Tokyo-based AQ Wants to Help Start-ups Design Better

Today Tokyo-based design house AQ announced the launch of a new user-experience design program to cater to start-ups who need help in that area. The program is called AQ Lift, and in order to find out a little more about it I sent a few questions to AQ co-founder Chris Palmieri.

How did the idea for AQ Lift come about?

AQ Lift emerged from a number of observations and needs from within AQ and within the web startup community.

In Tokyo, we’ve noticed the beginnings of a new wave of web businesses starting from a very different set of considerations. These startups have grown up on brands like Apple and Muji who have built their business on good user experience design. They know that design is not surface. Like many Silicon Valley startups, these founders still tend to come from either an engineering or business background, so they may not always have the skill set to reach their own standards, but there is an appetite for design feedback from their users, and from people like us.

How is working with start-ups different?

At AQ, we’ve worked on projects in which our contribution might not see the light of day for months, if at all. Some projects are simply not set up for rapid deployment, or require the balancing of several competing interests, any one of which may render a design direction unusable before it sees light of day. This is no one’s fault, and not necessarily a bad thing, but it can make success a little trickier to measure.

session at Open Network Lab

In the last year however, we’ve had the opportunity to work for various web startups, who had faster ship cycles, and were comfortable with a less formal design process.

During a few of these collaborations, the startup was able to take a design we scribbled on a notepad, and commit it to code in just a few days. This tight feedback loop was extremely satisfying for us, the startups were happy, so we started looking at how we could make this kind of collaboration a regular part of our business.

Chris added that the AQ Lift program is open to “any digital product or service anywhere in the world.” So whether you have a conventional or mobile site, or even if you’re an app developer, you can take advantage of AQ’s design expertise. The company has an impressive body of work including recognizable names like Mozilla Japan, NHK, Asics, and recently Bagcheck which was picked up by Twitter in August.