Nobody has to show up

Running it and doing the work

Redviver is a small consultancy in Santo Domingo that holds strategy, technology, UX and marketing in the same room. We work across the Dominican Republic, Florida and El Salvador.

My title is General Manager, which in a company this size means I run it and I am also the one doing the product design. There is no version of this where I hand a brief to someone else and review it later. I sell the work, shape it, and then sit in the file and build it.

That is usually described as a limitation of small firms. It is also why nothing gets lost between the promise and the thing: the person who made the promise is the person drawing the screens.

Platforms for things nobody is obliged to do

A bank has customers and a government office has citizens. A climate platform has neither. If the visitor closes the tab, nothing happens to them, which means every one of these projects is really a persuasion problem wearing an interface.

Rescate Ozama exists to stop waste before it reaches the rivers and the sea, built with ECORED, The Ocean Cleanup, INTEC and UNDP. Empresas por el Clima asks companies to commit to cutting emissions, and carries RDuce Tu Huella, a tool that calculates what a business emits and what it saves. Prácticas Prometedoras, in its fifth edition, collects entries from small and medium businesses for CONEP and UNDP.

None of them can require anything. So the design question is never how to make the form shorter. It is what makes someone decide this is theirs.

• 01Start from the service, not the site. What is the person actually trying to finish?
• 02Give people a number they can see move. RDuce Tu Huella works because emissions stop being an abstraction.
• 03Reuse flows and decision logic across projects. Never reuse layouts.
• 04Build so the client's own team can keep it running once we are gone.

One door for an entire industry

SEDECINE is the official portal for the Dominican film industry's services, led by the Dirección General de Cine. Before a portal like that exists, an industry deals with the state the way everyone does: one office at a time, each with its own form and its own queue.

It needed three things that are usually three products. A public site that explains what exists. A directory, so the industry can find itself. And a backoffice, because a request that arrives with nowhere to land is not a service, it is a message.

The same instinct runs through Congreso FIO, built for the Defensor del Pueblo and the Ibero-American Ombudsman Federation: convening happens somewhere, and if that somewhere is bad, fewer people come.

What it adds up to

The measure of this work is not a launch. It is whether the client's own team can keep going without us, and whether the thing still makes sense two years later when the people who commissioned it have moved on. Not everything we do is institutional, either. Hablemos Sin Filtro is a card game whose whole purpose is to get people talking to each other, which is the same problem in a much better mood.

3

Countries: Dominican Republic, Florida, El Salvador

4

Disciplines held in one brief: strategy, technology, UX, marketing

2

Founders, and both of us still in the file