A hotel can have an attractive website and still give someone a disappointing stay. The reservation may be perfectly legible. The welcome may be less convincing. Jorge Barahona has spent much of his working life in the distance between those two experiences: the thing a business presents and the thing a person actually encounters.
In 1997, he and his wife opened a boutique hotel in Viña del Mar, Chile. His family’s hospitality experience would span 25 years. He also became a digital entrepreneur, UX consultant, teacher and author. The guest and the user supplied different versions of a persistent question. What does someone need, and has the business arranged itself to provide it?
There is a pleasing inconvenience in that question. It refuses to stay inside a screen. Ask it at reception and you may end up discussing reservations. Ask it about a banking application and you may end up discussing the company selling it. Ask it about a journey through Patagonia and transport, food, guides and local relationships all want a seat at the meeting.
Barahona’s career has followed those excursions. Clerk Hotel Management, which he co-founded and historically led as CEO, is one revealing stop. His current work also includes strategic consulting and Ethos Patagonia. The connecting thread is an examination of the machinery behind an experience, including the commercial machinery behind his own ideas.
An internet connection, then a different education
Before the hotel software came the web. Barahona recalled installing the internet in his office in 1995. He came from packaging and editorial design. Making websites demanded another education, and information architecture gave him a way into it. He pursued linguistics and taxonomy as he learned to organize information people could find and use.
The move expanded what counted as design knowledge. Social science and statistics belonged in the conversation alongside visual decisions. A website could be aesthetically accomplished and commercially useless if people could not do what they had come to do. The customer had an unusually efficient veto: leaving.
He founded AyerViernes in 2000. His teaching record includes the architecture and design school at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso from 2000 to 2022, and the UX master’s programme at Universitat Pompeu Fabra from 2010 to 2021. Since 2016, his work has included UX-PM certification through UXalliance. These dates describe a practice built around passing knowledge on as well as applying it.
The bar in Madrid
One professional connection began with a fairly ordinary act: arranging to meet people. In November 2003, while in Madrid, Barahona contacted Javier Cañada through the Spanish-speaking usability community Cadius. Its members met on the first Thursday of the month. That evening’s gathering was in a bar above a theatre.
Among the people he met was Alfonso de la Nuez. Later came a research collaboration involving eye tracking in Argentina and Chile, followed by an invitation to apply to UXalliance. Barahona says AyerViernes was accepted in November 2009. A conversation over a drink had acquired a rather extensive itinerary.
International work became part of his practice, but local knowledge remained essential. His portfolio includes research for Google Play in Chile and Argentina: adapting research materials, recruiting participants, conducting fieldwork and turning findings into recommendations. The job required attention to people in a particular market, even when the client’s product travelled much farther.
When a usability review became a company
In 2020, the technology company Solem asked Barahona to review PSD, an application from its financial division. He had already worked with the company on banking projects in Colombia. The apparent assignment was familiar enough: inspect the product and find what needed improving.
His account describes a different diagnosis. As a minimum viable product, the application worked reasonably well. What it lacked was a name, an identity, positioning and a commercial proposition that could explain its technical capabilities to a bank. Refining the interface alone would leave those questions waiting outside the door.
He proposed widening the work. The resulting brief covered a company name and brand, product architecture, value proposition, sales language and digital presence. Ginko Financial Solutions emerged as a Solem spin-off with its own management and structure. The application became part of a broader financial-software offer.
This episode helps explain Barahona’s preference for questioning an initial request. A usability review can be useful. It can also be too small a container for the decision a company needs to make. In this case, design reached into how a technology would be understood, offered and supported as a business.
A product can work while its business waits
Clerk put him on the other side of that commercial question. His hotel experience had shown him how awkward small-property management could be when the available technology seemed designed for much larger organizations. Reservations, guest information and direct sales were concerns he knew at first hand.
A first MVP arrived in 2011. More than 100 hotels tried the freemium offering, he says. The historical founding team included Pedro Arellano in UX and Herbert Spencer in design. Barahona brought experience from both the hotel and the digital consultancy. The ingredients looked sensible.
His retrospective is plain about the result: infrastructure costs were covered, but he had not built the commercial capacity required for growth. He had designed a solution before fully designing the business around it. Expertise in a customer’s problem did not finish the founder’s job.
In 2026 he returned to the project, describing a redesigned system with an AI agent for commercial analysis. Tests with hoteliers precede a planned relaunch. The company supporting the software needs consideration alongside the software itself.
“El producto funcionó, pero el negocio no alcanzó el desarrollo esperado.”
Jorge Barahona, on ClerkThe product worked, but the business did not develop as expected. Translation.
Research has luggage, too
A separate project shows how much work can disappear behind the word “research.” In 2025, Barahona directed coordination in Argentina for a WhatsApp Communities study involving more than 60 participants. Meta came through UXalliance and its partner Usaria. Researchers travelled from London; local teams and specialists helped make the fieldwork possible.
The study combined in-depth interviews, focus groups and contextual research. His responsibilities included overall direction, finances, recruitment, field logistics and the working relationship with the visiting researchers. He also took part in some contextual-interview moderation. This was a project with schedules, rooms, movements and interpreters, as well as questions.
Research materials needed local adaptation while preserving international comparability. Language carried particular expressions and assumptions; an apparently straightforward translation could change what someone understood. Daily debriefs, analysis and reporting helped the Argentine work contribute to a wider study.
For Barahona, the value lay in evidence that remained useful internationally because it took local circumstances seriously. The methodological challenge and the operational one travelled together. A good question still needed the right participant, in the right setting, with arrangements that let the conversation happen.
Three books, one continuing argument
Teaching gives this work another form. His books move from the value of design to research and then to making proposals: Valor UX, published in 2017; Investigación UX, first published in 2018 with a second edition in 2019; and Idear UX, published in 2025. Information architecture and interaction design are central subjects in the latter.
The sequence matters more than a shelf of titles. Business value establishes why an organization might invest. Research supplies evidence about what people need and what a market requires. Ideation gives that learning a form that can be explored and tested. The attractive finished screen arrives with a considerable amount of homework.
His September 2026 writing returns to the cost of choosing the wrong problem. He argues for increasing investment as evidence improves. Faster production, including production assisted by AI, makes the initial decision more consequential: a team can now commit effort to a weak premise with impressive efficiency.
That concern carries into his public conversations. In June 2026, he appeared on Francisco Kemeny’s Vibe Builders to discuss UX, AI and business. The subject fits a career that has repeatedly moved between tools and the judgment needed to use them. New production methods give him another reason to ask what should be produced.
Patagonia supplies the practical exam
Ethos Patagonia brings these questions into territory Barahona knows personally. He has had a home in the Chelenko, or General Carrera Lake, basin since 2018. Walking there and receiving family and friends prompted a business question about small nature experiences connected to the people who live in the region.
His son Vicente contributed mountain and tourism-operation knowledge. A local network brought guides, accommodation, food producers, transport and other services. In March 2026, Trek Relief, a US travel and volunteering organization, provided a test: execute a sold programme combining community work and journeys through Patagonia.
Barahona handled commercial, financial and legal oversight; Vicente led logistics and local contracting. According to Barahona’s account, the expedition met its requirements and helped clarify Ethos as an inbound operator serving organizations and international agencies. The business model became more precise through carrying out the service.
The territory also enters his photography. He maintains a separate portfolio and describes photography as training in observation. In an August 2025 essay, he linked attentive hospitality, image-making and UX through noticing what others might overlook. His example was small and exact: coffee arriving as someone likes it. A personal preference becomes a design problem when a business wants to remember it.
The question before the next investment
In an October 2026 essay, Barahona wrote about growing a business around a craft one cares about. He wanted design’s contribution to be recognized, while acknowledging the commercial judgment needed to find where that knowledge matters to a client. It is an ambition made more interesting by Clerk’s unfinished lesson.
His current consulting offer begins with understanding a business challenge before deciding how to intervene. The possibilities include research, products, services, technology and organizational work. That breadth has a practical explanation in his career: the original assignment has often proved smaller than the problem.
A hotel reception desk, an Argentine research session and a Patagonian expedition make an unlikely set of design studios. Each gives a proposal somewhere to meet reality. Guests arrive. Participants interpret questions. A programme has to run. Barahona keeps moving between these settings, asking the next question before everyone becomes too attached to the first answer.