Outsourcing UX Design in Latin America: Why Buenos Aires may be the Perfect Place

When considering outsourcing, most people will think of India, or China. However, Latin America –and Buenos Aires, Argentina in particular– is emerging as an important hub for technology, digital entrepreneurship and of course, outsourcing. This is in part thanks to its strategic geographic location: it is close to the US and Europe’s time zones, and also for its qualified talent pool.

Argentina, like most countries in Latin America, is well known for its strong export-oriented agricultural sector and has been for many years considered the “barn of the world.” Nonetheless, it has also a diversified industrial base and a highly literate population. After the last big recession in 2001 (economic performance has historically been very uneven) the country has positioned itself as a powerhouse for service exports, especially in the IT industry, taking advantage of a modern telecommunications infrastructure and a devalued currency.

So far, yet so close (with your permission, Elvis!)

Buenos Aires has a small time difference with major cities in Europe and the US, as it is located in a time zone right in between both continents making it super convenient for meetings and calls:

• 3 hours behind the UK (GMT): London, Manchester, Liverpool, etc. (-4 hours during Daylight Saving Time).
• 4 hours behind Central Europe (CET): Berlin, Madrid, Paris, Rome, etc. (-5 hours during DST).
• 2 hours ahead of the US East Coast (EST): Boston, New York, Miami, Toronto, Washington DC, etc. (+1 hour during DST).
• 3 hours ahead of the center of the US (CST) and Mexico City: Austin, Dallas, Chicago, etc. (+2 hours during DST).
• 5 hours ahead of the US West Coast (PST): Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, etc. (+4 hours during DST).

The Challenge of UX Outsourcing

It is harder to outsource User Experience (UX) Design than it is to outsource front-end or back-end development. To design an experience that works the team needs to understand your market, your competitors, and most importantly, have a deep knowledge of your product, your audience and their culture: how do they commute to work, what’s important in their job or at home, what does their house look like, how do they like to spend their free time?

To understand these human conditions we need more than design skills or technical capabilities. We must speak their language, experience their culture, listen to their music, watch their movies, read their books, visit their museums and parks. Our team at Giro54 not only speaks fluently in English, Spanish, Portuguese and French (we can also communicate decently in German and Italian) but also, we have lived in different cities around the world: London, Miami, Basel, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires.

We are also curious travelers, and in our trips have spent time in neighbor countries like Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Brazil in South America; to far-away lands (for us) like China, Japan, Australia, and Indonesia.

Boutique Firm, and Proud of It

At Giro54 we are a small team, and that is our strength. Our senior managers and designers work directly with you on your project. You will not be assigned to junior staff or have to deal with middle management like many bigger agencies do.

We adjust to your corporate culture: if you are part of a larger company, we will create the deliverables you need for your formal presentations; if you are in a startup, we will deliver prototypes and code that you can put to work as soon as you get them.

We aim at being one team with our client. This may take a different form for each project: maybe you need daily calls for “stand-up” meetings, or weekly updates; or you may prefer to be added to our Jira and get a real-time feeling of how your project progresses. Sometimes, we collaborate with developers on our clients’ teams and we will adapt to their processes and schedules.

Great Value: High Quality at a Low Cost

Companies all over the world started to explore ways to reduce costs without affecting the quality of their products after the global economic crisis of 2008.

In our 10 years as an independent agency, we have worked with clients in Canada, Europe, the US and Latin America. The reason they keep choosing us is not only that we work our a**es off to deliver what they came looking for (and more) but also that we do it at a fraction of the cost of hiring a UX agency that can offer a comparable output in their own countries.

Visit the case studies in the Projects section to get a closer look at the websites, mobile apps and UX design we’ve created recently. Or give us a call! We’re closer than you think.