About

I've been doing UI/UX design for a bit over six years now, across a pretty wide range of industries. The thing that never really changes is the balancing act: what users need, what the business wants, and what's actually feasible to build. Design was never really about making something look nice to me. It's about making it work, making it feel right, and ideally making someone's day a little easier.

I got my start at a well-known agency here in Indonesia, working across dozens of clients from all over the world. That's really where I cut my teeth. From there I moved to DesignStripe, a startup based in Canada, spending a bit over two years there as a product designer. That one ended when the company shut down, partly because of how fast AI was reshaping things for them. Not the ending I expected, but it happens. After that I landed at Foundation, a marketing company, working specifically inside their subsidiary, distribution.ai, which is where I am now.

Alongside the full-time job, I've kept a handful of long-term freelance clients going too: Signlab, Elastic, Astra Insurance, Fotis, Andisor, a few others. Freelancing's partly just my escape hatch from full-time routine, honestly. Different problems, different pace.

How I work now

My process used to look pretty familiar: research, design, prototype, test. These days, the distance between an idea and something people can actually use is a lot shorter.

I still start with research and understanding the problem. But with AI, I'll often go straight into building a working prototype, put it live on a real domain, and get it in front of users. A lot of the design happens as I build. Then I watch where people get stuck, find out what actually makes sense to them, and work from there.

I've also gotten pretty deep into using AI to automate parts of my day-to-day work. Depending on the task, it's cut the time I used to spend by roughly 50–80%. Which means more room to explore an idea, try another approach, or finally build something that's been sitting in my head for a while.

I'm still figuring out what this process looks like as the tools keep changing. But getting something real into people's hands earlier has become a pretty big part of how I work.

Away from the screen

Outside of work I'm usually either on a bike or somewhere new with a camera. Cycling's a big one. I do bikepacking trips around Indonesia, once rode around Lombok, something like 300+ km total, and I've joined Audax events in both Malang and Jakarta. Photography's mostly street and travel. I like catching what's actually happening somewhere, not staged shots.

I'm also still very much a digital nomad. About ten countries in so far, almost always out of a WeWork. Not just for convenience. WeWorks look and feel roughly the same wherever you land, so it ends up feeling weirdly like home in every country. It's also just an easy way to run into other people doing the same nomad thing.

Building things for myself is where it all kind of ties together. I've built three products so far with different friends. Two of them we shut down because they just weren't working, which stung a bit, but I learned a lot from both. Right now I'm building Ayoayo.id, for the Indonesian market, with a friend I actually met at a WeWork.