Photos I took of the speakers from Day 1

Highlights and Learnings from Day 1 of the JFFC Web Design Conference in De La Salle University

Picture of us from UX Society in Ateneo who attended the JFFC event in our rival school, De La Salle University! (I’m 2nd from the left)

Today, January 26, I attended the 1st day of the JFFC Conference 2019 held inside De La Salle University in Manila. The conference had the theme of “Future Forward”, and it was a full day of talks from local thought leaders in web design and web development.

Poster for the Conference

There were a total of 6 talks in Day 1, each being around 30–40 minutes long. Here’s a short summary of what happened in each session, and what my main takeaways were. There’s a lot of great insights here, such as how to develop a personal brand, how to not be a UX Diva, and how to design better products and experiences for persons with disabilities (PWDs). Let’s start with the first talk:

Jiggy Villanueva on Brand You — How to Develop a Personal Brand

Jiggy is currently a senior taking up BS Management Information Systems at the Ateneo De Manila University.

However, even just as a student, Jiggy is a visual designer and has worked with several student-run ventures and startups in telling their unique stories through branding and user experience design.

He has also previously worked for Make Technology as a Design Intern, and at Kalibrr as a UI/UX intern.

My Learnings

1. Jiggy talked about his personal journey into learning design and branding. He then told us about the importance of personal branding and some misconceptions about it. He reiterated that personal branding can let us live more intentional and purposeful lives.
2. Jiggy then gave us a framework on how to build a personal brand. This involves collecting seeds (getting to know yourself and your interests), digging deeper (becoming knowledgeable about your interests), and letting yourself and others grow (through creating content and providing value).
3. Quotable Quote: “How you identify yourself is completely up to you. Just remember to be intentional, purposeful, and kind.”

Nico Encarnacion on Building Your Design Arsenal

Nico is currently the UX Manager at Make Technology, a technology subsidiary of Ace Saatchi & Saatchi that helps brands drive innovation and creativity through powerful digital platforms.

He loves tinkering with the latest design tools, learning new UX design methods, and improving team efficiency through collaboration. Nico showed to us some of the tools and tricks their team at Make uses to do efficient and effective research, wireframing, design, prototyping, and testing.

My Learnings

1. Nico showed to us the Methods on the Design Kit of IDEO for all their various tools and tricks on how to do research, which he finds helpful. However, he told us there are two main skills to master when doing research — the first is in conducting user interviews (or contextual inquiries), and doing affinity mapping.
2. Nico then showed us all the tools Make uses, like HotJar, LookBack, and Proven By Users for Research; Sketch, InVision, Figma, and Flinto for Design and Prototyping, and Abstract for Version Control.
3. Quotable Quote: “They say that it’s not the arrow, it’s the Indian. But what if If the Indian is piloting an Apache helicopter? That’s a different story.” — Nico was implying how others say it’s not the person using the tools that’s more important, but the person using them. However, the right set of tools can definitely improve you to be more powerful.

TJ Monserrat on Frameworks and the Future

TJ is a PhD student who focuses on the field on Human-Computer Interaction, working on research in Pedagogy and Technology in Interactive Platforms on Learning. He’s also currently one of three Google Developer Experts in the Philippines, the Chief Technology Officer of Senti TechLabs, Inc., and an Assistant Professor at the University of the Philippines — Los Banos.

He loves to experiment with creating smaller sized, offline-ready web apps using web components. Sir TJ gave us a talk on the debate between mastering the use of foundational web languages (like HTML, CSS, and JS) versus sticking to frameworks (like Bootstrap and React).

My Learnings:

1. There is an ongoing debate between whether to master foundational front-end web languages or to stick to frameworks, and Sir TJ’s response is to learn how to use the mix of both. Ultimately, frameworks can help you work faster, but learning the foundations can help you make smaller sized web apps. TJ highly advocates for creating smaller sized web pages, especially given the slow loading speeds of Philippine internet.
2. Sir TJ then listed some tools that can help improve your website’s UX and performance — including Lighthouse, VisBug, Axe, the Mobile-Friendly Test of Google, and Puppeteer.
3. Quotable Quote: “The less we load, the more we create a greater and faster experience for our users.”

Job Buenazedacruz on Accessibility: Understanding Disabilities and Designing for PWDs.

Job is currently a graphic designer at Canva, the billion-dollar-valued graphic design platform founded in Sydney. She is also the founder of Inclusive PH, a group of Philippine professionals collaborating to make the world barrier-free for people of all abilities.

In this talk, Job simplified the concept of Accessibility into basic principles that designers can incorporate into their usual work processes instead of treating it as a huge undertaking.

My Learnings

1. Job gave us a simple definition to understand disability more — Disability is the interaction between one’s health condition (i.e. impairment), the environment, and an inability to participate. What I took away from this was that often, it is more because of the people around the disabled and the ineffective products, services, and systems that the disabled interact with, that magnify people’s disability. For example, a deaf community can function quite normally on their own, but when mixed with the non-deaf, they can become ostracized and marginalized.
2. Job also gave us some stats — 1 billion people in the world are persons with disabilities, which means 1 out of 7 people are disabled. She also mentioned the stat that 1 in 12 men have some form of color blindness. These show how companies, especially big brands, should be mindful of if their products, services, and systems are accessible to PWDs.
3. Job also mentioned some resources and tools worth checking out, such as W3C Accessibility, Color Contrast Checker, Coblis, Color Add, and this Inclusive UX Copy Webinar.
4. Quotable Quotes: 1) “Persons with physical disabilities can be as capable as everyone else if they are given the chance to fully participate in the society.” and 2) “We need to stop being the cause of disabilities by producing designs that provide independence.”

Mark Lacsamana on The You in UX: Of Dungeons and Designers

Mark is currently a Senior Product Designer at Kalibrr, a local job hunting and recruitment platform popular in Southeast Asia. Mark previously worked at OLX Philippines, a popular classified ads website in the region. Mark gave a talk about the phenomenon of “UX Divas” — UX designers who want to show off and seem like experts, but who piss off others and demoralize the team in the process.

My Learnings

1. Mark related to how being a UX Designer is like joining a Dungeons and Dragons team on a quest, and you have to learn what is the best role you should play to support the team. Mark argues that UX Designers should be like the “Bard” (a role in DnD, the tabletop game). Bards help the team do a better job — they help out by inspiring allies to fight on. Bards are also masters of lore and speech, which is important for a UX designer to communicate and get feedback, and inspire and influence the team to build products with great UX.
2. Mark gave some symptoms of what a “UX Diva” acts like, so you can catch yourself or your colleagues from acting like one. These include “Using lines such as ‘this is based on my years of experience’ as an appeal to credibility,”; “Denying solutions outright because ‘it isn’t best practice’ also as an appeal to credibility,” and “Shooting down ideas because they were not yours or brought to you ‘to be approved’ first.”
3. Quotable Quotes: 1) Mark quoted a designer he admires, Samantha Soma: “Sometimes, you are the broken interface.” and 2) “Everyone wants to be a Hero. But [as a UX designer], you have to make sure everyone can be a Hero.”

Drei Alquiros on Why Quitting Her Dream Job was the Best Decision of Her Life

Drei has had 7 years of experience in the IT and Web Design industry, and she’s currently a remote WordPress/WooCommerce Tech Support employee. She previously was Team Lead for Web Development at Affinity Express.

My Learnings

1. Drei was quite open about how she was searching for a “dream job” for her, that could give her pride, financial stability, and happiness. This journey to having a dream job went on a few years until she became the “Team Lead for Web Development” at a company, and managed multiple web developers.
2. However, even though she was proud, financially stable, and happy, she had forgotten to put two important criteria for her dream job — she forgot the importance of taking care of her health, and having time for work-life balance. In the end, she had to quit her job as a Team Lead due to her getting sick. Now, given that she works remotely and doesn’t have as hectic of a workload, she has a lot more time and can take care of her health better. Her talk was about telling us the importance of these two criteria, so we wouldn’t fall into the trap of becoming workaholics and forgetting about our health.
3. Quotable Quote: “I wish that someone told me these two things — time and health — are also important.”

Overall, I enjoyed and learned a lot from the 1st day of JFFC, and I’m looking forward to the next day tomorrow! I hope this article was helpful, and that you check out some of the resources and companies linked above.

Feel free to reach out to any of the people above through their social media too! Maybe they can answer a question or help mentor you somehow. In the meantime, keep learning and hustling towards your own goals and dreams.

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Brian Tan is a UI/UX designer and writer from Manila. View his portfolio at briantan.xyz and other articles he’s written at blog.briantan.xyz. Follow him on Medium to stay updated on his articles.