In today’s hypercompetitive and digital-dominated world, poor user experience (UX) can be a death sentence for a digital product. People are used to good UX, with many of the most widely used mobile applications and websites have made sure to invest in this aspect, contributing greatly to their popularity. People know instinctively when they encounter a broken user experience and are extremely likely to stop using the digital product in question.
Torii Studio, a New York-based digital development, and UX agency, believes that, to provide a genuinely good user experience, the proper front-end implementation of a product must be impeccable. The front-end refers to the user-facing side of a digital product, such as a website or app’s layout, its menus, and other visual elements. Most UX topics deal with the user experience, but functionality, which refers to the interactivity with the server and behind-the-scenes elements that make a product tick, is also important. A faulty functional front-end can cause reliability issues and other bugs that can show up and ruin an otherwise good UX.
Torii Studio company logo
Cristobal Chao, Torii Studio’s founder, began his career as a software engineer after finishing his degree in computer science in Madrid. Working for one of the largest enterprise software companies in the world, he noticed that most applications used old and outdated user interfaces, causing frustration among clients. This sparked his interest in UX, and he began learning and experimenting in the field, with even minor improvements resulting in better satisfaction from clients.
Chao was among the 10 graduates from Spain who were chosen to go to the US for a half-year internship, and he later joined an innovation lab in the Silicon Valley area. There, he further explored front-end development, with the innovation lab working with several startups to launch their digital capabilities. Eventually, part of the innovation lab was acquired by Google, which, at the time, was also redesigning its products’ UX. Chao was the only software engineer picked up and became part of an embedded team that was in charge of innovating using front-end and design principles.
“It was a great journey, and I had the opportunity to learn from the best, in both the design and engineering aspects. It was also very challenging, as I knew I was working among extremely talented designers and engineers,” Chao said. “Working in such a large organization, I also learned the value of collaboration. This includes creating well-structured code that allows a new person to join the project and immediately know what to do. Poorly structured code, also known as spaghetti code, is very confusing to someone who hasn’t worked on it from the start, making it hard to scale the product. Similar to a domino effect, if the product gets affected, the user is affected as well as the business itself.”
After six and a half years, Chao decided that it was time for him to create his own company and contribute to the startup world by helping them translate their ideas into successful products.
Torii Studio is named after the torii, a traditional Japanese gate often found at the entrances of Shinto shrines, symbolically marking the transition from the mundane to the sacred. According to Chao, in the context of his company, this symbolizes transforming companies through exceptional UX, combining first-rate technical expertise with a human-centered approach to create innovative products that people love. Chao adds that this transformation applies not only to the client but also to Torii Studio’s team members, who approach each project with a learning mindset, seeking to continuously improve. Since 2019, Torii Studio has helped both large companies and startups build better, faster, and more creatively. To date, over five different companies have been able to go to the next level, being able to secure their next round of funding and one even becoming a unicorn.
One such project is with a neuroscience-based mental wellness platform, which had a huge disconnect between the design (front end) and development (back end) teams’ original intentions and the final product. This resulted in low user engagement, quality and consistency issues, and low ratings of 2.5 on the App Store and 2.1 on the Play Store. Torii Studio helped break down organizational silos by rearranging the company’s design and development teams to work side-by-side instead of in isolation. It also helped create a design system and component library, providing a common ground for both designers and developers. The platform now has an updated look and feel with significant improvements in performance and UI/UX design.
After implementing the project, the client saw a 300% increase in daily active users and vastly improved ratings of 4.0 in the App Store and 4.3 in the Play Store.
“Here we see the importance of having a unified vision and better collaboration between the front end and the back end in the success of a digital product,” Chao says. “UX encompasses both aspects, and our work bridges the gaps between design and engineering, tailoring our clients’ products to their users’ needs. To help us learn those needs, we offer code audits for prospective clients. We work with them in assessing the state of their codebase, identify which areas need improvements, and obtain a roadmap on how to best optimize their systems and processes.”
Media contact:
Name: Cristobal Chao
Email: [email protected]
