Attending Asia’s largest UX event as a scholar!

September 5, 2020

This article was originally published on Medium.

Coffee with Virtual Conference meeting on laptop

Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash

Hello! I’m Bo Wanda Aquino, a college student studying Education at Polytechnic University of the Philippines. Unfortunately, I wasn’t accepted to the course I wanted — which is Information Technology — so I decided to take up Education instead. This did not hinder me from pursuing what I love. I’ve always been passionate about design since I was a child. Growing up, I liked learning about technology-related lessons and found out that designing and technology can go together. Because of that, I became interested in web design and development.

My journey as a freelance designer started when my mentor invited me to work for her. At first, it was really difficult because I’m not good at taking the initiative to ask or seek information for use in my design. Luckily, my mentor challenged me to go out of my comfort zone and be better as a designer or photographer. She encouraged me to apply for the UXPH Scholarship to the UX+ 2020 Conference. And now, here I am as a lucky attendee who gets to attend the biggest UX conference in Asia!

This will be my first time attending a UX+ Conference. I’m excited to learn from everyone’s journey and their topics! I look forward to meeting all of the speakers virtually. I want to hear different stories of their personal journey and to know how they accomplished great things in their lives.

The speaker that I’m most excited to hear from is Dan Mall. I hope he would also talk about his journey of becoming the founder and CEO of his company, SuperFriendly. I love his topic about Design Systems Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them. Since I’m still a beginner in creating design systems, I find it hard to make the right wireframes, components, and naming them. I hope his ideas will be my guide in doing these tasks better.

Aside from that, I am thrilled to listen to the Round Table topic: How Can You Evolve in your UX Design Career? and Fireside Chat: Self-Discovery, Finding Opportunities as a Designer. I would like to know more about their workflow, understanding how they think, and how they communicate with their clients. It would also be helpful if they talk a little bit about their growth and the steps they took to become successful in their career.

The topic about Designing Backwards: Using Outcomes to Avoid Unintended Consequences also caught my attention because designers always design forward or use an input-process-output algorithm. They would get input on what the client wants, then would process the design and build a prototype of the outcome. So I wonder how designing backwards would work. Hopefully, it can avoid unintended consequences and lessen the rework.

Design foreign markets is an interesting topic too. I haven’t really traveled around the world, so designing for different cultures will be a good foundation. It’s a great thing for me and to everyone to join the event with interesting topics to learn and different people to meet.

I’m looking forward to joining the event and meeting my co-scholars, Chev Salvador, Chloe Abrasanda, and Felix Dela Fuente. I’m grateful to be a part of this community, with a pool of designers all over the world. Even though we are in the middle of a pandemic, we can still have a great conference. Thanks to the UXPH Team for giving me this opportunity and assisting us, the scholars of the UX+ Conference.


Learn more about the UX+ Conference happening on September 12–13, 2020!

Visit their website for more details: 2020.uxpl.us

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