Lab MGM invited Verrel Radiman, a UX Researcher at Mekari, to join the second session of its 2022 Interaction Design guest lecture series.
On March 11, 2022, Lab MGM, the Media, Game, and Mobile Technology Laboratory at Fakultas Ilmu Komputer, Universitas Brawijaya, held the second session of its Webinar Series on Interaction Design, with a guest speaker from Mekari, an Indonesian business software company that builds accounting, HR, and tax products.
Verrel Radiman, then a UX Researcher at Mekari and a FILKOM Informatics Engineering student from the 2017 cohort, joined Vivy Junita, a Product Manager at Blibli, for a session titled Defining The Impactfulness Of UX Strategy: Industry Perspective. About 90 students attended online, moderated by faculty member Adam Hendra Brata.
Radiman took part as an invited individual with direct industry experience, sharing what UX research looks like day to day rather than representing any agreement between Mekari and Lab MGM. He walked students through the UX researcher role, describing empathy, organization, and critical thinking as the core qualities needed to understand user needs and spot opportunities in a product. He and Junita both stressed that UX strategy has to flex with a company's product development approach rather than follow one fixed process.
Mekari builds accounting, HR, and tax software used by businesses across Indonesia, a different kind of product from the consumer marketplaces most other speakers in the series represented. That gave students a look at UX research inside enterprise software, a field that gets less classroom attention than consumer app design but plays a similar role in whether a product succeeds.
The session was the second of four Lab MGM ran under the same series across 2022, following a February session with speakers from Tokopedia and tiket.com and preceding a May session on emotional design with speakers from Blibli and Mister Aladin. Each guest, including Radiman, was invited individually for a single conversation rather than through any ongoing arrangement with their employer.
