And so the Mystery Begins...

Have you figured out yet who was the Mystery Speaker this year? ;-)

The Future of Travel: How Mixed Method Research Helped Shape Airbnb Experiences

Hannah will show us a case study of how she utilised user research to improve business and design decisions on a brand new product – Airbnb Trips.

For the past 10 years, Airbnb has changed the way people think about where they’ll stay for their next vacation. But accommodations were never the full vision. When Airbnb decided to expand to offering Experiences, Hannah Pileggi adapted many of the basic methods in the UX research toolkit in order to creatively capture community insight that would help ground more than a year's worth of rapid product development. This talk will highlight examples of applied research—both scrappy and traditional—behind the scenes of Airbnb Experiences.

Designing for Kids is not a Game

The children of today are growing up in a different paradigm than their parents, who might even remember what the world was like before the Internet!

This impacts the way they perceive and interact with the world around them, especially with digital products.

In this talk, Trine will explain how kids develop and learn, and how to design digital products that help them grow rather than dumb them down.

Taking Back Control Over Third-party Content

We have a complex love-hate relationship with the third-party content on our sites, and it has taken a turn for the worse. On the one hand, third-party content often pays the bills. On the other hand, recent developments have increased its “cost.” HTTP/2 means third-party content is even more of a performance burden than before; the weight of that content is taking up an ever larger percentage of our site’s overall bytesize; ad-blockers mean users have had enough; and projects like Google AMP and Facebook Instant Articles mean that embedders feel the same.
Our lack of control over what third parties are doing on our sites is showing. How can we gain it back?

Yoav Weiss explores mitigation tactics as well as a long-term plan to restore sanity to the ecosystem, arguing that we need mechanisms that put developers back in the driver’s seat as well as smarter ad blockers so that responsible third parties can remain a source of income.

A Word to the Wise: Writing Product Copy to Transform Your User Experience

Getting the right words into your product is a process that’s akin to designing with words. Great UX writing isn't a fill-in-the-blanks approach, but a strategy and creative process, just like design and product development.

In this talk, Andrea will be sharing top tips and best practices for making sure your product copy is clear, concise, and consistent. You’ll learn to avoid misleading or confusing wording, write error messages that don’t frustrate your users, and even create delight where and when possible. She'll also share tips on process, organization, and flow, so your design team can create copy that helps your users have the best possible experience. You’ll come away from the talk with ideas and inspiration to create and manage all the copy in your products, from microcopy to onboarding flows.

Design in the Era of the Algorithm

The design and presentation of data is just as important as the underlying algorithm, and designers have an urgent role to play in crafting the emerging generation of AI interfaces.

Designer Josh Clark explores a rich trove of examples—at once entertaining and sobering—to unearth design principles for creating responsible machine-learning applications.

Learn to use AI as design material in your everyday work. Adapt to the machines’ weird, unexpected, or flat-out-wrong conclusions. And above all, scrub data for bias to create the respectful and inclusive world we all want to live in.