About the Team

What we believe, how we work and introductions

Priority Playbook

Inspired by Jon Lax’s article, and his metaphor of sports "plays", we wanted to share our own Priority Studios Ptlaybook - the "rough architecture" of how we do our work.

01

Our Mission:

Relevant Design

Relevant is timely, useful. Something that matters to people, or an individual.

Revelance, for us, is the highest measure of a designed entity:
Will they be thankful it was created?  Will it be a regular or persistent part of their lives?

The best-designed products become integrated in human day-to-day behavior.  You can’t get to that level without a desire to problem-solve and intimately understand how people behave.

02

It isn't "UX" Design without knowing
your user.

In-Context Trumps In-Office

Relevant is timely, useful. Something that matters to people, or an individual.

When doing innovation projects, the key is for the management team, the design team -- the solutions-finders -- to get a feel of what's happening on the ground, to design better solutions.  

We always communicate to the teams that we work with, that the value is in the observation.  

Thick Data

Particularly for: Existing services seeking to redesign

We plot design solutions, coming from each data stream available.  Companies / Organizations already have measurable data on-hand, and because design research is highly qualitative, it needs to be interpreted and cross-validated with the other types of information you can get about your users. 

Performance data is particularly important to the work we do, because it lets the team understand what design solutions are actually "moving the needle" for your users and your business.

We believe in
bridging
understanding
between the
guardians of the
business objectives,
the different types of users and the
product creators
and engineers.

03

A Design Process is just theory if it isn't made viable.

Objectives-First

Whatever we do, whether wireframing, design recommendations or UX research, is directly linked to the objectives you need.

We have systems and documentation in place, for content planning, user stories and interview guides that we will show you so we can have an aligned understanding of what we want to achieve through the project.

This also allows us to check for how we want to benchmark the design solution.  Usability and User Experience are about palpable improvements to solve a design problem, so without a clear gap to solve, we won't be able to see whether the

Experience Design needs to work with Product Management

Particularly for: Existing services seeking to redesign

We plot design solutions, coming from each data stream available.  Companies / Organizations already have measurable data on-hand, and because design research is highly qualitative, it needs to be interpreted and cross-validated with the other types of information you can get about your users. 

Performance data is particularly important to the work we do, because it lets the team understand what design solutions are actually "moving the needle" for your users and your business.

04

"UX" Design is a team sport.

There is no one-size-fits-all experience design workflow.

Relevant is timely, useful. Something that matters to people, or an individual.

When doing innovation projects, the key is for the management team, the design team -- the solutions-finders -- to get a feel of what's happening on the ground, to design better solutions.  

We always communicate to the teams that we work with, that the value is in the observation.  

Particularly for: Existing services seeking to redesign

We plot design solutions, coming from each data stream available.  Companies / Organizations already have measurable data on-hand, and because design research is highly qualitative, it needs to be interpreted and cross-validated with the other types of information you can get about your users. 

Performance data is particularly important to the work we do, because it lets the team understand what design solutions are actually "moving the needle" for your users and your business.

The Team

This is our way of sharing what we’ve learned from over sixteen (16) years of working on digital products.

Why did we do this?

We’ve worked in large, small, medium companies.  We’ve launched a lot of products by now, and have been part of many business decisions.  We pretty much witnessed the difference between products and services with varying levels of love for the people who’ll use them.

At some point, we realized that the best way to create change and help more organizations in the wider community was to spark the change yourself.  And that, sometimes, it can be unfair to organizations when you wait for them to build your dream for you.  That if we really wanted to do design work that was always informed by real human insight, we might need to build it ourselves.

This belief sparked the beginning of Priority.  Which we hope to be part of a bigger movement for relevant, useful products and design.

Because local relevance (in data, content and design) is important to us, and to our mission as researchers and designers, we will regularly express ourselves in the languages commonly spoken in our context, Metro Manila — English and Tagalog.    Design competence shines when it authentically relates to the people it serves, and we hope to live out that value through the work we do.

READ IN TAGALOG

Angela Obias-Tuban

Angela Obias-Tuban is the Design Strategy Lead at Metrobank. She was Associate Planning Director at McCann Worldgroup, Head of Strategy at Nuworks Interactive Labs and Head of Digital Strategy for ABS-CBN Corporation, before becoming an independent consultant at Priority Studios.

She taught Digital Business Models and User Experience at the Ateneo De Manila University, was a UX and Analytics subject matter expert for IIDM CDM, and 2-year Design mentor at Ideaspace Foundation.

She was in quantitative and qualitative market research for six years before going into digital product development and brand planning in the past decade.

She has led agencies and corporate teams in applying functional, actionable service design phases — service blueprints and customer journey mapping for her clients for Metrobank, Make (Cebu Pacific), Dentsu (Toyota), Tribal DDB (J&J) and Bluethumb (BPI-Philamlife). She implemented and created the channel strategy for an ecosystem of over 150 publisher websites for the Philippines’ largest media conglomerate, based on user needs to support and achieve revenue goals.

B Tuban

B is an Interaction Designer by profession, formally trained in industrial design. In the past 6 years, he has also been more involved in running and managing the projects at Priority Studios and managing app developers at Platform Labs, an IT and digital R&D team he co-founded.

His latest projects include running the end-to-end discovery, design and development of digitized procurement systems for government departments.

He taught User Experience Design at the Ateneo De Manila University. Prior to that, he was Interface Designer at ABS-CBN Corporation. During his time as an Interface Designer, he conducted content optimization and 3D modeling workshops beyond day-to-day design work.

Overall, B has designed interactions and interfaces for various types of responsive websites - transactional, content publishers, user-generated content websites, multi-brand catalogues, games, — and microfinance FinTech, customer relationship management, ticketing, investing and inventory apps.