Another round of COMPFEST Seminar was held last Sunday, 15 September 2019, named Women in Tech: Empathy and Design Thinking at Dr. Indro Soewandi Auditorium, Faculty of Computer Science, Universitas Indonesia. 

The event began with the opening by Ellyza Marthadicta, Scrum Master’s Project Manager at DitiTolk as the moderator of the session. She is an alumnus of Fasilkom UI, and she invited three speakers to present their material at the stage.

The first material was given by Ananda Nadya, a senior UX Researcher of Tokopedia. In her presentation, Ananda or more commonly called Nanda, shared some information about UX from the psychology side. She has a degree in psychology as well, so more or less the area that she is now working in relates well with her passion and interest. In the middle of the presentation, she explained the existence of the Gestalt Laws theory, which stated that human eyes have various tendencies in perceiving a visual element. The existence of this law can help the UI Designer to simplify some various complex shapes into a much understandable component.

According to Nanda, one of the challenges of being a UX Researcher is to understand people whose culture is different from her in terms of language. Nanda stated that people’s perception when using local languages can be distinctive as to when they use Indonesian, so it is important for a UX Researcher to find out what to research and how they should carry themselves.

Next, it was Aulia Chairunisa turn to present her material. Aulia is a UX Researcher at Grab. She told everyone in the room about her experience in doing multiple research and user testing for sellers. Initially, she assumed that the system was able to solve their solutions, but apparently, she got some insight that not everything that she thought was easy to use, is also usable for others. This is what she would call empathy, which is a part of design thinking that puts our understanding to other humans in the context of design.

The presentation was concluded by Windi Romania, UX Lead of Cashbac. In her presentation, Windi showed a Venn diagram with three different circles labeled Desirability, Feasibility, and Viability. Among the three circles is Design Thinking, a method that is user-centric to design (UCD), easy to implement, but still profitable.

After finishing the presentation, participants were allowed to ask questions about their concerns and confusion. According to Aulia, COMPFEST Seminar participants were quite enthusiastic in following the whole event, and it can be seen by the number and the variant of questions that were asked.

Don’t forget to keep up with us through our social media on Twitter and Instagram @COMPFEST, and our main site www.compfest.id. (Editorial Marketing/Puspa).