Speakers

Alessio is an experimental psychologist and mixed-method researcher. He is particularly fascinated by the connection between mixed-methods research, cognitive psychology, and conversion-rate optimization.

Alessio built trivago’s UX research team from scratch, drawing on international talent. He won the trust of the company’s C-suite and product org, to successfully introduce UX research to both the experimental cycles and strategic planning of the company. This has resulted in millions of additional revenue for trivago and the growth of an international, expert UX research team.

Today Alessio is working as a UX Research & Strategy consultant, helping to empower UX teams to support product strategy with mixed-method approaches.

Before trivago, Alessio worked with both international and regional brands, including Warner Bross, Carrefour, American Express, Design Singapore Council, 3M, Hyundai, Unicredit Bank and Intesa San Paolo.

When not in ‘geek mode’, Alessio loves outdoor activities like snowboarding and diving. In an alternate reality, he would probably have worked as a psychological therapist helping people to deal with their everyday struggles.

Sakti serves as a Product Research Lead in Gojek, bridging UX and strategic user research for Gojek’s ever-growing product organization. Within his two-year stint in the iconic unicorn, he has contributed to building research practice for their Payments and Food delivery arms. A designer at heart, Sakti believes in the value of delivering innovation through connecting data with evidence-backed insights.

Prior to joining Gojek, Sakti has worked on user research for a not-for-profit organization on data transparency in Jakarta. Sakti holds a Master’s degree in Design Anthropology from UCL, London.

Ben is currently leading the Product & UX Team at Style Theory, where he is working on establishing a user-centered focus for product teams and streamlining UX delivery to better serve the entire organization.

Before Style Theory, he's previously worked with Fortune 500 companies, Fortune Global 100 financial institutions, successful Silicon Valley startups, and international publishing companies.

Victor is a visionary and thoughtful leader in user-centered innovation. With more than 15 years of experience in UX/UI design, he is passionate about transforming ideas into actualised, winning solutions—and about continually striving to provide top-tier, strategic design solutions.

A design leader, storyteller, facilitator and collaborator, Victor works to take problems to solutions. To these ends, he is passionate about building and leading design teams, enabling them to achieve successful business outcomes by aligning with stakeholders, bringing user stories to life, and making sure we are designing the right thing first before we design things right.

Mario Van der Meulen believes that people ignore design that ignores people. He is a creative who’s able to see what others are saying. A versatile, ambidextrous designer who can think strategically and execute tactically. Formerly as creative director at Frog currently as a Principal Designer at Foolproof, he discovers, designs and delivers experience design principles. In our design-by-humans-for-humans world, Mario works to dispel the misconceptions about how breakthrough ideas for meaningful innovation are made. He gives a voice to the end-user, meaning to the solution, and value to the design thinking.

Menaka Chandrasekhar has over 10 years of design experience spanning
across Singapore and India. With a strong background in graphic design, she
has a unique skill set of designing for various experiences, both online and
offline. Her love for problem solving and pixel perfect designs eventually led
her to becoming a digital product designer.
Though she specializes in creating human centered products, she also
understands the value of balancing business needs and user goals.
When she’s not busy being a super-mom after work, you may find her
enthusiastically chatting away about geeky things (like the influence of AI and
machine learning on UX) at design meet-ups across the city.

Saptarshi is an Engineer turned, Manager turned Self Taught Product Designer. He holds 2 degrees from the prestigious IIT Madras, yet he chose UX as his profession because he believes problem-solving can go well beyond the limits of engineering. Saptarshi presently leads consumer design at Swiggy, India’s largest food ordering and delivery platform. With a valuation of 3.3 Bn USD, Swiggy has presence in 100+ Indian cities. It clocks close to a million orders every day, ensuring deliveries under 30 mins for most of them. In his past stints, he has worked with some of the well known startups of India like Housing.com and Zeta. When he is not designing, Saptarshi is either drafting his next design talk, or backpacking in some country, far off.

Alyssa is a User Experience Researcher at Instagram and leads research on products like Feed and Stories. Her work focuses on guiding product strategy to ensure that people are able to connect with each other and share what matters most to them. She loves helping design and engineering teams make empathy-based decisions — from understanding users’ contexts and problem framing, all the way to testing and validating final prototypes.

Shiyun is a researcher leading user discovery for commercial and industrial projects in SP Digital. She has a strong love for business software, and worked several years as a business software designer before this. In her spare time, she conducts a design class for engineering undergraduate students at her alma mater.

Wolfgang is an award-winning design veteran with 20+ years of experience and a rare combination of design & product knowledge. He serves as Director of Design at SAP and he's also co-founder of Founder2be.com, the largest truly global online service for finding co-founders.
As a design leader in multiple Fortune 500 companies and multimillion dollar startups Wolfgang has managed global design teams and worked on countless B2C & B2B projects. Equipped with an entrepreneurial mindset, creative problem solving skills, and an excellent eye for detail, he drives product design & development and creates outstanding consumer & business products. In short, Wolfgang likes building products and simplifying people’s lives.

Khai Seng has been in the design field since 2004, focusing on design research and interaction design. He was previously the Head of Singapore for Foolproof, a UK-based experience design agency. He is a firm believer in holistic experience design spanning digital, spatial, product and service domains. However, he also thinks that delivering great design for a client is only part of the equation – it is also key to help clients bring sustained impact and cultural change in the way they work.

Throughout his career, Khai Seng has facilitated many workshops and training programmes with C-suite executives and working professionals to drive cultural change within organizations around design and innovation. Khai Seng is also certified as an Integral coach by New Ventures West – that involves helping people to create and maintain habits of excellence that are self-generating and self-correcting.

FengYi has educational background in Psychology. She started her user research journey in the consumer electronics industry and shifted to online/offline product field the past few years. She’s always curious about people and their behaviour. The more she knows about technology, the more she believes that only when technology meet people’s needs, can it be sustainable. She has been working with stakeholders across multiple functions in different scale of companies. And trying to find out how to solve real problems and serve real needs with the team in different cultures by understanding different perspectives.

Venetia Tay is the Head of Audience Insights at Mozilla, the not-for-profit behind Firefox. Her focus is to understand their key consumer and developer audiences and be the authentic “voice of the user” in the organization. As a business strategist with a mixed methods research background, she focuses on research that delivers actionable insights to inspire and shape design, product development and brand/marketing strategy. Her previous experience includes side projects with Studio D Radiodurans and Senior Strategist at frog design, where she co-led the San Francisco design research practice.

Aditya is an adept experience designer with over 12 years of experience in crafting experiences across physical and digital touch-points.
He is humanising technology by using a data driven and customer centric design approach to transform the way customers consume products or services and create greater value for businesses. With hands-on experience in Research, Strategy and Design; Aditya manages the design process across product lifecycle.

Aditya is based in Hong Kong and has extensive experience working across 10 developed and emerging APAC markets. Aditya has also mentored, facilitated and organised numerous design workshops and jams and taught design at Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Nicole leads the Creation Research team at Instagram, focused on sharing products including Stories, Feed, and Instagram’s camera, formats, and effects. Since completing her MBA at the Kellogg School of Management, Nicole has worn many hats in a variety of industries over the last 12 years, marrying her strong business and strategy background with her passion for rich consumer insights.

Stevanus Christopel is an experienced Design leader in Indonesia. He is currently managing the Design team at OVO, the biggest digital payment company & 5th unicorn of Indonesia.
His experiences of leading 2 unicorn's design team (Tokopedia & OVO) in his career gave him a lot of experience to drive UX impact in organization with strong design leadership.
His vision is to build user-centered company culture with strong Design Thinking practices to deliver the best user experience in fintech industry.

Naning is leading the qualitative research process for consumer products in SP Digital. Previously she build inventory management software as a product person for 2 years. She also worked in advertising and marketing industry for 4 years helping regional clients in building digital strategies and campaigns. Naning has passion in representing the user point of view and an intense curiosity about why people do what they do.

Yong Hwa, formerly Head of Design & Research for Grab Financial Group, is a long time design practitioner, starting in dot.com days of 2000, working in ad agencies till her Aha moment when she chances upon Apple’s Human Computer Interface Guidelines while researching on a project. Since then she has move on and worked with Creative Labs, R&D arm of Creative Technology, OCBC Bank and Grab.

She believes that everything around us are and need to be consciously designed. A good design is solving a problem and making things work beautifully for people. An exceptional good experience design is marked by beautiful stories that people remembered. Her current focus is on helping team to achieve great outcomes for business. This include guiding the organisation transformation in customer experience, connecting business strategy and human insights to forward the creation of product, services and brand experiences.

Adze Ganesha is the first Principal UX Designer in Tokopedia, the biggest e-commerce in Indonesia. As a UX designer, Adze designed many products and services in Tokopedia that had been used by million daily users. As Principal he also helps to build a strong product design team.

He believes that good UX supposedly helps many people, and there’s no better place than marketplace to realize it. Adze has a strong passion for education. He often teaches and conducts workshops about UX design.

Product Designer with experience in e-commerce, consultancy and incubation environments. Taking a user-centered approach using data to make informed design decisions to improve the user experience. Currently focusing on design scalability bridging cross-department collaboration.

Agoraphobia led Sam from hospitality to human-centered design in 2005. Curiosity, candour, and an innate care for the people she once feared have guided her on this path, and she is currently at GovTech Singapore, driving design research and research ops as new disciplines while building a reflective practice centered around skill sets, mindsets, and self care. Her hope: That one day, people will feel safe enough to cry in front of their colleagues.