About us
Learn about UXHI, Hawaiʻi's home for aloha-centered design. Founded in the summer of 2021, we are a female-founded volunteer-run organization that acts as the go-to resource for UX in the state. Our primary initiatives include our annual UXHI Conference, our State of UX Report, our ongoing events, and community of over 470 UX practitioners who share feedback and best practices with each other via our dedicated Slack channel.
Our mission is to champion and elevate aloha-centered design
Aloha-centered design applies Hawaiʻi's values of care, reciprocity, and respect for place to how we design for people.Learn more → in Hawaiʻi by developing practitioners, building community, and connecting organizations with our craft.
Our approach
From UX to aloha-centered design
What is aloha-centered design?
Aloha-centered design is our Hawaiʻi-rooted approach to human-centered design. Built from foundations of UX, and grounded in the values of our home.
Where UX and human-centered design generally just ask us to design for the user, aloha-centered design is more expansive than that. It asks us to design with aloha: a heartfelt care for the people who'll use what you build, their culture, where the solution takes place, and the communities involved and impacted.
In practice, that means grounding our work in four things:
- People
- Every design decision starts with genuine care for the humans affected by it. We design with people, inviting them into the process, not just studying them from a distance.
- Culture
- We honor local knowledge as expertise, not anecdote. We design with respect for what they already know, not importing frameworks wholesale.
- Community
- We believe in designing through relationship, not in isolation. Building pilina with the people and communities our work touches is core to our approach.
- Place
- Context matters. What works in one place doesn't always translate to another, and the land, history, and people who live there shape what good design looks like.
UX remains our professional foundation. The skills, methods, and rigor don't change. Aloha-centered design is our distinctive point of view on how and why we practice it here.
Who we are
UXHI is a female-founded community organization whose mission is to connect and elevate the field of human-centered design for the people of Hawai'i.
Founders
Board Members
Community & Events
UXHI Conference
Professional Development
Research & Industry Partnerships
Get in touch
Whether you have a question, an idea, or something you want to build with us, we read every message and we'll get back to you.
Looking to join the community instead? Becoming a member is free and gets you into our Slack, our member directory, and our monthly events email.