Following my graduation from Microsoft, I made the decision to remain in Tokyo and embark on a venture to establish a startup User Experience consulting company alongside a former Microsoft colleague and friend. In February of 2018, we officially co-founded “Transmethod UX Consulting.”

Between us we brought more than 35 years of User Experience expertise, spanning websites, mobile applications, internal and external omni-channels, and site and application audits. We worked with businesses to resolve complex user problems and balance them against business objectives, while building experiences people actually wanted to use.

We worked with both Japanese and global companies, helping them improve their products and services through better user experience — work that supported their success in the Japanese and US markets.

Our Brand

Fun, Agile, Flexible, Reliable, Professional and Results Driven.

Consulting was the starting point of every engagement. To understand a client’s business needs clearly — and for them to see how user experience could serve and expand their goals — we ran brainstorming sessions, in-depth discussions and stakeholder interviews to build a solid shared vision.

From those discussions we built Customer Journey Maps, to establish how a service or product performed in its market and which elements served its customers best. Defining target users and personas moved the work toward something more user-centric, and gave us the ground to build strategies and solutions on.

Alongside our research and analysis, we built UX strategies by bringing customer, client and user perspectives together. Clarifying business opportunities with value propositions and service blueprints helped align a client’s strategy with what their customers actually expected.

We also produced a Features Roadmap, so that the strongest strategy could be realized within the client’s constraints — giving a clear and distinct direction as their users’ needs diversified.

• UX business models
• User journey maps
• Visual ideation
• Support for omni-channels
• Service ecosystem models
• Service roadmaps

Finding solutions to raise user engagement or lift conversion rates had often been difficult. Our research, heuristic and competitive analysis, site and application audits, content audits, quantitative surveys and other metric analysis turned those difficulties into actionable solutions.

Simple issues were rarely as simple as they appeared. In most cases the right Solution Roadmap made the worthwhile adjustments clear. Design changes and the harder constraints — business strategy, organizational conditions, external pressures — were handled individually, according to how complex they genuinely were.

From that holistic process, short-, mid- and long-term Solution Roadmaps could be adapted quickly as a client’s business and market shifted.

• Heuristic evaluation
• Usability testing
• User group testing
• Competitive analysis
• Content evaluation
• Quantitative analysis
• User Journey Maps
• User flows
• Prototyping
• Solution roadmaps

UX design was where a client’s business met their users’ expectations. We handled the critical work of integrating products and services, and of consolidating branding, visual design, usability and function.

To arrive at a more satisfying and insightful experience, we prototyped expected use cases and scenarios to extract the most relevant user flows. That process also connected a client’s business objectives to data-driven task and usability analysis.

From that methodical grounding, our UX design work built comprehensive design language systems that held consistency across service and product platforms.

Presenting visual identity, unity and familiarity across a client’s products and services made them easier to use. Our design-language deliverables — templates and guidelines — gave every team member a clear direction, and shortened development time.

• UX design consulting
• UX · UI design
• Information Architecture
• Design guidelines
• User Journey Maps
• User flows
• Prototyping
• Front-end development