Ħamrun, January 26th, 2017

Once upon a time there were two brothers, Zak & Benji Borg, that lived by the sea. Growing up with an entrepreneurial heart, the first studied Advanced Software engineering and the second Advanced Character Animation.

Zak funded a company and worked for PWC, while Benji became a full time sailor and worked in short films.

The chances of life brought the brothers back together in 2013 to create an app on their native land of Malta. Their first app was called MaltaonDmove, which geo located all items in Malta. This was the start of what came to be Anchovy, a Malta and Dubai based digital agency.

The name of the company is significant to their love of the sea. They also claim on their website that anchovies are synonymous with creating teams in a world of vast oceans with adventures and opportunities around each corner.
Benji Borg says that Anchovy evolved from a digital agency into a performance-based agency, assisting clients achieve specific online Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) across various sectors. Today the agency assists clients with sustaining or increasing sales by delivering specific and tangible goals for our clients. He tells us more.

Can you describe your agency in three words?

Branding, Data Driven, Results Oriented.

In your opinion, what ingredients are key to create a successful UX design?

To create a successful UX design you need to have a mix between very good design principles and a very good understanding of the end goal of the product/page/app your designing. At Anchovy we follow data and make calculated decisions to ensure we’re created a user flow that allows the target audience to navigate as easily and fluidly possible. However, if this leads us onto a path that doesn’t make ‘Design Sense’ we will take a few steps back and create a final product that first and fore most looks and feels good and then flows well.

How did you get started in the industry?

My brother and I started by created our own app which then lead onto creating apps for other clients, which then just opened Pandora’s box to a worlds of opportunity.

What is your personal definition of creativity?

Creativity to me means pushing the day-to-day boundaries we face as humans to create something that little bit better.

How do you work out your design taking into account your target audience or users?

To work out how our designs will work with their intended audience we use Role Play. We run a lot of role-playing scenarios, whereby we try to identify the aches and pain in a booking process for different people in different scenarios.

Can you tell us about a project you worked on (a case study) and that was especially successful?

I would say that one of the most successful projects we worked on in 2016, funnily enough would be Anchovy. Since we are designed our entire brand image and website to set our self’s up for international exposure and lead generation campaigns. In the past we only won new business from our business development team, however we wanted to shift it slightly and start running effective online SEM, PPC campaigns across the world to win new clients from online only. This provide to be very successful.

How do you imagine the UX concept to work in the future?

I believe that UX will keep changing based on the way we interact with technology and with one another. UX will be become an integrated part of our daily lives, since technology is becoming an integrated part of our lives.

How do you organize your team and their tasks to guarantee quality assurance (QA)?

We schedule our work in 2 ways:
1) Bursts which are tasks that are achievable in one day or
2) Sprints – where we work on a project or part of a project in 3-5 days.

Name a challenge your team is currently facing.

Communication. This is and will always be the biggest problem with all teams. People have lost the way to communicate and express their feelings with one another. Social Intelligence.

Which are the most important web tools that you use?

Invision, Google Analytics, Google Adwords, ConvRes™, Mailchimp, Facebook business manager, sketch.

Are there online publications, professionals, industry leaders you follow?

I follow a lot of Entrepreneurs, innovators and creators. I use Medium a lot (an online publishing platform developed by Twitter co-founder Evan Williams), and also find my self on sites like Betalist looking and learning from new startups.

Which cities outside where you live interest you creatively?

San Francisco, New York, Amsterdam & Milan.

What do you like doing in your free time?

Sailing, Cooking and working on side projects. Being entrepreneurs at heart, we have two new startups that we own, called www.briiz.com.mt (for cleaning services) and www.getfetchit.com (on demand deliveries of goods).

What piece of advice would you give a recent grad looking to work in digital marketing?

Put the time into your career and stop talking just do it. You need to spend a lot of time trying and failing to succeed. A CV with a fancy degree won’t cut it.

By Geny Caloisi.
genyc@topinteractiveagencies.com

Learn more about Anchovy

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