Photo credit: Technori.com

With 5 days remaining until midVentures’ third monthly DESIGN+DEVELOP Series, we are running another short series of interviews about the two companies involved: Pathfinder and AKTA. More specifically, we want you to know about the people behind the companies, and what they have in store for the participants. (Click here for the interview on Michael Walkden with Pathfinder.)

Our second interviewee: John Roa, Founder of AKTA Web Studio, took the time to answer these questions while on a bus driving through a Chilean mountain. That’s a first! Don’t worry, he will be back in time to lead the “Design is Not Design” Workshop at 3:30PM on February 24th.  (You can share your thoughts about UX Design on their blog here.)

AKTA Web Studio is a UX strategy and UI design firm that creates web applications (their first application called TrakLabs launched last year) and provides client services. In addition to leading Chicago in the UX space, Roa is the founder of a not-for-profit called Digital Hope that works with partner corporations to funnel online ad revenue to relief funds around the world.

midVentures: “Design is Not Design” is the title of your workshop next week. What does this mean and what can participants expect from the workshop?

John Roa: While working with more and more clients at AKTA, we’ve found there are a lot of discrepancies in terms of defining what makes user experience design successful. Many folks walk in the door asking about “design” services, where their real needs are completely different. This workshop is built to not only educate about what constitutes UX “design”, but more importantly, walk participants down a process that will help them be more successful in their next product.

midVentures: Why did you decide to lead this workshop? What would you like the outcome to be?

JR: I absolutely love talking about UX. By far the most exciting part of my role at AKTA is helping clients mold their business by being their UX expert and evangelist. I look at this workshop as an opportunity to do this in a larger public setting, hopefully in front of future partners and clients.

mV: Can you tell our readers a bit more how you got into UX and why you are so passionate about it? What has your journey been?

JR: My background stems from a video game marketing firm that I founded in Los Angeles almost 10 years ago. We had extreme success online, and even though there was a lot of competition for this type of content, our audience grew hand over fist for years before a successful exit. I realized along the way that the reason for our success was the experience we built for our gaming audience, not necessarily the content we offered up. This put me on the path of becoming a student and steward of UX design. Now years later, I rounded up the core team of designers and strategists from that start-up and created AKTA- a firm solely specialized in UX design.

mV: Tell us something that we don’t know about you or AKTA.

JR: Not everyone knows this, but we have a second division of AKTA that we call AKTA Labs which creates our own apps and products. This is to force us see our process through the eyes of our clients, as well as create commercially viable products. We have a very exciting social data product we will be debuting in Q2 – as well as a few others in the oven.

Keep an eye out for those, as well as an announcements of the newest Chicago startups that AKTA is working with.

mV: Thank you John for allowing us to steal you away from the Chilean mountains for a moment! Register for this workshop on User Experience here!