AIKON Advisors: Introducing Connie Wong
Introducing Connie Wong
One of the best parts about working at AIKON is the team of talented, enthusiastic, and inspiring people we get to work with every day. (And yes, we’re hiring…) In today’s post, meet one of our advisors — Connie Wong. Connie is the lead vision of creativity behind the designs you see across the AIKON platforms, a veteran of the Crypto Industry, and an accomplished DJ in her spare time.
Connie Wong, lead product designer at a top US crypto exchange, was already deeply involved with the crypto industry when our chief product officer, Marc Blinder, reached out to her with the prospect of bringing our vision for a decentralized API marketplace to life through branding and visual design.
Working in tech and digital media for 18 years, and blending creative and technical expertise, Connie is what the industry refers to as a “unicorn” — a designer who also writes code and implements her own designs. While she is mostly self-taught with some time spent learning fundamentals at CCA, she feels fortunate to have a career that allows her to nurture and exercise both sides of her brain.
“Naturally, since I love challenging myself creatively, I jumped on the opportunity to take advantage of the full artistic freedom given to me to create a beautiful family of logos, color palette and visual design,” says Connie. “Also, I was appreciative of the opportunity to work with Marc again since we made quite a great team at our former company.”
Why User Centered Design Rules
As a designer, Connie is a believer that UX design should follow the principles of User Centered Design — to create an intuitive streamlined interface optimized for the user’s needs, goals and requirements.
She explains that following User Centered Design through a continuous open feedback loop, user testing, and analytics, designers are able to optimize the user’s journey further, validate their design hypothesis, or improve the overall product.
As we continue to build the ORE Protocol and launch the world’s first decentralized API Marketplace — talking to real users is our priority at AIKON.
Why She’s Counting on Crypto
Regarding the crypto industry, Connie is also a “true believer.” She sees Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies someday reaching mass adoption, and providing a borderless decentralized payment solution that doesn’t rely on or can be corrupted by the “predatory banking industry.”
“What I love about crypto is that it levels the playing field for everyone of all classes and backgrounds, especially the millions of people around the world who are unbanked or underbanked,” she shares. “ I don’t think it will be considered a ‘niche’ much longer, as more and more people catch on and FOMO into the industry dies down. Despite all the impending regulations by the SEC and other legislation, crypto is here to stay and I, for one, am excited to see where this wild journey takes us.”
At the end of the day, Connie gets the most fulfillment from aligning a company’s mission with the persona that company wishes to portray. She also loves executing end-to-end projects from concept to completion.
“I feel such a sense of pride and accomplishment when something I’ve designed and/or built is shipped and shared for the world to see,” she says.” I also love collaborating on fun projects where I have full creative freedom to produce forward-thinking non-conforming brand design like what I had the pleasure of doing for AIKON.”
Interested in partnering with AIKON? Have an existing API that you’d like to transform into a dService? Check out our GitHub repo, and send us an email to be considered to become one of our alpha partners. Current launch partners including HADRON, Inflect, GBOX, SpringRole, and TastyTime to name a few. We’re actively seeking companies with APIs for partnership — both in the blockchain/crypto space and beyond.
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