UX Crunch: Start the Year With Start-ups

New year new me, right? Well, January could be the time for you to start your new business venture.

Get off on the right foot with our next UX Crunch event; Start the year with start-ups. Whether you're looking to start your own business or improve an already established one, learn the dos and don'ts of starting your own company.

Join us online as we assess the integral role UX plays in these ventures as you asses whether or not you need to hire a UXer, or perhaps you already are one! Let's get started.

Aleksandra Melnikova

Aleks is a co-founder of Cosmic Velocity, an inclusive and multicultural service design agency who design inclusive digital products, services and training. Before starting Cosmic, she has led various design teams across top London-based UX/ product design agencies such as ORM, Foolproof, BIO, Radley Yeldar, Publicis Poke and Inviqa (ex-Webcredible).

In her career, she has delivered successful products and services for many clients in travel, finance, real estate, and healthcare. She has designed and launched internal audiences tools and helped people and teams find books for kids with diverse representation, understand how to work with dyslexia, generate inclusive design scenarios, find inclusive imagery and content and make research activities inclusive.

Franklin Akanno

Franklin is a UX professional with seven+ years of experience across the fundamental aspects of research and design. He primarily worked for reputable financial institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa and cutting-edge companies in the UK and the rest of Europe.

He currently works in the ClimateTech space championing UX research endeavours and SaaS-based product experimentation towards helping SMEs achieve their net-zero pledges. He accomplishes this by blending his early UX expertise with entrepreneurship, innovation, and fundamental business strategy garnered and underpinned by a recognised business degree.

Franklin has a strong sense of entrepreneurship, a knack for understanding human needs, and a natural aptitude for problem-solving, learning, and self-improvement. His professional interests include encouraging and promoting user-centric thinking and practices to deliver delightful and usable product experiences. And he achieves these by offering free and paid advisory services to SMEs and SMBs, accepting speaking engagements at product schools, and participating in internal mentoring programmes at companies.

Franklin enjoys outdoor activities, especially brunches and dinners. And when indoors, he likes to unwind by binge-watching the best crime and legal drama TV series.

Aakanksha Mirdha

Aakanksha is a Senior Product Designer at Playground AI, designing AI-based creative design tools. Before this, she designed autonomous ridesharing and food delivery experiences at Cruise and Uber and patented nearly a dozen inventions in the autonomous vehicles space.

In her spare time, she enjoys dabbling in 3D design and going on long walks in her home city.

Stephen Tomlinson

Stephen is an experienced design leader and a co-founder of the Product & Service Design studio, Cosmic Velocity. Through the last 16 years, he's led multiple projects spanning user research, design and digital strategy for clients like Amnesty International, Costco Travel, Tesco, the Financial Times and Molton Brown.