UXSA Speaker
Speaker TBC
Nadia Naidoo
Nadia is a service designer with 20+ years in the design industry. Her career has come full circle: starting with web design, diving into coding, mastering customer experience (CX), and now back to her true passion—crafting meaningful services that deliver.
Justin Evans
Arcanum Founder, Experience Design Consultant. Facilitator. Coach. Self-proclaimed geek. Justin has been in the digital industry for 16+ years and started his career as an interior architect designing experiences in a 3D space. His vision for the world is to help make technology invisible by making it more human and natural for anyone to use. Justin also loves to fail, because through failure you learn the best lessons. His mantra to design is to fail early, fail quickly and fail inexpensively.
Gidon Orelowitz
Shaeema Boer
Brandon Tancott
Brandon is the Founder of Webstreet Digital, a full-service digital agency. He is also a Webflow Global Partner and the host of the podcast Navigate the Web. He has held positions as the MD of Boost UK, Communications Director for Business Unite and the MD of Real Success.
Xandor Schiefer
Xandor Schiefer is a developer, but don’t let that fool you. He owns books like “The Elements of Typographic Style” and “Grid Systems in Graphic Design”. He built his first website in ’99, grew up with the industry. He’s spent time working at companies on in-house products and at digital ad agencies before hanging out his shingle as an independent consultant @ Pixel Theory.
Sivan Lapidus
Sivan is a seasoned design leader in financial services and fintech with 20 years of experience across physical and digital experience design. Currently, she is the Senior Design Director for Digital Banking at Absa. Since taking on this role, Sivan has helped Absa’s digital banking grow its user base to over 3 million users, while winning numerous awards. Sivan studied multimedia design, with a focus on how experiences are key to building strong brands. Her academic endeavours culminated with her Master’s thesis “Building Trust Through Authentic, Human Brands‚Äù, which was published in multiple international journals. Sivan is now known for being innovative and fostering intrapreneurship within Absa. She has been a driving force in market-leading innovations. Her work on biometric authentication has seen massive adoption and is used by over 2 million customers to keep their banking safe. Sivan also played a pivotal role in the design and launch of PayShap (rapid payments) in South Africa. Most recently, Sivan played an instrumental role in Absa’s ChatWallet, a first-to-market product that enables Absa and non-Absa customers to create a mobile wallet and bank entirely in WhatsApp. This initiative brings together Sivan’s expertise in payments and her passion for financial inclusion, and is now one of Absa‚Äôs key ESG focus points. Despite her busy schedule and numerous achievements, Sivan mentors designers at all levels in their careers and is committed to building the next generation of design leaders.
Natalie de Canha
Natalie is a proud Portuguese-South African, and passionate product designer and manager. Her design journey started in the User Experience realm, where she quickly learned to leverage design as a powerful medium to help create relevant and meaningful experiences for end users. From there, her role evolved with a deeper focus into digital product and service development. Her core skills center around research and design thinking, wireframing, prototyping, and strategic UX and UI design application. Currently, she focuses her efforts and energy into creating scalable digital products and services for e-commerce retailers, and manages an incredible team of design practitioners to do the same. She has a deep passion for harnessing the power of design to drive business value. By weekend, she’s also a RYT qualified Vinyasa Yoga Instructor who loves a good spreadsheet, has an extensive allergy list, and is always keen for a sunrise gym session!
