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To wrap up our last Interaction Nerds issue of the semester, we’ll be interviewing Sander Vonk and Rong Yuan—our UXA co-presidents for next year!
Sander Vonk: Website
Rong Yuan: LinkedIn
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Sander: What happened a lot this year was that we just had a lot of events going on with weekly GBMs, and we really loved getting to know our community. As a part of that, people did feel some of the time a little bit overloaded for the people who are hosting events. And I mean that in like the sweetest way, because they're all people who love doing it and love interacting with the community. But I'm excited to see things like co-working sessions with a little more of a collaborative atmosphere rather than events such as teaching a workshop next year. This is a chance for people to go to events and feel like they’re welcomed in a collaborative space where you can be with other people who share the same interests.
Rong: One thing I would say I look forward to is more internal connections and networking between our unit members and our general members for more chances to get to know each other and learn from each other. Another thing is that I want our members to be able to get something tangible out of participating in UXA. This can be like a simple project piece or something that they can showcase to others—they’ll be able to say that, “okay, I got this from UXA and it's super cool!” Personally as an upcoming UXA prez (since we’re doing VP selecting), I’m super excited to see new faces and I’m looking forward to cooperating with Sander next year to see how far we can bring UXA.
Sander: Just to latch on to that part about tangible stuff—and this is maybe the personal part—but as someone who is on the design unit, I really love the merch we've been making. It makes people feel like they're part of a club on campus. That, and maybe working with external companies on projects. We don't want it to go too far into the space of other clubs, but I really do have one company who told me they would be very interested in it. So definitely excited to see where that goes.
Rong: That’s a super good question, and I think it has something to do with how UXA is bound together by the idea of UX—everyone is interested in some aspect of user experience design. No matter if it’s designers or software engineers, we all want to get something out of this club, be it experience or career opportunities regarding UX, or even just to make friends who are interested in learning about the same things. I think that’s the reason why UXA is such a spread-out community. Last year we've been really focused on building up that community, and this year we will continue to build onto that by helping people have solid participation throughout UXA activities.
Sander: I agree with a lot of what Rong said. While there’s been a strong interest in job opportunities and networking events, I think regardless of what we do, it’s still gonna have the same spin of “we want this to be a community event” on it. We were talking to not just the co-presidents of this year but previous co-presidents as well, and they were talking about how UXA was really founded with the purpose of being a place where people can get to the resources they need and get into those little niches of UI/UX as well as just general HCI concepts. So I think that casting a wide net is still a big part of our purpose.
Sander: Something we've been meaning to do—and I know it's not the most fun thing—is documentation. It’s a way of leaving behind what we've learned and the tips and tricks from all the different units as well. How do we get events to work? What do people like and want to see? If we were surprised by, say, anything we did at an event or in planning, marketing, design, etc.. What really stuck with people? That kind of shaped the notion of what the club becomes. Apart from that, just meeting with them and having the chance to bond has given us very open opportunities to ask questions. There’s such a spread of information that we cover, and it’s the unit heads that tend to handle more intricacies, so we’re just trying to learn enough of everything to actually be useful.
Rong: The documentation is called the CookBook, thanks to Sander’s great idea. It’s like a recipe that you need to become a good UXA president. As for me, I’ve been on board for an entire year now, so I feel like I have some assumptions of what to expect with a lot of things. Something I want to catch up on is finance. That’s something we never really talk about across the entire board since it’s usually between the finance VP and the president. We also have a great number of board staying for next year, so that’s super great—it’s nice having strong support for us to hold UXA together.
Rong: To me, it’s really amazing how the events team were able to put everything together throughout the year, especially as a small team that handles a lot of events throughout the semester. At the very start, we were unsure about even just small events meetings with unit members, but we’ve all grown so much and became super close after going through events such as Career Prep Weekend and XHacks. Supporting each other through every detail of planning and making sure events go smoothly really felt great.
Sander: One was teaching the first Figma workshop with Kyle. I never quite realized the actual impact of these workshops that felt to me was just a quiet kind of lecture-type space, which is not ideal for sure. But later seeing these people in my classes—even people in grades above me—be like, “Oh, I’ve been using Figma for this” and just using what they had learned made me so happy. It lets me know that these workshops are actually going somewhere and that these people are genuinely interested in it.