Kambrica brought us significant value by helping us put ourselves in our customers’ shoes and incorporate UX logic into the transformation of how we deliver our services.

Value Proposition Manager

Multinational insurance and financial services company

* This project is presented in anonymized form under corporate confidentiality agreements.

When a project enters a meeting and exits as a budget-burning machine

When a corporate organization starts a digital initiative, the problem enters a meeting and exits transformed into a large structure of resources, platforms, and months of development. Not because it is necessary, but because industry incentives are aligned that way.

Software factories are rewarded for project growth: more teams, more hours, more complexity. Never less.

In this case, the organization entered discussions with a predefined conclusion: “we need an App”. Users were calling to check information about financial products and were not using the existing website, which was perceived as “outdated”.

Agency sales teams responded as expected: “Of course you need an App!” iPhone, Android, tablets. Modern backend, QA, DevOps, multiple squads, and several months of execution. Within minutes, an idea became a 12–14 person team.

We did something different: we reduced the problem before scaling the structure. Because executing quickly on the first interpretation of a problem is not agility: it is waste at high speed. Avoiding it took just one hour.

One meeting is enough to untangle the project

Using our XDM (Experience Decision Making) methodology, we separated three layers that are usually mixed from the start: facts, interpretations, and proposed solutions.

That analysis revealed a critical data point nobody had considered: user consultation frequency ranged between six months and two years. This alone invalidated the “App” hypothesis. The data showed that users would typically be prompted to delete unused apps long before they needed ours again.

The project therefore required an initial phase of strategic UX research to understand why users rejected the website and preferred calling. Without that, any initiative would have been guesswork.

The client believed the site was “old” and “ugly”. That may have been true. But the real answers were in front of the screens.

While the UI lives inside the screens, UX is what happens in front of them.

This focus led to a two-week research phase that uncovered the core issue: the website exposed less than half of the information users needed to make decisions. That is why they called.

The interface was not failing for technological or aesthetic reasons. It was failing because it did not answer the questions users actually had.

Something no agency had attempted to address, perpetuating the typical RFP trap. After 4–6 months, the client would have received exactly what was requested—but not what was actually needed.

Reducing complexity and uncertainty before execution starts

Our methodology is based on a simple fact: large projects do not fail due to technical limitations. They fail because complexity is only surfaced once the system is already in motion.

That is why we reduce UX, institutional, and technical complexity from the very beginning.

Because true agility is not executing quickly on the first plan that seems reasonable. It is having the flexibility to change direction when new evidence emerges.

1. UX complexity: the gap between business and people

We map real decision-making processes, identifying what information users need, how they interpret it, and what alternative channels they use to complete their goals.

This allows us to redefine information architecture, visualization rules, and product priorities before UI and development decisions harden.

2. Institutional complexity: politics and alignment

In corporate environments, most friction appears late in the process when branding, marketing, compliance, and stakeholder reviews start rejecting already-built solutions.

We address this from day one by mapping all affected stakeholders and involving them early in parallel tracks, removing risks such as internal inconsistencies before they impact delivery.

The result: no political rework cycles and no endless approval loops.

3. Technical complexity: feasibility

In Banking, Finance, and Insurance, legacy systems introduce a critical layer of constraints that must be addressed early. In this case, the volume of financial data created latency patterns incompatible with the required user experience.

We built an intelligent, backend-agnostic frontend layer capable of reusing previously fetched data, minimizing roundtrips, and enabling progressive loading without blocking navigation.

This allowed us to solve performance without degrading experience or adding unnecessary architectural complexity.

Results

While agencies proposed large and expensive structures to “fulfill the request”, Kambrica exceeded the objectives with a smaller team, strategic focus, and clear direction.

Because our incentives are not aligned with staffing or billable hours, but with solving the right problem.

In this case, the project did not require an App or a cutting-edge platform. It required understanding what was broken between the organization and its customers.

Without diagnosis and direction, speed only scales misunderstanding.

Most organizations do not need more velocity.
They need better diagnosis before scaling structure, budget, and complexity. That is what we do.

If you are responsible for the success of products or projects and suspect the problem is being misinterpreted, let’s talk.

We can help you see it before cost, complexity, and political risk continue to grow.

The entry Banking, Finance & Insurance was first published on Kambrica.

So, I can declare that this heuristic is mine. It’s Bustelo’s Heuristic.

Principle: Interfaces should free users from repetitive tasks by leveraging computers’ ability to automate processes. Failing to do so wastes the potential of the digital medium and hampers user efficiency.

Example: The interface shown below, which my bank imposes on all its customers, force us to click for every single receipt we need to download.

When it’s time to close the fiscal year, that’s 72 careful clicks to avoid missing anything: 2 cards x 12, 3 accounts x 12, and a year of investments. And that’s assuming you don’t have loans, not to mention the clicks required to switch between tabs.

All of this, while being careful with each click and scrolling slowly to avoid losing your place (since there’s no distinction between clicked and unclicked icons).

The process could take up to an hour, which could easily be avoided by providing a “download all” link or button. That is, by applying the Digital Nature usability heuristic: the principle that computers are designed to efficiently handle repetitive tasks. This heuristic emphasizes the importance of leveraging technology to automate and streamline processes, ensuring that systems and interfaces are optimized for repetitive actions, thus enhancing user efficiency and reducing the likelihood of error.

Santiago Bustelo
May 2024

The entry The Digital Nature usability heuristic was first published on Kambrica.

If we give direct instructions or commands to users from the software (e.g., “Enter card number without dashes or spaces”), then we are trying to program people, which usually doesn’t end well.

When this happens, it’s best to go back to programming computers with the goal of making them adapt to people.

For example, use a regular expression to only accept numeric characters.
In pseudocode: find( /[^\d]/ ).replace("").

This instruction for the computer requires fewer characters than the instruction for the user, never fails, and makes everyone happy.

Computers, we program. People, we understand.

Everything works much better when we apply the tools we master to the domains they are meant for. Computers, we program. People, we understand.

The entry A programmer’s job is to program computers. Not people. was first published on Kambrica.

In 2010, Santander Río bank needed to migrate the request for its products from the physical to the online channel. Up until that point, very few customers were willing to apply for credit cards online.

The reasons: low trust in the online channel and forms that required information users didn’t understand or weren’t willing to complete.

Areas of work:

We redesigned all the application forms, following best practices in usability and accessibility.

• Conducted UX Research to evaluate existing processes, user motivations and interests, opportunities, and areas for improvement.
• Redesigned the process for applying for credit cards and banking packages, following best practices in persuasion, usability, accessibility, and responsive design.
• Redesigned internal Knowledge Management systems.
• Conducted interviews with the Call Center to learn about best sales practices, which were then applied to upselling processes.

The entry Santander Río was first published on Kambrica.

The Office of Judicial Affairs at Stanford University selected us for our ability to provide design and development that met Section 508 standards: making it accessible to all individuals, regardless of their technical, cognitive, or physical abilities. This earned recognition from a panel of experts at the prestigious South by Southwest (SXSW) Festival in 2004.

The information architecture and content strategy recommendations were made considering the use cases where faculty and students must access the site: sensitive topics related to violations of the university’s honor code, such as plagiarism, substance abuse, or sexual harassment.

The HTML/CSS development not only resolved accessibility issues with the same code but also included special styles for different resolutions and printing, automatically selecting them when printing the page or generating PDFs.

Thanks to this responsive approach, the site became the single repository of official information for all formats, eliminating maintenance issues related to information across multiple formats and requiring the responsible staff to document and train on a single platform.

Areas of work:

• Consulting
• Accessibility
• Information Architecture
• Interface Design
• Front-end Development
• Validation with users with disabilities

The entry Stanford University was first published on Kambrica.

Wayra, the tech project accelerator from the Telefónica group, operates in 12 countries across Latin America and Europe. Each year, it selects a small group of startups to provide with funding, workspace, and access to a global network of mentors, experts, and investors.

As part of its acceleration program, we offer consulting, mentoring, and training to startups in Lean UX methodologies, UX design, user-centered design, usability testing, qualitative interviews, A/B testing, task prioritization, identifying business opportunities, and evaluating solution scalability, among others.

Areas o work:

• We have provided consulting to over 35 startups participating in our UX and agile methodology training program for digital product development.
• We collaborate with startups from various sectors, including fintech, medtech, agritech, entertainment, marketplaces, apps, e-commerce, IoT, and smart cities.
• Through the “Lean UX” program, we help startups identify and refine their value proposition, understand their users to align the product with their needs, improve product usability to attract more customers, achieve consistent growth, and reduce costs.
• We developed an iterative work process that allows each startup to refine its product with each iteration, adding more value to the business, its end users, and investors.

The Lean UX program helped entrepreneurs test their products in real environments, creating high quality services with shorter time to market.

Lorena Suárez, Wayra Business Development Manager

The entry Wayra Argentina was first published on Kambrica.