Controlling what your users see, and achieving good performance when it comes to page speed and response times, all influence how effective your web sites are. Getting it right can be hugely profitable. Getting it wrong can be costly for us all.

There have never been more technologies and approaches available to us as developers and technical architects. Trends and popularity and “best practices” seem to change all the time, so how do we choose the right approach for our projects?

In this talk, we’ll explore a number of popular techniques for populating and delivering content into web views for our users. We’ll compare different rendering models to help us understand the benefits and limitations of each one, and we’ll build examples with different tools to show how our choices influence the developer experience, user experience, and environmental impact of our projects.

In Germany, designers often refer to the DAU, the “dümmster anzunehmender User” or the "stupidest potential user,” but is it really this simple?

Unpacking the idea that intelligence is costly and often conserved, we will dive into why users may appear less intelligent in various contexts. From environmental distractions to cognitive overloads, we'll explore the myriad reasons that can hinder a user’s ability to interact effectively with software.

Together we will explore practical methods to design interfaces that minimise cognitive strain. Illustrated by real-world examples and best (and some bad) practices, we’ll try to make your view of your users capabilities a little more empathetic and optimistic.

Curious about what goes into building accessible data visualizations? What best practices developers can follow? Wondering about effective testing methods and understanding user interaction with your visualizations? And how exactly does prioritizing accessibility lead to better graphs?

Sarah has the answers. Join them as they share insights on constructing accessible and inclusive data visualizations, testing approaches, and optimizing the user experience.

Sarah will also give a workshop on Practical Accessibility — Sold Out.

More urgently than ever, companies need to innovate. From inspiring the organisation around a shared vision, to building competitive advantage and securing enduring success, innovation is the pulse of a perennial company. It’s also top of mind for your senior stakeholders: 82% of leaders say a company will become extinct within five years if it fails to innovate.

In this talk, Emma will explore how an organisation’s knowledge is its portal to innovation… but this won’t be the usual discussion of insight repositories. We’ll examine how knowledge management is as much about people as it is about insights, and how everyone in the organisation, not just researchers, play a fundamental role in knowledge creation.

We’ve spent a decade over-indulging in JavaScript, bingeing on NPM packages, and routinely being mis-sold that this week’s new framework or library is the remedy to all our performance and productivity woes. Attempting shortcuts only makes this a constant battle – we need to make a change.

Thankfully, the reality of poor performing solutions can no longer be hidden. With the introduction of Interaction to Next Paint (INP) this March, the trio of Core Web Vitals is now truly useful for measuring any kind of website or web application.

Let’s find out how INP identifies our bottlenecks, what it means to design for performance, and how the Web Platform can help us leave the hype cycle of in-vogue ‘solutions’ behind and focus on building longer-term skills that allow us to deliver better experiences for our users.

Ryan will also be running a workshop on Web Performance!

Designing for accessibility sucks 😩! It is limiting creative expression, making things look ugly, and is mostly for the blind anyway. But is that really true? How can sublime typography and accessibility go hand in hand?

In this talk, Oliver confronts himself with his own misconceptions as a designer and type nerd. Is 16 px the required minimum font size? Is high contrast necessary? Should you really avoid serif typefaces? And is Comic Sans best for dyslexic readers (while being the worst for everyone else)?

In a fun, engaging session, Oliver takes an often overwhelming and fuzzy topic for creatives and breaks it down. You will walk away inspired 🤩 with practical guidelines on how you can set the text of your next design project beautifully accessible, to reach and convince more people.

This Mystery speaker is a rad raccoon. We can't wait to see them play on stage.

We, as designers, are incredibly powerful. We know how to sell information, services, and products so well. And we can use that for good or evil. For evil, you ask? The web has a tremendous environmental footprint, which only keeps increasing. With the online shops we’re building, we also add to massive consumption and nature exploitation.

On top of that, over 60% of today’s digital products aren’t accessible, and many people don’t feel seen or represented. Equality (in many different shapes and forms) is lacking heavily. Lastly, mental health takes a huge toll from our social media platforms, websites, applications, and online shops. So maybe design can be evil, and we are the designers behind all this.

In her talk, Sandy focuses on ecological sustainability and its correspondence with accessibility, diversity, equality, and mental health. She’ll show how lightweight design, positive behavior psychology, healthy eCommerce, raising awareness, and more can shape our design industry into something better.

A practitioner’s guide to Zenko Mapping, a framework that separates and examines the interplay between the social and material dimensions of a design process. With client examples drawn from over the last decade of work, and a new systemic version which creates a template for a holistic Strategic Design process, this talk will also (trigger warning) feature quite a lot about gardens.

The rapid expansion of Generative AI is changing how we work, how we collaborate, and what we create. The window is rapidly closing for us to take a thoughtful and collective approach to evaluate what interaction design should look like in this new medium. How do we remain human-centered as AI becomes more agentive? How must our approach to trust, friction, and personalization adapt? And how can designers, engineers, and product leaders work together to create and evaluate these experiences at scale?

In this talk, Emily will share her experience leading teams shaping AI experiences, her observations on emerging AiUX patterns and principles, and practical takeaways on how to rapidly define, evaluate, and ship AI products at scale.

It seems like there’s always a hot new library or framework promising great things. But people often forget about the pain and effort required to move from an old technology to a new one. How long will it take? If you finish, will it be worth it? And if you don’t, could it leave you in a worse place than where you started?

Drawing from my experience of the Typescript migration we recently completed at Monzo I’ll take you through some of the different outcomes of technical migrations and the things we learned along the way.

Ever felt like designers and developers speak different languages? Well, it’s time to bridge that gap! Join us as we dive into the world of design tokens. We’ll explore how design tokens can streamline workflows, ensure consistency, and make both sides of the creative spectrum sing in perfect harmony. Whether you’re a designer, developer, or somewhere in between, this talk will equip you with the knowledge and practical tips to create a seamless, collaborative process.