What in the world is UX and Wabala Studio? (Q&A)
We answer some of our most requested questions about Wabala Studio and what we do. For instance, what is this strange acronym ‘UX’? We will cover that and more in this story.
Two months ago, I published a story about why I started a UX business as a black at 27 years old. I am writing this one to share what we do at Wabala Studio, at least for this year of 2023. This is for you if you are a friend, family member, former colleague or member of the tech community and you came across our articles, posts or products. I wrote it in a Q&A format, so scan through the questions you’re most interested in.
What is Wabala Studio?
Wabala Studio is a company started by Anne-Marie Mulumba in 2022. It is a product-led service company. We offer product strategy workshops and user validation rounds to early-stage startups to fix specific experience bottlenecks and increase user engagement and product-market fit. Those experience bottlenecks are mentioned in the following services section.
What services do you offer?
We offer 3 categories of services right now that can turn into longer testing/user validation sessions:
- User onboarding optimizer
- Product-market fit assessment and scoring
- UX writing / content design
What makes your agency different?
We develop products
We offer a range of products that also we integrate into our service delivery process. Check out our online store. We use our products in our strategy sessions, but if anyone prefers to optimize their product experience on their own, they can use them. We expand more on what these products are below.
These products are also useful toolkits for design students, design enthusiasts, industry folks who are building capacity within their product teams or any individual doing a career transition in user experience, product design or even design thinking and strategy.
Fast delivery
We operate on a fast delivery model. Our front-end service offerings have a timeline of 3 to 48 hours. Our back-end offers can span over a few weeks.
We give back
Wabala Studio donates 10% of our product sales to a non-profit organization called Agape in Action (AinA). I know the founder and CEO of this organization personally. Agape in Action invests 100% of their donations to support Kenyan kids living in extreme poverty with food, shelter and education. We aim to offer support to 4+ kids per month this year. We will continue to give back and increase our donation year over year.
What are the products?
For now, we offer three products called UX optimizers:
- The Onboarding deck.
- The UX Writing deck.
- The UX Success deck.
They are launching next week, so join the waiting list to be first in line.
These UX Optimizers are physical and digital card decks made to support the ideation, strategy and brainstorming of individuals and teams building stellar apps and software experiences. Our goal is to develop more products as we discover more intricate user experience challenges to solve. We are already developing our next generation of products so stay tuned for exciting launches in the next 6 months.
Tell me more about them.
The Onboarding deck is a user engagement toolkit to help individuals or teams evaluate and ideate an ideal app onboarding experience. Onboarding is one of the toughest experiences to get right and the gateway to your overall digital experience, period.
The UX Writing deck is the most practical of them all. Any designer or researcher can have it in hand to draft or edit in-app copy. We focus on 3 UX writing principles: trust, transparency and connection.
The UX Success deck was built in partnership with the UX/UI Arizona-based agency Drawbackwards. It measures where an app user experience stands right now and how to go from a functional app to one that makes people’s lives better.
What is user experience (UX)?
User experience is more than just pretty pixels. It’s about understanding the journeys, needs and challenges of people and creating digital opportunities to make lives better, through technology.
User experience is a process within digital product design (usually apps and software). It is the commitment to developing digital products with compassion and integrity. It follows a philosophy popularized by IDEO called human-centred design. It aims to balance business goals, human needs with technical constraints, depending on the final output.
How does UX add value to a business?
Investing in UX is a sound business decision for technology companies and any other business that cares about their user and customer experience online. The return on investment of UX is huge. Some companies get 300 to 9,900% of their investment back, but you can expect that about every dollar you invest in UX will bring back 100$. Research and strategy can reduce app development time between 33% to 50%.
Not only that, you should expect to see a reduction in customer service cost, a higher valuation, an increase in sales and customer acquisition, a reduced churn rate and bounce rate, increased brand trust, and more. It is that good. Entrepreneur Paul Graham and co-founder of venture capital firm Y Combinator says that the biggest mistake that kills startups is not making things people want. UX is a process to help teams know what people want, so they can build with a strategy.
I want to learn more. Where do I go?
You have three options.
- Book a 15-minute chat with Anne-Marie: https://calendly.com/wabalastudio/blitz
- Email us: sprint@wabala.studio
- Check out our online store