I spent the last 3 months testing AI-prototyping tools on real, in-house projects. Here’s my unfiltered review…

Most reviews of AI prototyping tools showcase passion projects — a niche productivity app or a retro game clone. But that’s not the reality for most of us. We’re in-house designers, PMs, and founders shipping real features under tight deadlines. We need to know which tools can handle the constraints of an existing brand and a complex product.

That’s why I put 3 leading AI tools to the test, not on side projects, but on my actual work. My goal was simple: cut through the hype and see how they perform in a professional environment. For 3 months, I integrated a different AI tool into my workflow, and this is what I learned.

My Evaluation Framework

I evaluated each tool against 5 key criteria tailored for a professional workflow:

• Generation Speed: How quickly could I get from a prompt to a usable, high-fidelity prototype?
• Prompt Intelligence: How well did it understand context and intent, or was I stuck in a loop of re-explaining?
• Replication Fidelity: How accurately could it replicate our existing UI and branding?
• UX Quality of Output: Was the generated layout logical, usable, and adherent to established UX principles?
• Free Usage Quota: How much could I realistically accomplish before hitting a paywall?

The Controlled Experiment

To build a controlled experiment, I asked all bots to generate two of the same tasks with opposing objectives under the same constraints. Both tasks were to build features on top of our existing platforms and branding:

• Constraints: Replicate the UI in the screenshot exactly using ReactMUI components.
• Task A (focus on complex dashboards): Build an insurance policy assessment dashboard for underwriters.
• Task B (focus on common app UIs): Create a customer sign-up page for a digital insurance company.

My 3-Step Prompting Process

Simply pasting a screenshot and hitting “generate” would naturally drive us crazy. To get reliable, high-quality results, I created a simple 3-step process:

1. Define the Flow First: Clearly define the user problem you are solving and map out the user flow. The AI can’t do the strategic thinking for you.
2. Create Lo-Fi Mockups: Don’t waste time on high-fidelity screens. Sketch quick, low-fidelity mockups of your feature. You don’t need the entire frame — just the core components and layout.
3. Prompt Strategically: This is when the magic happens.

• Split your prompts. Don’t write a giant paragraph. Break the request into logical steps (e.g., “Create a navbar with these elements.” -> “Now, add a hero section below it.”).
• Use your lo-fi mockups as a visual reference when prompting; this drastically improves replication accuracy.

• Use the “Enhance Prompt” button if the tool offers one! It’s designed to structure your thoughts in a way the AI understands best.

Month 1: v0 by Vercel

Excelled at: Task A (Complex dashboard)

• Generation Speed: Fast — it only took 1–2 minutes.
• Prompt Intelligence: Understood prompts immediately, requiring minimal context. This is likely due to Vercel’s maturity and its deep integration with the Next.js ecosystem.
• Replication Fidelity: High — Almost perfect.
• UX Quality: Great — Functional and great, though the logic could sometimes be improved.
• Free Usage Quota: 20–30 prompts per month
• Overall: Great tool for generating complex, data-dense UIs like dashboards and CMS. It’s built for developers, so it outputs clean, usable code at an impressive speed. The best choice for high-fidelity, coded prototypes.

My Takeaway: This is likely because Vercel has been in the development space longer. v0 is likely built on a more sophisticated, fine-tuned, or proprietary AI model that has been trained on a massive dataset of high-quality code, specifically for UI generation. Its deep integration with the Vercel platform and Next.js ecosystem means it understands modern web development patterns intuitively, requiring less context from the user to produce accurate results.

Month 2: Lovable

Excelled at: Task B (Sign-up Page)

• Generation Speed: Fast — 2–3 minutes per generation.
• Prompt Intelligence: Understood prompts but requires more context to understand the goal.
• Replication Fidelity: Medium — Excellent for websites and landing pages, but it failed to replicate our complex dashboard accurately.
• UX Quality: Excellent — Showed a strong innate “UX sense” for layout and standard components. Interestingly, when it couldn’t replicate our dashboard, it redesigned it based on UX best practices.
• Free Usage Quota: 5 prompts per day
• Overall: A powerhouse for marketing sites, landing pages, and common app UIs. Its training seems heavily based on common UI patterns. It struggles with highly specialized, data-heavy interfaces because they fall outside its core domain. Perfect for brainstorming and quickly pitching web app ideas.

My Takeaway: Lovable’s AI seems specifically trained on a vast number of marketing websites, landing pages, and common app UI patterns. This means it has an innate “UX sense” for these types of projects. It understands the standard components — hero sections, feature lists, calls-to-action, and pricing tables. Complex dashboards are a different beast. They are highly specialized, data-dense, and unique to a specific product’s needs and internal logic which Lovable seems to lack behind.

Month 3: Figma Make

Excelled at: Task B (Sign-up page)

• Generation Speed: Slow — About 5 minutes per generation.
• Prompt Intelligence: Performs best when a Figma frame is provided. Requires significant context to understand the goal.
• Replication Fidelity: Low — It produced numerous errors when asked to replicate from a screenshot. I highly suggest using Figma frames as a reference but still expect more prompting to get it perfect.
• UX Quality: Good — but not as refined as the others.
• Free Usage Quota: About 30–40 prompts per day
• Overall: Its strength is as a design assistant, not a code generator. It’s fantastic for creating variations of a button or generating a new form layout within Figma. However, it struggles to interpret the intent and complexity of an entire pre-built frame. Think of it as a co-pilot for the ideation phase, not a tool for shipping final code.

My Takeaway: Better suited for generating new ideas from within Figma than for perfectly replicating intricate existing work. As we saw, Figma Make struggles to interpret entire pre-made frames. It’s excellent at generating a new button or a form layout from a prompt, but it gets overwhelmed by the complexity of a full, existing design. It still lacks the deep context a human designer has, leading to errors when you ask it to replicate something intricate. In short, Figma Make’s core strength is to help designers create and iterate on static UI mockups faster within the design tool.

Conclusion

The “best” AI prototyping tool doesn’t exist. The right choice depends entirely on the job to be done.

Need to generate production-ready components for a complex dashboard? v0 is your best bet.

Need to go from a simple prompt to an interactive, standard web app UI in minutes? Loveable shines here.

Need to brainstorm and build a standard feature on top of existing Figma design files? Figma Make can do the job.

Happy prototyping! 😉

I never earned a degree in design, psychology, or business, nor did I attend a UX design bootcamp. In fact, I struggled to memorize the colors of the rainbow and didn’t learn until I was 14 years old that blue and yellow make green. Initially, becoming a designer wasn’t on my career radar. However, the opportunity to build products that have a significant impact on people’s lives opened my eyes to the power of design, and I’ve been passionate about it ever since.

Let me first introduce myself. I am a Product Designer at Hong Kong’s first digital health insurer. Although I majored in Computer Science at university and was initially set to be a Software Engineer, I quickly realized my passion for UX design after developing web and mobile apps and encountering poor UX design practices.

In 2020, amidst the pandemic, I took the opportunity to self-study UX design by attending online workshops, and conferences, and competing in hackathons. I made the transition from software engineering to UX design before graduating and was fortunate enough to have secured an internship at Bowtie.

I quickly fell in love with the energetic and warm culture at Bowtie and was later converted to a full-time Product Designer role upon my graduation from the University of the Philippines. Looking back, I am grateful for the opportunity to pursue my passion and contribute to building products that have a positive impact on people’s lives.

What does a Product Designer at Bowtie actually do?

There isn’t a fixed definition of a Product Designer but for the purpose of this piece, let’s refer to David Hoang’s definition:

A product designer is responsible for working with product development teams to understand customer problems, evaluating the opportunity for the company to solve customer problems resulting in outcomes for the business. The product designer is responsible for driving the process from concept to delivery and leveraging team members and resources to deliver.

In simpler terms, I have to be great at understanding human behavior and building products that are impactful to the customer which in return, generates income for the company.

At Bowtie, we take pride in being our users’ best friends. Our work involves conducting regular user research, applying UX principles, and practicing design thinking to ensure a seamless user experience. Joining Bowtie has taught me what it truly means to be a thoughtful designer.

I’m actually reinventing insurance

When I first joined Bowtie as an intern, I didn’t fully understand the company’s mission to “make insurance good again”. As a novice in the field, I was entrusted with leading challenging design projects, with the constant support of our talented design team and my mentors Chris and Nick. These projects ranged from automating the underwriting question creation process for our internal Operations team to improving the internal Claims assessment flow to create a delightful online claims submission experience for our customers. Through these projects, I was able to do real, hands-on work that benefited the people of Hong Kong, and it felt great to be able to make a tangible impact. My journey at Bowtie has been like being thrown into a pool to learn how to swim, but with the support and guidance of my team, I have been able to thrive and grow both personally and professionally.

I’m actually doing design stuff

At Bowtie, we follow Basecamp’s 6-week cycle as our product development framework. Our weekly rituals include stand-ups, design thinking workshops, and design critique meetings with designers, engineers, and product managers. These meetings serve as opportunities to identify problems, pitch ideas, give feedback, and explore solutions. As a young designer, these meetings were pivotal in developing my industry skills, which were rarely taught in school. Each week, I would soak up knowledge like a sponge, spending up to five hours learning from my colleagues, who each had their own niche backgrounds, ranging from problem-solving and data analytics to project management, Webflow development, illustration, graphic design, UX research, UI design, and more.

Through these experiences, I have learned to empathize with users’ needs and pain points and design solutions that exceed their expectations. At Bowtie, we are committed to creating products that have a positive impact on people’s lives, and I am proud to be part of such a user-centric team.

I’m actually part of a team

If you’re from Hong Kong, you’ve likely seen Bowtie’s bright pink posters plastered on minibus’ and MTR walls. The company’s vibrant branding reflects its energizing and warm culture, which is what drew me to Bowtie in the first place.

Building an exceptional product takes a village, and I am grateful for the collaborative and motivated team at Bowtie. From day one, we are encouraged to be proactive and take initiative, which I later learned is an essential skill for designers. As designers, we have the power to turn user insights and problems into real-life solutions, and this requires great initiative and active listening from our teammates.

My motivation to work towards design initiatives grew from this culture, and I took on projects such as building a design system for our internal enterprise system to ensure consistency in design and user experience. I feel especially fortunate to have open-minded engineering teammates who value user-centric ideas and regularly hold design thinking rituals such as 45-minute ideation workshops on Miro. These rituals lead to valuable discussions that help us identify potential issues and develop solutions more efficiently than usual.

Being part of such a supportive and innovative team at Bowtie has been an incredible experience, and I am grateful for the opportunity to work alongside such talented and dedicated individuals.

My journey at Bowtie has been nothing short of eye-opening. As a self-taught designer, I never imagined myself working in the field, let alone at an innovative and forward-thinking company. Joining Bowtie has given me the opportunity to grow both personally and professionally, allowing me to pursue my passion for building products beneficial to people’s livelihoods. I am grateful for the collaborative and motivated team that has supported me every step of the way, and I look forward to continuing to reinvent insurance and doing real design work at Bowtie.

The Unparalleled Design Internship was originally published in Inside Bowtie on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

1. Utilise your tools as much as you can to understand a problem.

Insurance is a tricky domain which could take more than a year to fully comprehend. Every day is a new lesson learned everyday for me. That being said, it’s important to really take time to understand the problem at hand. As designers, we are equipped with a handful of tools or methods to frame a problem so don’t be afraid to use them!

At Bowtie, my projects normally entail automating processes whereby I’m required to use service design and systems thinking skills to understand the end-to-end flow. Service design because they involve work online and offline. Systems thinking as one step in itself is a system part of a much larger, complex system affecting numerous other functions.

Often there are times when I struggle to understand a problem involving a complex process even after a series of calls with stakeholders. As a designer, I realize that I have the upper hand in using what I learned to accelerate the discovery process. So I schedule another 30–45 min call with the relevant stakeholders. But before this call, I make sure to prepare the following:

• Craft a simple user flow of the current process and my proposed flow on Miro based on my understanding
• Prepare screenshots of the screens that appear in the process or are affected by the problem
• Quickly sketch a draft of the solution I plan to propose
• Comment your questions on the steps you do not understand on the Miro board for stakeholders to see
• Share the link to the Miro board with stakeholders in advance

This quick preparation has not only helped us visualize the end-to-end flow but also given me a headstart in getting feedback on my proposed solution in just a span of 30–45 mins. Through this method, I’ve been fortunate to have had a ton of efficient meetings in the discovery process.

2. Cleaning up and documenting your work is just as important as delivering it well.

Insurance processes are already complicated as is. If you want to influence other stakeholders with your design process, make sure your work is readable and organized. In the past year working as a designer, I’ve noticed numerous encounters where an engineer or marketer would refer to a customer journey map to help them understand a problem. This is a chance to show others that your design process does work. If a file is not readable at a glance, the reader will give up and eventually ask you to explain it all over again which only wastes time.

To avoid this, you can try the following with your team (WIP):

• Develop a standard language for user flows, customer journey maps, Notion doc templates, etc.
• Collaborate with your team to categorize the files so they are easy to find
• Document why the file exists in the first place: what was the problem, when was it created, who’s the author, etc

3. Insurance is an exciting industry to design for.

Insurance literally concerns life and death. It is abstract and not a physical product. How do you as a designer gain the trust of customers to protect them until their last breath? How can you turn a concept so abstract into something easy for customers to understand? It’s no doubt a challenging area to solve as a designer which only makes it a constant learning journey.

To make things more complicated, the majority of insurance processes are manual involving numerous stakeholders from sales agents, underwriters, claim officers, financial underwriters, finance guys, and much more especially if it's in a traditional insurance company. Such processes often mean thousands of Excel sheets that need updating. This only opens a vast area of opportunities to automate the process to not only make business workflows more productive but also improve the day-to-day lives of these people. What used to be a 2-day process can easily turn into a 10 mins workflow with the help of service design and systems thinking! 🤯

Personally, it is through these projects I truly feel the impact of my work as a designer.

3 golden nuggets from a designer working in insurance was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A person’s perception of “home” has always fascinated me. I’ve always believed that in each person lies a place that warms their hearts — or a city that gives meaning to their existence.

When I encounter a person for the first time, I find myself paying close attention to their place of upbringing. In the city, I look for customs that explain their movements and belief system. Behind their candor and speech, I look for the sounds of the place that may either be a bustling city or a tranquil suburban area. The way the city pulses through their veins and reflects in their demeanor. Isn’t it amazing how a single place could define a person?

This isn’t simple for people like us, though. For people that belong to more than one place or maybe even two, it gets quite confusing.

My parents were both born and raised in the heart of the capital city of the Philippines, Metro Manila. They had me in Manila and lived until I was four. My family decided to move to Hong Kong for work. During long weekends, my family and I would still find the time to visit the Philippines as if it were a bus ride away. When I turned 18 years old, I flew back to study for university for four years. My stay in Manila was eventually cut short due to the pandemic, and so I’m back in one of the cities I call home. This year marks my 17th year living in Hong Kong. But even so, I couldn’t quite grasp where home really was to me.

I’ve always wanted to call myself a local Hongkonger. Like any local, I would go for cha chaan teng (often called Hong Kong-style cafés in English) on early Sunday mornings to order myself a bowl of Hong Kong Style Satay Beef with Noodles and a cup of hot milk tea. Like any local, I would clutch onto my handbag and rush past other citizens in the MTR station (Hong Kong’s major rapid railway system) as if I’m about to miss a flight. Like any local, I would say my m goi’s and dor ze’s (translates to “Excuse me” and “Thank you” in English) out of respect. When Chinese New Year comes, Hong Kong is my home. But no matter how hard I tried to identify myself as a local, it never sat well with me.

I was often a bystander during my high school days. I studied in a local all-girls Catholic school which meant the majority of the institution consisted of Cantonese-speaking girls. The school was attended by over 900 girls each year and a small chunk of them were non-Cantonese speaking girls like me, otherwise known as the “French girls”. We were dubbed as such as it was mandatory for us to study French for six years. As for the other girls, they studied Cantonese. It never made sense to me but it sure looked great on my resumé. Sure, I also knew Cantonese but it was only useful when it came to ordering food or saying hello. It was a completely different story when it came to an academic setting. When a teacher would make a joke in Cantonese, I would laugh as if I were part of a talk show’s audience, not understanding a single word that was said. At school events, you would find me sitting at the back of the hall sitting next to an English teacher translating every word spoken. Eventually, I managed to pick up common Cantonese phrases from my classmates. But even so, my Cantonese was not fluent enough to join a conversation.

Lunchtime was the most chaotic of all, during which our playground would turn into a battlefield of cliques. Every group had an untouched spot claimed by the populars, the jocks, the good-ats, the fine-arts, or the weebs. And somewhere in the little corner of the holy campus sat us girls. The “French girls”. The non-Chinese girls. The ethnic minorities. Our tiny group was a melting pot of cultures and languages which made us a bit more interesting than the other girls. Like myself, my girls were multilingual and were born elsewhere — be it in the Philippines, India, Indonesia, Singapore, or Britain. We led our own little country where we would make jokes in Tagalog, curse in Hindi, order food in Cantonese, and gossip in French.

For a moment, I thought to myself, I found my home.

Then I thought back to the times I visited the Philippines. My family can be as Filipino as it gets. My family and I shared a household with my grandparents and my cousin’s family. I have so many cousins that I cannot count them with my two hands or even my two feet! We often have our typical fiestas and boodle fights with a gigantic, freshly-roasted lechon resting on the center of our table. As soon as I’ve arrived fashionably late to a party, I pay respects to my relatives by practicing my mano po’s, the holy grail of Filipino customs. Of course, the party isn’t complete without warming a piece of stolen lumpia in my hands until after the opening prayer.

My family takes Christmas very seriously. We are so Filipino that we put our Christmas tree up by September. On Christmas Eve, it is almost essential to layout a table per relative group — the Titas, the Drunk Titos, the Doñas, and finally, the Children. Karaoke is definitely a must on Christmas Day. When I think of Christmas, the Philippines is my home. But even so, I didn’t feel Filipino enough to identify as one.

English is my first language. It is universally believed that your first language should be your mother tongue. In our country’s case, that would be Tagalog. At home, my parents and I would speak Tagalog and English daily. Sometimes, we would even code-switch in Taglish. It was the language I heard most when watching teleserye with my grandmother. Growing up, it was one of the languages I heard around me among many others having grown up in a multicultural society like Hong Kong. Still, my command of Tagalog isn’t the best. In fact, my relatives found me cute and entertaining when I couldn’t roll my l’s and r’s properly. Just as I thought I’d finally bargained for clothes in Tagalog correctly, store clerks would answer me in English and chuckle, “Hindi sya pinoy.”

At that moment, I realized, what’s the point of trying if people don’t see me as Filipino?

By the time I entered college in the Philippines, fitting in started to feel like a chore. Aside from my broken Tagalog, my habits were barricading me from finally finding my cultural identity. When I say thank you, my body involuntarily bows which is a common custom in Chinese culture. Growing up in Hong Kong, I also tend to prefer to get things done quickly. Sure, we Filipinos get things done, but 2381 hours later. Forget the weekly lunches or after-work drinks. To local Hongkongers, work is work. I had gotten used to the fast-paced city life where traffic does not exist and bank transactions do not take forever. And please do not get me started on our government system.

To be quite frank, I missed my home called Hong Kong.

Living in Hong Kong was no different, though. The friendliness of Filipinos is incomparable. I often find myself yearning to bump into a Filipino stranger hoping we would start a conversation on how horrible the traffic is in Metro Manila. How blue the water in Philippine beaches is during the summer. How much we miss eating sisig. Unsurprisingly, this community of Filipinos is pretty easy to find in the city. I pretty much go to Church on Sundays to have a taste of the warmth our people give off. It is almost a thrilling experience when I meet a Filipino for the first time as it can be compared to meeting an old best friend. This is not something you can receive from Hongkongers.

I began to wonder — if I’m told I’m too foreign for the Philippines, then what am I? If I’m too Filipino for Hong Kong, then where am I from? No matter how hard I try, I cannot explain how foreign I feel when I fail to speak a language I am expected to be fluent in or why I have beliefs different from what I am believed to have. Wherever I go, a part of me is missing.

“Where are you from?” the question I abhorred the most growing up.

What is supposed to be a minute conversation turns into a TED talk about my entire life. I can tell you my maroon passport and birth certificate says I’m Filipino. I can tell you what my Hong Kong permanent resident card implicates. I can also tell you where I studied for elementary and high school. But to tell you where I’m from takes more than one answer to satisfy my needs.

After years of avoiding the dreaded question, adulthood has finally forced me to make a decision. Now that I’m about to enter the corporate world, I think it’s time I build my life soon in a place I can truly call home.

Being raised in an urban jungle like Hong Kong, nothing feels more like home than the sound of multiple languages being spoken on the streets or the dim sum plates clamoring as the waitress lays them down on a plastic table in a hurry. I can lose myself in the neon signs and vibrant skyscrapers that light up across the harbor. Nothing will ever beat the convenience of city life and its natural liveliness.

I remember what liveliness is like in the Philippines. My mind lights up when I spot the stressed syllables in a Filipino accent. I cannot speak my native tongue fluently but I can work the accent in my tongue when speaking English or Cantonese. My heart warms when I think of my family back in my mother’s childhood home and my grandma’s home-cooked Nilaga.

This is how deep the Philippines runs within me. The same way the metropolitan city moves me but quickly. The bright city lights thrill me but not the way the scorching heat does on Philippine land. I’ve been looking for the perfect mix of family, languages, skyscrapers, and islands. If only this place existed.

But what if I create my own world? My own culture?

I belong everywhere and anywhere that fills me.

Why should I choose to live in one country when I can live in both or even three? I am constantly switching between two worlds in a third-culture where I could belong nowhere in an instant. That’s the real beauty of living as a third-culture kid. My life is my playground where I am able to expand and inherit the best traits from the two worlds and create my version of a hybrid culture. This I could use to my advantage as I’m reaching the peak of adulthood.

An upbringing with a wealth of global experiences has its perks. As a child, I have been exposed to a fusion of accents and traditions having lived in an international city like Hong Kong. The language section in my resumé suggests so. To be a cultured and multilingual candidate is a trait that has opened doors for me professionally and personally as it supports my ability to adjust to various environments. Besides, nothing is more festive than getting to celebrate three cultures simultaneously in a month. In winter, I have the chance to do a rapid wardrobe change from traditional sari clothing for Diwali to Thanksgiving turkey-themed sweaters to Santa Claus jumpsuits.

There is this proverb I learned in high school that I never really understood: “Curiosity killed the cat.” As a third-culture kid, curiosity is what drives me. How do people live? Where have they lived? How do they eat? What gets them busy during the holidays? What has changed them? I want to know everything about the people around me. I am addicted to learning the old and new. I love exploring new places and interacting with their people. As someone raised between the Philippines and Hong Kong, where friends and family would come and go, we become adept at calibrating ourselves to finding connections between both points, relating equally with our peers from Australia, America, South Korea, London, Japan, Malaysia in my case more so than others. Ask us about the political controversy happening in Western Australia and we will explain both sides of the parties to you. It is our cross-cultural knowledge and skills that have formed our identity. At some point in my life, the plane was my third home where the map became my personal playground.

This is the life of a third-culture kid.

You can ask me where I am from and I can tell you what places have touched me. I can tell you of several places I have lived and how its people have left a mark.

You can ask me where home is and I can tell you that home is not a geographical location nor is it a place you grew up in. Home is what warms me and is familiar to my conscience. I am the product of my environment, and my environment is what I consider my home.

I now believe that no one belongs to a place, be it a country or a city. Our identity cannot be dictated by a piece of paper or an accent. It changes over time as we visit a new place, meet new friends, take a new job, get our hearts broken, and find ourselves.

I do not belong to one country, instead, I belong to a blended world of city dreams, cultures, food, people, and spaces. As for my home, I’m looking forward to seeing where that may be next.

I do not major in an arts and literary field nor was I ever one to excel in my literature classes in elementary school. I did not know how to put two and three together to philosophize engaging pieces about my fantasies, emotions and beliefs. In fact, I do not think I was ever born to be a writer. What I do know however is that I find joy in people-watching and daydreaming every now and then. I sometimes find myself sitting alone in a coffee shop and observing an old couple sitting across the room feeding one another. This is when questions start to linger in my head. Is this what a happy married couple looks like? How can I find a relationship as prosperous and loving as this couple? What even is true love? My mind becomes a factory of thoughts which in return, produce a series of paragraphs and life manifestations on paper. It is then I find peace with myself and my reflection.

Like most children, I had a diary which I locked and kept hidden. My diary was my safe haven of sentiment and memories. When I was upset with my parents, I would write about why I felt that way, whether it be in bold and capitalized four-letter words or a short and sweet paragraph. When I held hands with my childhood crush at the playground, I would make up stories about what our life would be like if we lived in a magical castle. Ever since I was a child, I have considered writing to be my personal hideaway to think with and for myself. Writing is my source of self-care. Without it, I feel lost and frustrated.

I strive to be independent and self-sufficient. I write to give myself a voice when I feel like I am about to lose it. As someone who finds great importance in self-love, I write to relive my mistakes and memories whether it be in losing a job opportunity, failing to enter my dream university or finding true love in college. Through writing, I am able to make impactful decisions based on my experiences and lessons learned.

I write to give myself a sense of purpose. I am a digital creator and problem-solver who aspires to become a product owner one day. There is always something new to learn through studying other people’s work of art like Elon Musk or Melanie Perkins perhaps. Through writing, I am able to apply Asimov’s creative writing process to connect my ideas with other creators like myself in hopes of building a digital product of my own.

This is why I write.

While other writers intend to write for people, I write for myself so I can achieve my goals and stick to my values for the benefit of the people I so love. That being said, I look forward to my next chapter.

How to build a tech community — an open letter from an ex-Google DSC Lead

You’re right, it is scary.

Dear Future Community Leader,

Having a spectacular idea is one thing but actually acting on it is another thing.

In August 2020, I was appointed as a Google DSC Lead. I was ecstatic to receive this email but a part of me was anxious too. This community was the first chapter of its kind at my university. We were entering a pandemic and I didn’t expect that I’d have to build an online community. I scavaged around for articles on how to build remote communities hoping for some inspiration but since it was a slightly new concept, no such handbook existed.

Despite it all, this didn’t stop my team and I from building our very own tech community at my university, the University of the Philippines Diliman. Along the way, I learned a lot about what I could’ve done which I wish I knew from the very beginning.

This an open letter to the upcoming community leaders who have the ideas to build their own community but just don’t know how to begin.

Introducing the Google Developer Student Clubs

The Google Developer Student Clubs (GDSC) is a community for university students looking to grow their knowledge of Google technologies and the tech industry to potentially build their own solutions for their community. Every year, Google gets to pick a GDSC Lead per chapter from all over the world to lead their own GDSC community.

The GDSC UP Diliman (GDSC-UPD) chapter aims to connect tech enthusiasts alike (who often feel excluded from other tech societies) to learn and collaborate with one another to build solutions. Our chapter is currently home to 17 core team leaders and 120+ members ranging from various fields like Engineering, Biology, Law, etc.

When I first heard about the GDSC community from a good friend and ex-GDSC Lead, Harvey Jay Sison, I was super shocked to hear that my university as the “Iskos ng bayan” (scholars of the country) didn’t have one. I was motivated to start this chapter in hopes that it will create a platform for Filipinos to explore opportunities in the tech industry from a global scale.

In the span of a year, our chapter was able to run workshops in Flutter/Firebase, Google Cloud, UI/UX, Project Management, and Kotlin. We also managed to successfully organize a UNSDG-focused webinar, Mentorship Series, and a month-long hackathon, Diliman Solutions Challenge, which consisted of weeks of mentorship from industry professionals, design thinking, and technical workshops, and collaboration among high school and university students from all parts of the Philippines.

Let’s say you have this amazing idea to build a community for data science enthusiasts at your university. As a techie yourself, you realized that your course curriculum just isn’t teaching the essential practical skills to build projects as you please. Your peers complain about it which just proves the problem exists. This motivates you more to start your own society of data scientists.

What now?

Don’t rush growing numbers

I initially had a misconception that having a large number of community members determines the success of the organization. Our GDSC chapter welcomed members from all kinds of fields like Biology, Law, Engineering, etc. which was awesome!

But over the course of the term, this affected our productivity and efficiency when completing projects since there were too many people to handle remotely.

Before taking people into your organization, it’s important to focus on your organization’s structure and your overall plan for the community first. You may start by asking yourself questions like:

What do I want to achieve for the community by the end of the year?

What kind of skills do we really need to grow the community?

How may we keep our members engaged in the community?

What do I want our members to get out of this community?

Will your community be service-oriented or academic-oriented?

Find your people

To build a community, you need a dedicated and motivated team. Fill your community with people that share the same goals and advocacies as you do, especially if you’re running your community online.

Once you find your people, your network will eventually grow and the people you find will support you in your journey. If your teammates are as passionate as you are, you are one step into building your own community!

Form relevant teams

Running a community is like running a startup. You need to carefully form skilled teams for your organization to function efficiently.

Once you have answers to the questions above, you should be able to identify the kind of expertise you need to leverage your community. In most tech communities, 2 types of teams exist — technical and non-technical ones.

Technical teams tend to be focused on hosting data science workshops, client development projects, etc. Non-technical teams could be composed of marketing specialists, treasurers, event organizers, or graphic designers.

You’re not alone

Chances are, many people have the same great ideas as you. It’s just a matter of being brave enough to act on it.

As a community builder, you are given this ✨golden wand✨ to create opportunities for your peers around you and potentially even solve one of the greatest challenges faced in your society through online workshops, webinars, or hackathons! Because of the global pandemic, people are also looking for more ways to support their personal and career development. And if you can play a part in this, it’s going to be a great achievement.

Don’t stop talking about your ideas

Continue to stay motivated and share your ideas for your community with the people around you. You never know who is really listening and is as keen to start a community alike. Eventually, these people will approach you to join you in contributing to your creation!

I wrote the above based on my personal experiences as a GDSC Lead of my chapter. These are some tips I wish I knew before starting my own chapter so don’t take them word for word. After all, it is your community to begin with 😉

Good luck, leader!

With love and support,

An ex-GDSC Lead

During these tough times, it’s more important than ever as students to apply and expand our skills by taking on real-world challenges.

I’m Gianna, an aspiring Product Designer and a Computer Science senior studying at the University of the Philippines Diliman. My passion for designing and developing product experiences roots from immersing myself in environments that encourage the creation of solutions that benefit societies. This winter break, I had the great opportunity to join Bowtie as a Product Design Intern.

💰Revolutionising Insurance in Hong Kong

If you know me well enough, you should know that I’m a sucker for startups due to its innovative and agile culture. Joining startups trains you to adopt an “out of the box” mindset which often results in revolutionizing solutions.

When I first came across Bowtie, their ability to revolutionize insurance by removing the middleman and creating a painless virtual experience when buying insurance, which is often a long and tedious process, caught my attention. As a designer with an engineering background, I valued how Bowtie managed to quickly create a product with a clean and user-friendly design, and with credible software — their system is deployed to AWS and audited by PwC.

When I was offered the Product Design intern opportunity, I was excited to take an insider look at what the team has done to become Hong Kong’s first virtual and award-winning insurer.

🏩 My First Week

On my first day at Bowtie, I was welcomed with friendly faces and a bright neon pink sign at the studio (we do not use “office”). Since some colleagues were working from home, I managed to receive warm greetings on Slack! During the onboarding, I was also impressed to learn that weekly Lunch & Learn talks were held at the studio where experts from different startups were invited, be it in the food delivery, wellness and even, the craft beer industry! Safe to say, Bowtie highly values an active learning environment.

💡The Backbone of Bowtie’s Virtual Experience

Even though I joined Bowtie as an intern, I am treated like any other employee at Bowtie. As a Product Design intern, my role is to explore and implement opportunities to ensure our digital products are meeting users’ needs and expectations whilst achieving our long-term business goals. Apart from working with talented designers, growth leaders and product managers from the product team, I also work closely with the Engineering team.

Every week, growth ideation and design critique meetings are held to study our user data and explore ways to improve our products in terms of design and technology. These meetings are often times when we identify the problems, pitch ideas, give feedback and explore solutions. As someone who really values data, I found this to be very exciting as it’s when everyone’s creative juice begins to flow!

👀 A Sneak Peek into the Product Team

The design thinking methodology is fully embraced by our team.

In my first two weeks at Bowtie, I was already given major hands-on projects which highly impact Bowtie’s digital products. One of my projects involves improving the experience first-time buyers go through when purchasing our products. As a Product Designer, I need to carry out a series of customer journey mapping, user interviews, wireframing, prototyping and user testing. I collaborate with our UX Designer on this project.

The customer journey maps are created based on real user data and interviews using the collaborative tool, Miro. Once these are drafted, we dedicate several days to interview various stakeholders within the company to explore their thought process when purchasing on the Bowtie platform. After each interview, we then explore the opportunities that could be done to improve the user journey.

After finalising the maps, it’s time for me to create wireframes and prototypes of the features with the most painful user experience using Sketch and InVision. We then present these designs to the Design team to generate more feedback. Finally, comes user testing, the most important step in my opinion as we gather real user feedback. This is where we have new customers speak aloud what they’re thinking and feeling as they are using our platform.

🔑 My Key Takeaways

I’m currently entering my third month of interning at Bowtie and I’m confident to say that I’m learning so much that I cannot learn in school, or Zoom university rather thanks to COVID-19 .

Prior to joining the team, I wasn’t confident in speaking up about my ideas, especially when it came to design. As someone studying in a very technical field, I felt people preferred to hear the thoughts of a design student. Thankfully, joining Bowtie made me realise this early that it didn’t matter at all. It was self-confidence that mattered because with confidence comes a great learning attitude. I’m so grateful to be part of a team that welcomes new ideas as I learn to differentiate between powerful and low-impactful ones. I feel most interns are hesitant to speak up, afraid they may say the wrong thing. I say forget this and own up to your ideas as they may one day be used by millions of users. What’s the worst that could happen?

Another key takeaway for me is to show up and take the effort to know your colleagues. By getting to know my colleagues or people in general, I learn so much about different fields and how people think. As a Product Designer, it enables me to understand user behaviour and how I can apply it to future projects.

I cannot be more thankful to be given the great opportunity to be a part of Bowtie. If you’re interested in applying at Bowtie and want to know more about my experience, feel free to shoot me a message here! Apply now at Bowtie.

A Message to Future Product Design Interns at Bowtie was originally published in Inside Bowtie on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Out of the 5 million children with disabilities in the Philippines, only 71,000 managed to enroll in school due to the pandemic. STABLE (Students who are ABLE) is the first-ever adaptive learning management system for hearing impaired primary students. This app concept was awarded Top 2 out of 300 teams worldwide at the Digital Inclusion Challenge 2020 where my team was challenged to tackle the SDG 4: Quality Education.

TL;DR

• Project duration: Our team was given 10 days to define the problem, conduct extensive research, create the business model, and develop our solution. I had 3 days to design the adaptive learning management system.
• Goal: To develop an adaptive learning management system for hearing-impaired children (aged 6–12 years old) in the Philippines.
• Interesting Information: Our team placed Top 2 out of 300 teams in 30 countries at the Digital Inclusion Challenge 2020; The entire hackathon was done remotely.

Outcome highlights:

• Defined the target customers and business model.
• Conducted 4 user interviews.
• Generated 1 interactive prototype.

How Everything Started

Our team was challenged to tackle UN SDG 4: Quality Education by developing an app concept to make education accessible for everyone. We decided to tackle the existing problems in the Philippines such as that of the Special Education community as we are familiar with it the most.

What is STABLE?

STABLE (Students who are ABLE) is the first-ever adaptive learning management system for hearing-impaired primary students (aged 6–12 years old) in the world. The LMS aims to provide a seamless and intuitive online learning experience for children and teachers in the Philippines.

The Problem

There are 248,000 children with hearing-impairments in the Philippines as of today. Of that number, 37,200 are enrolled in the formal educational system. Due to the CoVID-19 pandemic, only 5,580 were able to enroll where most schools lack the necessary tools for the new setup of blended learning online, meaning that thousands of children could not continue their studies this year. To add to this, PWD learning in the Philippines is underdeveloped and there are limited options for online learning for the deaf. Thus, there is a very real chance that the dreams of an entire generation of hearing-impaired learners may be lost if nothing is done.

The Team

Mentors: Mark Toledo & Maryam Ghulami
Team Leader/Research Analyst: Miguel Balao
Research Analyst: Savinay Sharma
Business Analyst: Jamila Domingo
Graphic Designers & Animators: Kayla Tiongson & Jelena Garcia
UI/UX Designer: Gianna Burgos

My Role

User Experience Design, User Interface Design

Timeline

Our team was given 10 days to define the problem, the business model, and develop our solution. I had 3 days to design the adaptive learning management system.

Project Kickoff

The first 4 days were dedicated to defining the problem, the target users, and strategies.

Before beginning the entire process, we started off by conducting research on the current learning curriculum and methods used by specialized teachers to teach the children in the Philippines.

We tried to look for similar learning platforms online that cater to this community.

In the end, our team has confirmed that there are tools to supplement these platforms (voice-to-text recognition, etc) but still no existing platform as such online. We also identified the reasons why such a tool still does not exist.

User Research

Despite the tight deadline, we managed to conduct remote user interviews with 2 main stakeholders within the 4 days where we identified the needs and struggles of teachers and the hearing impaired. We asked certain questions like:

For Hearing-Impaired Students (conducted using Sign Language):

• What do you enjoy most about school?
• How do you learn best?
• Was it hard to make friends?
• How would you describe your ideal teacher?
• What are the daily struggles you find most annoying?
• Suppose you are watching a video, is it more convenient to have the dialogues signed or captioned?
• Are there any mobile applications you find most difficult to use? What about it?

For Special Education Development (SPED) Teachers:

• Do you have a reward system for these students?
• What is the greatest challenge you have faced while teaching them?
• What difficulties do students face while learning remotely (esp during COVID-19)?
• Have you ever used any web or mobile apps to assist your teaching delivery?
• If you were to create an app to teach the children, what functionalities would you add?

User Interview Responses

Through conducting remote user interviews with SPED professors, instructors, and students, we managed to identify the key needs and struggles of the hard of hearing community as well as the current trends in Sign Language.

“Filipino Sign Language is the new norm. American Sign Language has become a traditional way of communicating in the Philippines.” — SPED Professor

“Visual aids help us understand words and phrases more such as pictures and emojis.” — Student

Understanding our Users

With the help of an affinity diagram, we were able to identify the general scope of the project based on the responses of the user interviews and on our research. This helped me find the right direction in beginning the design process.

Persona: Meet Ellie

We created a user persona to represent our hearing-impaired child users. I used this persona as a direction to meet the primary users’ needs throughout the design process.

Ideating the Solution

To better understand the scope of our project, we generated mapped out our solutions on sticky notes using Jamboard and eventually, generated a lean canvas. Given our time constraint, this helped us discover our product development cycle and business propositions more rapidly.

Defining the Users’ Goals

Eventually, we defined our primary users’ goals which I used to center the design of STABLE. As our app mainly caters to the hearing-impaired community, it was important to take into account how the end-user felt when interacting with our product.

Sketching and Ideation

Before converting our solution into its digital form, I did some rough sketches to showcase my idea of the dashboard to the team in order to generate early feedback quickly. This helped me decide how we wanted to build the UI and what features we should put in it in the first place.

Branding of STABLE

STABLE stands for Students who are ABLE. Much like a stable where horses are trained, our team at STABLE wants to help hearing-impaired students be equipped so that they will be able to grab opportunities in the world ahead of them.

The branding concept was done by our Graphic Designers & Animators, Kayla Tiongson & Jelena Garcia.

Designing STABLE

We were approaching the end of the hackathon which meant it was time for me to design the world’s first-ever adaptive learning management system, STABLE. My end goal was to design two dashboards for both the student and the teacher. This was a challenge for me given it was my first time designing a user interface for children ages 6–12 years old, let alone, for the hearing-impaired community.

While designing STABLE, I kept in mind a quote I read in an article to remind me what my team wanted to accomplish in the first place.

We are not disabled and Deafness is not a disability; it’s the perception of many hearing (people) that we are disabled, and that is our disability.

Wireframes & Low-fidelity Designs

I found this step to be the most essential phase in the design process as it helped me better envision the features and content of the app. As our target users are primarily hearing-impaired, it was important that the components were laid out in a linear and logical manner, and that the content was broken down into sub-headings, images, and videos to accommodate to their needs.

Hi-fidelity Designs

For this step, I used Figma to design the screens for both the student and teacher user interface.

🐴 STABLE for Students User Interface

For the student UI, I focused on placing as many recognizable visual assets as possible as it helps the hard of hearing community better understand the function of a feature. For instance, using common icons and emojis catches their attention.

Based on our user interviews, the hearing-impaired also prefer sentences to be kept to 7 to 10 words short and the use of plain language. This is to prevent a cognitive load and to make the user feel at ease when participating in the classes.

Finally, I decided to keep the colors sharp but not “too loud” in order to catch the child’s attention while not increasing their cognitive load. We wouldn’t want to distract the child while they’re learning.

🐴 STABLE for Teachers User Interface

While designing the UI, I had to keep in mind that the teachers may or may not have a hearing-impairment which meant the content should be broken up in a logical manner. I found this quite challenging given how many features we wanted to build. The most difficult part was designing the Dashboard and the Student’s Profile screen as we did not want to increase the users’ cognitive load and confuse them with the features built. Eventually, I overcame this by referring back to our user interviews and by keeping the design as clean and intuitive as possible.

Interactive Prototype

Finally, for the final phase of the hackathon, I developed an interactive prototype using Figma to demonstrate how users may use our product.

Testing the Design

Due to the tight deadline, we conducted informal user testing online. We sent a demo of our prototype to potential users to validate whether the app met their needs and was easy to use. We managed to receive insightful feedback from our stakeholders in the end.

Designing this app is probably one of the biggest achievements in my student life because it serves to educate the children in our society who are often forgotten. This app helps alleviate the education problem 248,000 hearing-impaired Filipinos are currently facing today.

One major takeaway I got from this project is how User Experience Design can make a great impact in fostering inclusion. When consciously done, UX can be a very powerful tool to educate children from different sectors of the community, most especially those who have limited mobility or choices.

If you’ve reached this far, thank you for reading my case study!
Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn :)

Adaptive Learning Management System for Hearing-Impaired Children — a UX Case Study was originally published in UX Planet on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

So, first things first…

What is the DSC Solutions Challenge?

The Solutions Challenge is an annual global contest hosted by the Developer Student Clubs (DSC). The goal is to invite students to develop solutions to solve problems in their country using Google technology.

What was our solution?

Our solution was to develop a CoVID-19 self-diagnosis app that could help inform Filipinos if they potentially contract the virus or not. The aim was to give them access to ways to legitimately test it by connecting them to medical professionals or suggesting them to do self-quarantine.

The app had 4 features: a health check-up form to be filled out by the user, a search hospital feature to find the closest hospital to the user, a book an appointment feature to book appointments with medial professionals and finally, a personal profile where the user’s answers are dynamically saved to their account so when they visit the hospital, they show their answers/symptoms to the doctor immediately.

The app was developed using Flutter and Firebase to store user data.

Here are the 3 things I learned from the DSC Solutions Challenge:

Make a project timeline.

My teammates and I were far apart and due to CoVID-19, we realized that meeting up to discuss the project would not be possible for a long time. This made it harder for us to communicate and beat deadlines. Before we knew it, we rushed to finish the project.

This is when a project timeline comes in to avoid procrastinating and annoying questions like “Are we on track to meet the deadline?”. And lucky for us, there are many free tools available online to allow us to track our progress.

Here are some links to easy and free project timeline tools I have gathered:

• Trello
• Asana
• Office Timeline
• Toggl Plan
• GSuite

Research, research FIRST.

Our aim was to get the app out as fast as possible since CoVID-19 was just starting to peak in the Philippines. But due to the outbreak, we found out last minute that the App Store wouldn’t publish any apps unless it was certified by the national Department of Health. This eventually delayed our project even more as we took more time to resolve this issue.

I cannot emphasize the importance of research enough when considering developing your own app. Aside from Googling whether such an app exists or not, it’s important to ensure that your app will be efficient and that users would choose to use them in the first place. And in order to achieve this, it is best to prepare a set of questions to answer:

• Who will be your target audience? How will you reach them?
• Who are your key stakeholders?
• What would your elevator pitch be?
• What do professionals have to say about this idea?
• Is your app ethical? Will it benefit the community?
• What framework is best to develop this app?

Interview as many professionals as you can.

Throughout the development process, we dedicated some time to interview some doctors that were knowledgeable with the virus. After talking to several professionals, we were advised by doctors at the end of the dev process that the app may lead to overcrowding at hospitals as users could easily misdiagnosis themselves. Again, this delayed our project.

Getting feedback is universally known to be essential when it comes to project management. But it doesn’t always have to come at the end of the development process. And who would be best to get honest feedback but from professionals, especially in the case of a healthcare app!

When picking which user to interview, always consider your stakeholders. This should’ve already been identified during your research step. In our case, they were doctors, nurses, and the general public. Your goal would be better to understand the problem at stake and to identify the needs of your user. A maximum of 5 users is sufficient to interview as it will get you to 80% of the needs and problems.

Finally, you should always have a script or a set of questions prepared to ask. Here’s an example:

1. Start with a 1 to 2 minute summary about what your app is, what the features are, and who the target audience is.
2. Tell them the goal you would like to achieve with this app.
3. Dive into the questions! Here are some questions you could ask to best identify their needs:

• Which feature would you find least useful?
• What features would you want to find?
• Would you use this app? Would you recommend it to others (in our case, their patients)?

4. Close the discussion by asking if they have any final questions or feedback.

5. Thank them for taking the time to talk with you.

I hope this article helped you plan your next steps in developing your own amazing idea. It could be overwhelming but do not forget to enjoy the process with your team because it will all be worth it in the end!

Once again, congratulations to all winners of Solutions Challenge 2020! I cannot wait for the next challenge in 2021.