Roots

Shannen Sapar is a self-taught Product Designer and art enthusiast. She currently works as a UI/UX Designer at Onerent, where she focuses on solving UX challenges in the real estate market and mentoring junior designers. Previously, she was a freelance designer, and also worked for companies like Oranj and Ingenuity. She’s no stranger to building design communities. Shannen is the Co-founder and S...

Jamie Cristal is an Inclusive Designer at Airbnb —where she is helping create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. Previously, she led design initiatives at Facebook as a Design Operations Program Manager and Product Design Lead for Facebook Lite. Before, Facebook, she served as one of Yahoo’s first Design Associates, where she spearheaded cultural initiatives for the greater design community...

Leroy Almeida is an experience designer at ING, the Philippines' first fully-digital bank. He previously worked at Kalibrr, where he designed the recruiter platform, and Accenture, where he worked with Philippine Airlines and Globe Telecoms. Largely self-taught, he transitioned from engineering to design by reading books, asking for feedback, and learning from the smart people of the Twitterverse....

Jay Demetillo is the Lead UX Designer for GrabFood. With 10+ years of experience working in New York City to San Francisco and now Singapore, Jay Demetillo has almost seen it all in the design world. Jay has worked with Twitter, Pinterest, and Yahoo. He's also worked on notable projects such as the Bay Lights, Gaspar Brasserie, and San Francisco's Park System SFPark. Jay is an adjunct professor at...

Justine Win is a Product Designer, UI Developer, and team player. She'll be joining Shopify — a leading cloud-based, multi-channel commerce platform — as a Product Designer in the core product team. She recently ended her stint as the Design Lead of UBX Philippines where she had an opportunity to assemble a team, establish a design process, and design products for financial inclusion. Justine's mi...

Christine Balatbat is a customer experience officer in JG Summit Holdings Inc., one of the biggest conglomerates in the Philippines. A normal weekday for her is moderating research studies, synthesizing qualitative data and communicating findings to stakeholders. Over her 7-year career she became the UX research manager of OLX Philippines, did experience design for On-Off Group, and co-founded UXP...

Patrick James Lim is a Senior Product Designer for SplitmediaLabs Inc. With over 4 years of experience, he was able to work for companies of various types and sizes like NetSuite, Accenture and First Circle before finding his love for esports or competitive gaming. Now, he currently utilizes his UI and interaction design skills for Challonge, an application for managing competitive activities like...

Boggs Labayen is the User Experience Lead at Home Credit Philippines —a self proclaimed emotional designer and guardian of the users. Armed with 10 years of experience in designing products that enrich people’s experiences, he uses his emotions as a key ingredient in the design process. He held various roles from different industries and companies such as ABS-CBN, ASPAC Creatives Incorporated, QUI...

Vj Francisco is the Head of Experience Design for NuWorks Interactive Labs. He brings with him 12+ years of design experience and expertise in design leadership, usability analysis and human-centered design. An experience strategist by practice, his most recent stint before joining NuWorks was with Globe Telecom where he was also the Head of Experience Design. There he championed human-centricity...

Mikey Ilagan is a Product Manager on the Comcast Accessibility Team. He's spent the past decade building digital experiences using a lifetime of passion for technology. He is a former web designer and frontend developer. He's spent his career working in and around his hometown, Philadelphia, PA, USA. Today, he uses a diverse background to work with product teams to ensure Xfinity's offerings are u...

Tari Rosario is the Lead UX Product Designer for Sprout Solutions, where she designs for HR and Payroll software systems. Previously, she held UX Designer positions in various startups before finding her love for research upon entering On-Off Group, where she worked as a Lead Experience Strategist. She graduated with a degree of BFA Information Design from the Ateneo de Manila University and spent...

Jiggy Villanueva is a fresh Management Information Systems graduate from Ateneo de Manila University. For the past year, he served as the Executive Vice President of User Experience Society, the first student-led UX organization in the Philippines. He also led the branding team of JFFC, the biggest student web design conference in Asia. He interned as a UX Designer for companies like Make Technolo...

Aris Acoba is a product designer and developer. He is currently the Head of Design at LawAdvisor, a legal technology company founded in Australia. He has been tumbling around Manila, Melbourne, and London, designing legal tech enterprise solutions. He has worked with companies like Mashup Garage, IdeasXMachina, Toyota Philippines, PAREF Southridge School, Lorenzana Food Corporation, and Eastwest B...

Paul Sabandal is the Head of Product Development at Qwikwire, a multi-awarded startup that provides cross-border payment solutions for real-estate — they handle international online payments for clients AyalaLand, Century Properties, Double Dragon and other top real-estate companies in the Philippines. He leads the end-to-end processes related to product discovery. He also co-founded Figma Philipp...

Chi Señires is a UI/UX Designer at TrueMoney Philippines, where she designs products to help the underbanked and underserved in our country. When not doing design work, she does front-end web development. Before graduating with a degree in Computer Science in 2016, she co-founded User Experience Society, the first student-led UX organization in the Philippines. She also served as the Associate Vic...

Charz Mendoza is the Head of User Experience at Mynt. His main responsibility is to ensure the products and services of GCash deliver good user experience across all its channels. Previously, he was a Co-founder and Chief Experience Officer of B3Solutions. Before that, he was an Experience Design Specialist at Smart. He also held design and copywriting roles at top ad agencies like Publicis Groupe...

Paolo Malabuyo is a Director of User Experience for YouTube Advertising at Google, where he leads an international team of designers and researchers responsible for enabling a healthy ecosystem for YouTube and its billions of users worldwide, and an Adjunct Professor at Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley, where he teaches a graduate-level course on Human-Computer Interaction & User Experien...

I interviewed Job Buenazedacruz, a graphic designer at Canva. She’s the founder of Inclusive PH, a small online community of professionals who want to share and learn more about inclusive practices in different fields like design, engineering, copywriting, education, and medicine. She’s also a design consultant with two design firms: CIA Bootleg Manila and Godmother PH. She handles design research...

I talked to Brian Tan, a UI/UX designer and merit scholar from the Ateneo De Manila University. He’s about to graduate in June with a degree in IT Entrepreneurship. Brian has done 6 internships already, including being a Product Design Intern at Kalibrr and a UI/UX Apprentice at Stampede, a Malaysian UX agency. He’s also the co-creator of HangTime, a web app built to help students compare class sc...

I interviewed Jasmine Ty, a seasoned UX content strategist and marketing copywriter with over a decade of experience working in Silicon Valley. She has worked at small startups like JustAnswer to big brands like Gap and Facebook. Her expertise includes finding brand voice and tone, marketing, e-commerce, UX, and machine learning. Soon, Jasmine will be joining Netflix as a Content Designer. In this...

I chatted with Avery Si, a UI/UX Designer in Mynt — a subsidiary of Globe Telecom, Ayala, and Ant Financial. Avery took up Management Information Systems in Ateneo de Manila University and was a founding member of User Experience Society--the first student-led UX organization in the Philippines that educates the next generation of design leaders. As a student, he was able take on UX and Product De...

I interviewed Ely Apao, Customer Experience Manager at JG Summit Holdings. He founded UX Philippines, a non-profit organization that hosts the Philippines' largest community of individuals passionate about the realm of User Experience. The organization aims to help spread awareness and raise the bar for design practices all over the Philippines. Previously, he also held UX roles at companies like...

I interviewed Niaw de Leon, the author of Microcopy and co-founder of Cognible, a design consultancy that helps startups, IT firms, and development teams nail the right language and interactions to make sexy apps that sell. Starting out as an enterprise web developer at a CMMI Level 5 IT firm, she’s been a trainer, RFP writer, and product marketing manager until she found herself in the passionate...

I interviewed Chrys Francisco Laguitao, a Senior UX Designer at Google currently based in Zurich, Switzerland. She has designed for both consumer and enterprise products such as Google Flights, Assistant, and AdWords. Her career journey has taken her from being an IT Associate Manager in P&G in Manila, to taking up Master's in Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University abroad, and fi...

AJ Dimarucot is a self-taught graphic designer who is known for his iconic work on t-shirts--having designed for brands like Nike, Jordan Brand, Adidas, to a multitude of independent brands. His work has delivered millions of dollars worth of sales all over the world. He has designed officially-licensed tees for athletes in the NFL, MLB, and the NBA, as well as for properties like Coca-Cola, Star...