giotto Studios the secret of our success is always focusing on designing your story through brand experience. Interested to learn more about how you can also implement this for your business? Sign up for our newsletter and you’ll receive tips and other informative data that can help your business grow!
Giorgia Cifani – UX Designer & External Consultant to Giotto Studios