Journal tags: presentations

I went to FFConf on Friday. It did me the world of good.

To be honest, I haven’t much felt like venturing out over the past few days since my optimism took a big hit. But then when I do go and interact with people, I’m grateful for it.

Like, when I went out to my usual Wednesday evening traditional Irish music session I was prepared the inevitable discussion of Trump’s election. I was ready to quite clearly let people know that I didn’t want to talk about it. But I didn’t have to. Maybe because everyone else was feeling much the same, we just played and played. It was good.

The session on Thursday was good too. When we chatted, it was about music.

Still, I was ready for the weekend and I wasn’t really feeling psyched up for FFConf on Friday. But once I got there, I was immediately uplifted.

It was so nice to see so many people I hadn’t seen in quite a while. I had the chance to reconnect with people that I had only been hearing from through my RSS reader:

“Terence, I’m really enjoying your sci-fi short stories!”

“Kirsty, I was on tenterhooks when you were getting Mabel!”

(Mabel is an adorable kitty-cat. In hindsight I probably should’ve also congratulated her on getting married. To a human.)

The talks were really good this year. They covered a wide variety of topics.

There was only one talk about “AI” (unlike most conferences these days, where it dominates the agenda). Léonie gave a superb run-down of the different kinds of machine learning and how they can help or hinder accessibility.

Crucially, Léonie began her talk by directly referencing the exploitation and energy consumption inherent in today’s large language models. It took all of two minutes, but it was two minutes more than the whole day of talks at UX Brighton. Thank you, Léonie!

Some of the other talks covered big topics. Life. Death. Meaning. Purpose.

I enjoyed them all, though I often find something missing from discussions about meaning and purpose. Just about everyone agrees that having a life enfused with purpose is what provides meaning. So there’s an understandable quest to seek out what it is that gives you purpose.

But we’re also constantly reminded that every life has intrinsic meaning. “You are enough”, not “you are enough, as long as there’s some purpose to your life.”

I found myself thinking about Winne Lim’s great post on leading a purposeless life. I think about it a lot. It gives me comfort. Instead of assuming that your purpose is out there somewhere and you’ve got to find it, you can entertain the possibility that your life might not have a purpose …and that’s okay.

I know this all sounds like very heavy stuff, but it felt good to be in a room full of good people grappling with these kind of topics. I needed it.

Dare I say it, perhaps my optimism is returning.

I went to the UX Brighton conference yesterday.

The quality of the presentations was really good this year, probably the best yet. Usually there are one or two stand-out speakers (like Tom Kerwin last year), but this year, the standard felt very high to me.

But…

The theme of the conference was UX and “AI”, and I’ve never been more disappointed by what wasn’t said at a conference.

Not a single speaker addressed where the training data for current large language models comes from (it comes from scraping other people’s copyrighted creative works).

Not a single speaker addressed the energy requirements for current large language models (the requirements are absolutely mahoosive—not just for the training, but for each and every query).

My charitable reading of the situation yesterday was that every speaker assumed that someone else would cover those issues.

The less charitable reading is that this was a deliberate decision.

Whenever the issue of ethics came up, it was only ever in relation to how we might use these tools: considering user needs, being transparent, all that good stuff. But never once did the question arise of whether it’s ethical to even use these tools.

In fact, the message was often the opposite: words like “responsibility” and “duty” came up, but only in the admonition that UX designers have a responsibility and duty to use these tools! And if that carrot didn’t work, there’s always the stick of scaring you into using these tools for fear of being left behind and having a machine replace you.

I was left feeling somewhat depressed about the deliberately narrow focus. Maggie’s talk was the only one that dealt with any externalities, looking at how the firehose of slop is blasting away at society. But again, the focus was only ever on how these tools are used or abused; nobody addressed the possibility of deliberately choosing not to use them.

If audience members weren’t yet using generative tools in their daily work, the assumption was that they were lagging behind and it was only a matter of time before they’d get on board the hype train. There was no room for the idea that someone might examine the roots of these tools and make a conscious choice not to fund their development.

There’s a quote by Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen that UX designers like repeating:

Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context. A chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.

But none of the speakers at UX Brighton chose to examine the larger context of the tools they were encouraging us to use.

One speaker told us “Be curious!”, but clearly that curiosity should not extend to the foundations of the tools themselves. Ignore what’s behind the curtain. Instead look at all the cool stuff we can do now. Don’t worry about the fact that everything you do with these tools is built on a bedrock of exploitation and environmental harm. We should instead blithely build a new generation of user interfaces on the burial ground of human culture.

Whenever I get into a discussion about these issues, it always seems to come back ’round to whether these tools are actually any good or not. People point to the genuinely useful tasks they can accomplish. But that’s not my issue. There are absolutely smart and efficient ways to use large language models—in some situations, it’s like suddenly having a superpower. But as Molly White puts it:

The benefits, though extant, seem to pale in comparison to the costs.

There are no ethical uses of current large language models.

And if you believe that the ethical issues will somehow be ironed out in future iterations, then that’s all the more reason to stop using the current crop of exploitative large language models.

Anyway, like I said, all the talks at UX Brighton were very good. But I just wish just one of them had addressed the underlying questions that any good UX designer should ask: “Where did this data come from? What are the second-order effects of deploying this technology?”

Having a talk on those topics would’ve been nice, but I would’ve settled for having five minutes of one talk, or even one minute. But there was nothing.

There’s one possible explanation for this glaring absence that’s quite depressing to consider. It may be that these topics weren’t covered because there’s an assumption that everybody already knows about them, and frankly, doesn’t care.

To use an outdated movie reference, imagine a raving Charlton Heston shouting that “Soylent Green is people!”, only to be met with indifference. “Everyone knows Soylent Green is people. So what?”

UX London 2024 is done …and it was magnificent!

It’s always weird when an event like this moves from being something in the future to something in the past. I’ve spent the year so far fixated on getting the right line-up, getting the word out, and nervously watching the ticket sales (for some reason a lot of people left it to pretty late in the day to secure their spots—not good for my heart!). For months, then weeks, then days, this thing was coming towards me. Then it was done. Now it’s behind me. It feels strange.

I’ve spent the past few days decompressing and thinking back on the event. My initial impression of it has solidified with the addition of some rumination—it was really, really good! The best yet.

I wish I could take the credit for that, but it was all down to the fantastic speakers and my wonderful colleagues who kept things moving flawlessly. All I had to do was get up and stage and introduce the speakers. Easy peasy.

I will say that I am very proud of the line-up I put together. I had a nice mix of well-known voices alongside newcomers.

With some of the speakers, I knew that they’d deliver the goods. I didn’t spend any time fretting over whether people like Emma Boulton, Tom Kerwin or Ben Sauer would be great. I never asked myself whether Brad Frost would have valuable insights into design systems. I mean, does the pope shit in the woods?

But what really blew me away were the people I didn’t know. I hadn’t even met Clarissa Gardner or Benaz Irani before UX London. They’re not exactly fixtures on the conference circuit …yet. They should be. Seriously, I go to a lot of events, and I see a lot of talks, so I don’t offer my praise lightly. Their talks were great!

There were numerous times during UX London 2024 when I thought “More people need to see this!” More people need to see Benaz’s superb talk on the designer alter-ego. More people need to see John’s superb presentation—he put a ton of work into it and it really paid off.

And everyone needs to hear Harry’s blistering call-to-arms. His presentation was brilliant and much-needed. Oh, captain, my captain!

Oh, and needless to say, the closing keynotes on each day were just perfect. Rama, Matt, and Maggie bestowed so much great brain food, it was almost like a mini dConstruct.

I’m so grateful to all the speakers for really bringing their A game. I’m grateful to all my colleagues, especially Louise, who did all the hard work behind the scenes. And I’m really grateful to everyone who came and enjoyed UX London 2024.

Thank you.

It is now exactly five weeks until Patterns Day—just another 35 sleeps!

Everthing is in place for a perfect day of deep dives into design systems. There’ll be eight snappy 30 minute talks—bam, bam, bam!

Here’s the schedule I’ve got planned for the day:

9:00	Registration.
9:45	Jeremy introduces the day.
10:00	Jina delivers the opening keynote.
10:30	Débora talks about the outcomes, lessons and challenges from using design tokens.
11:00	Break.
11:30	Yolijn talks about the relay method for design system governance.
12:00	Geri talks about her journey navigating accessibility in design systems.
12:30	Lunch.
14:00	Richard talks about responsive typography in design systems.
14:30	Samantha talks about getting buy-in for a design system.
15:00	Break.
15:30	Mary talks about transitioning from a single to a multi-brand design system.
16:00	Vitaly delivers the closing keynote.
16:30	Jeremy wraps up the day.
16:45	Have a drink and a geek pub quiz at the Hare And Hounds pub.

I assume you’ve got your ticket already, but if not use the discount code JOINJEREMY to get 10% off the ticket price.

See you there!

Patterns Day is exactly six weeks away—squee!

If you haven’t got your ticket yet, get one now. (And just between you and me, use the discount code JOINJEREMY to get a 10% discount.)

I’ve been talking to the speakers and getting very excited about what they’re going to be covering. It’s shaping up to be the perfect mix of practical case studies and big-picture thinking. You can expect talks on design system governance, accessibility, design tokens, typography, and more.

I’m hoping to have a schedule for the day ready by next week. It’s fun trying to craft the flow of the day. It’s like putting together a set list for a concert. Or maybe I’m just overthinking it and it really doesn’t matter because all the talks are going to be great anyway.

There are sponsors for Patterns Day now too. Thanks to Supernova and Etch you’re going to have bountiful supplies of coffee, tea and pastries throughout the day. Then, when the conference talks are done, we’ll head across the road to the Hare And Hounds for one of Luke Murphy’s famous geek pub quizes, with a bar tab generously provided by Zero Height.

Now, the venue for Patterns Day is beautiful but it doesn’t have enough space to provide everyone with lunch, so you’re going to have an hour and a half to explore some of Brighton’s trendy lunchtime spots. I’ve put together a list of lunch options for you, ordered by proximity to the Duke of York’s. These are all places I can personally vouch for.

Then, after the conference day, and after the pub quiz, there’s Vitaly’s workshop the next day. I will most definitely be there feeding on Vitaly’s knowledge. Get a ticket if you want to join me.

But wait! That’s not all! Even after the conference, and the pub quiz, and the workshop, the nerdy fun continues on the weekend. There’s going to be an Indie Web Camp here in Brighton on the Saturday and Sunday after Patterns Day.

If you’ve been to an Indie Web Camp before, you know how inspiring and fun it is. If you haven’t been to one yet, you should definitely come along. It’s free! If you’ve got your own website, or if you’re even just thinking about having your own website, it’s a great opportunity to meet with like-minded people.

So that’s going to be four days of non-stop good stuff here in Brighton. I’m looking forward to seeing you then!

The line-up for Patterns Day is complete! You’ll be hearing from eight fantastic speakers on March 7th 2024 here in Brighton.

I really like the mix of speakers we’ve got…

Half of the speakers will be sharing what they’ve learned from design systems in their organisations: Débora from LEGO, Mary from the Financial Times, Yolijn from the Dutch government, and Samantha from University College London. That’s a good spread of deep dives.

The other half of the speakers can go broad across design systems in general: Vitaly on design patterns, Rich on typography, Geri on accessibility, and Jina on …well, absolutely everything to do with design systems!

I’m so happy that I could get the line-up to have this mix. If you have any interest in design systems at all—whether it’s as a designer, a developer, a product manager, or anything else—you won’t want to miss this. Early bird tickets are £225.

But wait! That’s not all. If you really want to dive deep into interface design patterns, then stick around. The day after Patterns Day, Vitaly is running a one-day workshop:

In this in-person workshop with Vitaly Friedman, UX consultant and creative lead behind Smashing Magazine, we’ll dive deep into dissecting how to solve complex design problems. Whether you’re working on a complex nested multi-level navigation or creating enterprise grade tables, this workshop will give you the tools you need to excel at your work.

Places are limited. There isn’t room for everyone who’s going to be at Patterns Day, so if you—and your team—want to learn design pattern kung-fu from the master, get your workshop ticket now! Workshop tickets are £445.

UX London 2023 is over.

That feels weird. I’ve spent most of this year planning for this event. It’s been something that’s coming towards me. Now it’s in the rear-view mirror. Surreal.

I’ve talked about this with other conference organisers. Some of them get the post-conference blues. It makes sense. You spend so much time pouring all your energy into something and then one day, suddenly it’s done. No wonder smart folks book some holiday time for the week after a big event.

Luckily for me, the organisation of UX London isn’t all on my shoulders. Far from it. Louise did all the hard work: planning, logistics, execution. All I had to take care of was the line-up.

Before the event, I was already feeling pretty darn happy with the line-up I had assembled. Now that the event is over, I’m feeling even happier. I was blown away.

There were some speakers on the line-up that I already knew would deliver the goods. I’ve seen them speak before. They’re a safe pair of hands. But there were other speakers I had never met before, much less seen them speak. I was pretty sure they’d be great, but I couldn’t be certain.

Well, it turned out that literally everyone was fantastic. I know, I know—that sounds highly improbable. Out of 15 people, no duds? But take it from me, every single one of them was terrific. You kinda had to be there.

Imran, Vim, Daniel, Trine, Vitaly, Mansi, Stephen, Asia, Amy, Paul, Stacey, Ignacia, Stefanie, Hannah, and Dave—thank you, thank you, thank you!

I’ve been getting a heartwarming buzz from reading how much people got out of the event…

Eliza Lawson finished her summary by saying:

So many amazing things to take away from the conference. But I think the main one for me is “I want to do that. I could do that. I’m GOING to do that…one day.”

Anastasiya Korolkova came as part of the scholarship programme:

☺️ Thank you to everyone involved in organizing this remarkable event. Your dedication and hard work created a truly remarkable and enriching experience. I am sincerely grateful and eagerly look forward to what the future holds for UX London.

Jojo Tulip finished their detailed write-up by saying:

Couldn’t recommend UX London enough, it was awesome 😎👍

Jan Henckens said:

A good mix of inspiring talks and practical workshops, top-notch organisation and cool venue meant we had a great time (and we might already want to go back next year 😀)

And I’m equally pleased that the speakers got so much out of the event…

Imran:

Huge thanks to Jeremy Keith for inviting me, and the team at Clearleft for organising a great event.

Trine:

UX London was amazing - full of wonderful UX folks who genuinely care about using their skills to do good.

Mansi:

I bring back with me relationships and ideas that go way beyond the gathering!

I’m going to bask in this post-conference glow for a little while. Then it’s time to start planning the next event…

In just a couple of weeks, I’ll be heading to Bristol for Pixel Pioneers. The line-up looks really, really good …with the glaring exception of the opening talk, which I’ll be delivering. But once that’s done, I’m very much looking forward to enjoying the rest of the day’s talks.

There are still tickets available if you fancy joining me.

This will be my second time speaking at this conference. I spoke at the inaugural conference back in 2017 when I gave a talk called Evaluating Technology. This time my talk is called Declarative Design.

A few weeks back, Oliver asked me some questions about my upcoming talk. I figured I’d post my answers here…

Welcome back to Pixel Pioneers! You return with another keynote - how do you manage to stay so ever-enthusiastic about designing for the web?

Well, I’d say my enthusiasm is mixed with frustration. And that’s always been the case. Just as I’ve always found new things that excite me about the World Wide Web, there are just as many things that upset me.

But that’s okay. Both forces can be motivating. When I find myself writing a blog post or preparing a talk, the impetus might be “This is so cool! Check this out!” or it might be “This is so maddening! What’s happening!?” …or perhaps a mix of both.

But to answer your question, the World Wide Web never stays still so there’s always something to get excited about. Equally, the longer the web exists, the more sense it makes to examine the fundamental bedrock—HTML, accessibility,progressive enhancement—and see how they’re just as important as ever. And that’s also something to get excited about!

Without too many spoilers, what can we expect to take away from your talk?

I’m hoping to provide people with a lens that they can use to examine their tools, processes, and approaches to designing for the web. It’s a fairly crude lens—it divides the world into a binary split that I’ve borrowed from the world of programming; imperative and declarative languages. But it’s a surprisingly thought-provoking angle.

Along the way I’ll also be pointing out some of the incredible things that we can do with CSS now. In the past few years there’s been an explosion in capabilities.

But this won’t be a code-heavy presentation. It’s mostly about the ideas. I’ll be referencing some projects by other people that I’m very excited by.

What other web design and development tools, techniques and technologies are you currently most excited about?

Outside of the world of CSS—which is definitely where a lot of the most exciting developments are happening—I’m really interested in the View Transitions API. If it delivers on its promise, it could be a very useful nail in the coffin of uneccessary single page apps. But I’m a little nervous. Right now the implementation only works for single page apps, which makes it an incentive to use that model. I really, really hope that the multipage version ships soon.

But honestly, I probably get most excited about discovering some aspect of HTML that I wasn’t aware of. Even after all these years the language can still surprise me.

And on the flipside, what bugs you most about the web at the moment?

How much time have you got?

Seriously though, the thing that’s really bugged me for the past decade is the increasing complexity of “modern” frontend development when it isn’t driven by user needs. Yes, I’m talking about JavaScript frameworks like React and the assumption that everything should be a single page app.

Honestly, the mindset became so ubiquitous that I felt like I must be missing something. But no, the situation really has spiralled out of control, much to the detriment of end users.

Luckily we’re starting to see the pendulum swing back. The proponents of trickle-down developer convenience are having to finally admit that it’s bollocks.

I don’t care if the move back to making websites is re-labelled as “isomorphic server-rendered multi-page apps.” As long as we make sensible architectural decisions, that’s all that matters.

What’s next, Jeremy?

Right now I’m curating the line-up for this year’s UX London conference which is the week after Pixel Pioneers. As you know, conference curation is a lot of work, but it’s also very rewarding. I’m really proud of the line-up.

It’s been a while since the last season of the Clearleft podcast. I hope to remedy that soon. It takes a lot of effort to make even one episode, but again, it’s very rewarding.

Back in November of last year I announced that UX London would be returning in 2023 and that I’d be curating the line-up again. That’s where I’ve been putting a lot of my energy over the last six months.

The line-up is complete. If I step back and try to evaluate it objectively, I’ve gotta say …hot damn, that’s a fine roster of speakers!

Imran Afzal, Vimla Appadoo, Daniel Burka, Trine Falbe, Vitaly Friedman, Mansi Gupta, Stephen Hay, Asia Hoe, Amy Hupe, Paul Robert Lloyd, Stacey Mendez, Ignacia Orellana, Stefanie Posavec, Hannah Smith, and David Dylan Thomas.

Take a look at the complete schedule—a terrific mix of thought-provoking talks and practical hands-on workshops.

On day one, you’ve got these talks:

• Designing your design process,
• Thinking differently about digital sustainability,
• Let’s choose empathy,
• The lies we tell ourselves about design systems, and
• What if people weren’t the product? Building a web that loves humanity.

Then on day two:

• The necessity and practice of women-centric design,
• Time team: Documenting decisions and marking milestones,
• User experience beyond screens,
• Can designers save lives? Not by themselves, and
• Ghosts in the machine: AI, design, and ethics.

And that’s just the talks! You’ve also got these four excellent workshops on both days:

• Practical, ethical design,
• Designing for complex UIs,
• Strategies for creating and evolving design systems, and
• Dataviz sketching session.

That’s a lot of great stuff packed into two days!

In case you haven’t guessed, I am very excited about this year’s UX London. I would love to see you there.

As an appreciation for you putting up with my child-like excitement, I’d like to share a discount code with you. You can get 20%—that’s one fifth!—off the ticket price using the code CLEARLEFT20.

But note that the standard ticket pricing ends on Friday, May 26th so use that code in the next week to get the most bang for your buck. After that, there’ll only be last-chance tickets, which cost more.

Looking forward to seeing you at Tobacco Dock on June 22nd and 23rd!

I was up in Edinburgh for the past few days at the Design It; Build It conference.

I was supposed to come back on Saturday but then the train strikes were announced so I changed my travel plans to avoid crossing a picket line, which gave me an extra day to explore Auld Reekie.

I spoke at DIBI last year so this time I was there in a different capacity. I was the host. That meant introducing the speakers and asking them questions after their talks.

I’m used to hosting events now, what with UX London and Leading Design. But I still get nervous beforehand. At least with a talk you can rehearse and practice. With hosting, it’s all about being nimble and thinking on your feet.

I had to pay extra close attention to each talk, scribbling down potential questions to ask. It’s similar to the feeling I get when I’m liveblogging talks.

There were some line-up changes and schedule adjustments along the way, but everything went super smoothly. I pride myself on running a tight ship so the timings were spot-on.

When it came to the questions, I tried to probe under the skin of each presentation. For some talks, that involved talking shop—the finer points of user research or the design process, say. But for the big-picture talks, I made sure to get each speaker to defend their position. So after Dan Makoski’s kumbaya-under-capitalism talk, I gave him a good grilling. Same with Philip Lockwood-Holmes who gave me permission beforehand to be merciless with him.

It was all quite entertaining. Alas, I think I may have put the fear of God into the other speakers who saw me channeling my inner Jeremy Paxman. But they needn’t have worried. I also lobbed some softballs. Like when I asked Levon Sharrow from Patagonia if there was such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism.

I had fun, but I was also aware of that fine line between being clever and being an asshole. Even though part of my role was to play devil’s advocate, I tried to make sure I was never punching down.

All in all, an excellent couple of days spent in good company.

Hosting was hard work, but very rewarding. I’ve come to realise it’s one of those activities that comes relatively easy to me, but it is very hard (and stressful) for others. And I’m pretty gosh-darned good at it too, false modesty bedamned.

So if you’re running an event but the thought of hosting it fills you with dread, we should talk.

I’d like to play it cool when I announce the latest speakers for UX London 2023, like I could be all nonchalant and say, “oh yeah, did I not mention these people are also speaking…?”

But I wouldn’t be able to keep up that façade for longer than a second. The truth is I am excited to the point of skittish gigglyness about this line-up.

Look, I’ll let you explore these speakers for yourself while I try to remain calm and simply enumerate the latest additions…

• Ignacia Orellana, Service design and research consultant,
• Stefanie Posavec, Designer, artist and author, and
• David Dylan Thomas, Author, speaker, filmmaker.

The line-up is almost complete now! Just one more speaker to announce.

I highly recommend you get your UX London ticket if you haven’t already. You won’t want to miss this!

I know I’m being tease, doling out these UX London speaker announcements in batches rather than one big reveal. Indulge me in my suspense-ratcheting behaviour.

Today I’d like to unveil three speakers whose surnames start with the letter H…

• Stephen Hay, Creative Director at Rabobank,
• Asia Hoe, Senior Product Designer, and
• Amy Hupe, Design Systems consultant at Frankly Design.

Just look at how that line-up is coming together! There’ll be just one more announcement and then the roster will be complete.

But don’t wait for that. Grab your ticket now and I’ll see you in London on June 22nd and 23rd!

I am positively giddy with excitement to tell you about some more speakers you can look forward to at UX London 2023:

• Stacey Mendez, Product and Experience Designer,
• Hannah Smith, Director of Operations at the Green Web Foundation,
• Vitaly Friedman, Creative Lead at Smashing Magazine, and
• Trine Falbe, Ethical Design Consultant at Falbe Consulting.

I have more confirmed speakers but I’m going to be a tease and save them for a separate announcement soon. You can expect more of the same: smart, fabulous people with all kinds of design experience that they’re going to share with you at UX London.

But why wait for another speaker announcement? Get your ticket to UX London 2023 now!

Please put your fingers on the desk in front of you and move them up and down rapidly in the manner of a snare drum…

I’m very happy to announce the first four speakers for UX London 2023:

• Imran Afzal, Principal Designer at Co-op Digital,
• Vimla Appadoo, Head of Experience at Culture Shift,
• Daniel Burka, Director of Design at Resolve to Save Lives, and
• Mansi Gupta, Founder of Unconform.

This is shaping up nicely! You can expect some more speaker announcements before too long.

But don’t wait too long to get your ticket—early-bird pricing ends this month on Friday, February 24th. Then the price goes up by £200. If you need to convince your boss, here are some reasons to attend.

I very much look forward to seeing you at Tobacco Dock on June 22nd and 23rd this year!

I am very excited to announce that UX London will be back in 2023!

We’re returning to Tobacco Dock. Save the dates: June 22nd and 23rd.

Wait …that’s only two days. Previously UX London was a three-day event and you could either go for all three days or get a ticket for just one day.

Well, that’s changing. UX London 2023 will be condensed into a two-day event. You get a ticket for both days and everyone shares the experience.

I’m very excited about this! I’m planning to make some other tweaks to the format, but the basic structure of each day remains roughly the same: inspirational talks in the morning followed by hands-on workshops in the afternoon.

As for the who’ll be giving those talks and running those workshops …well, that’s what I’m currently putting together. For the second year in row, I’m curating the line-up. It’s exciting—like a planning a heist, assembling a team of supersmart people with specialised skillsets.

I can’t wait to reveal more. For now though, you can trust me when I say that the line-up is going to be stellar.

If you do trust me, you can get your super early-bird ticket, you’ve got until this Friday, December 2nd.

The super early-bird tickets are an absolute steal at £695 plus VAT. After Friday, you’ll be able to get early-bird tickets for the more reasonable price of £995 plus VAT.

Keep an eye on the UX London website for speaker announcements. I’ll also be revealing those updates here too because, as you can probably tell, I’m positively gleeful about UX London 2023.

See you there!

dConstruct 2022 was great fun. It was also the last ever dConstruct.

If you were there, and you’d like to re-live the magic, the audio from the talks is now available on the dConstruct Archive. Here they are:

• George Oates
• Lauren Beukes
• Daniel Burka
• Sarah Angliss
• Matt Webb
• Seb Lee-Delisle
• Anil Seth

Thanks to some service worker magic, you can select any of those talks for offline listening later.

The audio is also available on Huffduffer on the dConstruct Huffduffer account. Here’s the RSS feed that you can pop into your podcast software of choice.

If you’re more of a visual person, you can watch videos of the slides synced with the audio. They’ve all got captions too (good ones, not just automatically generated).

So have a listen in whichever way you prefer.

Now that I’ve added the audio from the last dConstruct to the dConstruct archive, it feels like the closing scene of Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Roll credits.

I met up with a supersmart programmer friend of mine a little while back. He was describing some work he was doing with React. He was joining up React components. There wasn’t really any problem-solving or debugging—the individual components had already been thoroughly tested. He said it felt more like construction than programming.

My immediate thought was “that should be automated.”

Or at the very least, there should be some way for just about anyone to join those pieces together rather than it requiring a supersmart programmer’s time. After all, isn’t that the promise of design systems and components—freeing us up to tackle the meaty problems instead of spending time on the plumbing?

I thought about that conversation when I was listening to Laurie’s excellent talk in Berlin last month.

Chatting to Laurie before the talk, he was very nervous about the conclusion that he had reached and was going to share: that the time is right for web development to be automated. He figured it would be an unpopular message. Heck, even he didn’t like it.

But I reminded him that it’s as old as the web itself. I’ve seen videos from very early World Wide Web conferences where Tim Berners-Lee was railing against the idea that anyone would write HTML by hand. The whole point of his WorldWideWeb app was that anyone could create and edit web pages as easily as word processing documents. It’s almost an accident of history that HTML happened to be just easy enough—but also just powerful enough—for many people to learn and use.

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed Laurie’s talk. (Except for a weird bit where he dunks on people moaning about “the fundamentals”. I think it’s supposed to be punching up, but I’m not sure that’s how it came across. As Chris points out, fundamentals matter …at least when it comes to concepts like accessibility and performance. I think Laurie was trying to dunk on people moaning about fundamental technologies like languages and frameworks. Perhaps the message got muddled in the delivery.)

I guess Laurie was kind of talking about this whole “no code” thing that’s quite hot right now. Personally, I would love it if the process of making websites could be democratised more. I’ve often said that my nightmare scenario for the World Wide Web would be for its fate to lie in the hands of an elite priesthood of programmers with computer science degrees. So I’m all in favour of no-code tools …in theory.

The problem is that unless they work 100%, and always produce good accessible performant code, then they’re going to be another example of the law of leaky abstractions. If a no-code tool can get someone 90% of the way to what they want, that seems pretty good. But if that person than has to spend an inordinate amount of time on the remaining 10% then all the good work of the no-code tool is somewhat wasted.

Funnily enough, the person who coined that law, Joel Spolsky, spoke right after Laurie in Berlin. The two talks made for a good double bill.

(I would link to Joel’s talk but for some reason the conference is marking the YouTube videos as unlisted. If you manage to track down a URL for the video of Joel’s talk, let me know and I’ll update this post.)

In a way, Joel was making the same point as Laurie: why is it still so hard to do something on the web that feels like it should be easily repeatable?

He used the example of putting an event online. Right now, the most convenient way to do it is to use a third-party centralised silo like Facebook. It works, but now the business model of Facebook comes along for the ride. Your event is now something to be tracked and monetised by advertisers.

You could try doing it yourself, but this is where you’ll run into the frustrations shared by Joel and Laurie. It’s still too damn hard and complicated (even though we’ve had years and years of putting events online). Despite what web developers tell themselves, making stuff for the web shouldn’t be that complicated. As Trys put it:

We kid ourselves into thinking we’re building groundbreakingly complex systems that require bleeding-edge tools, but in reality, much of what we build is a way to render two things: a list, and a single item. Here are some users, here is a user. Here are your contacts, here are your messages with that contact. There ain’t much more to it than that.

And yet here we are. You can either have the convenience of putting something on a silo like Facebook, or you can have the freedom of doing it yourself, indie web style. But you can’t have both it seems.

This is a criticism often levelled at the indie web. The barrier to entry to having your own website is too high. It’s a valid criticism. To have your own website, you need to have some working knowledge of web hosting and at least some web technologies (like HTML).

Don’t get me wrong. I love having my own website. Like, I really love it. But I’m also well aware that it doesn’t scale. It’s unreasonable to expect someone to learn new skills just to make a web page about, say, an event they want to publicise.

That’s kind of the backstory to the project that Joel wanted to talk about: the block protocol. (Note: it has absolutely nothing to do with blockchain—it’s just an unfortunate naming collision.)

The idea behind the project is to create a kind of crowdsourced pattern library—user interfaces for creating common structures like events, photos, tables, and lists. These patterns already exist in today’s silos and content management systems, but everyone is reinventing the wheel independently. The goal of this project is make these patterns interoperable, and therefore portable.

At first I thought that would be a classic /927 situation, but I’m pleased to see that the focus of the project is not on formats (we’ve been there and done that with microformats, RDF, schema.org, yada yada). The patterns might end up being web components or they might not. But the focus is on the interface. I think that’s a good approach.

That approach chimes nicely with one of the principles of the indie web:

UX and design is more important than protocols, formats, data models, schema etc. We focus on UX first, and then as we figure that out we build/develop/subset the absolutely simplest, easiest, and most minimal protocols and formats sufficient to support that UX, and nothing more. AKA UX before plumbing.

That said, I don’t think this project is a cure-all. Interoperable (portable) chunks of structured content would be great, but that’s just one part of the challenge of scaling the indie web. You also need to have somewhere to put those blocks.

Convenience isn’t the only thing you get from using a silo like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Medium. You also get “free” hosting …until you don’t (see GeoCities, MySpace, and many, many more).

Wouldn’t it be great if everyone had a place on the web that they could truly call their own? Today you need to have an uneccesary degree of technical understanding to publish something at a URL you control.

I’d love to see that challenge getting tackled.

Today is the first day of UX London 2022 …and I’m not there. Stoopid Covid.

I’m still testing positive although I’m almost certainly near the end of my infection. But I don’t want to take any chances. Much as I hate to miss out on UX London, I would hate passing this on even more. So my isolation continues.

Chris jumped in at the last minute to do the hosting duties—thanks, Chris!

From the buzz I’m seeing on Twitter, it sounds like everything is going just great without me, which is great to see. Still, I’m experiencing plenty of FOMO—even more than the usual levels of FOMO I’d have when there’s a great conference happening that I’m not at.

To be honest, nearly all of my work on UX London was completed before the event. My number one task was putting the line-up together, and I have to say, I think I nailed it.

If I were there to host the event, it would mostly be for selfish reasons. I’d get a real kick out of introducing each one of the superb speakers. I’d probably get very tedious, repeatedly saying “Oh, you’re going to love this next one!” followed by “Wasn’t that great‽”

But UX London isn’t about me. It’s about the inspiring talks and practical workshops.

I wish I were there to experience it in person but I can still bask in the glow of a job well done, hearing how much people are enjoying the event.

I’m standing on a huge stage in a giant hangar-like room already filled with at least a thousand people. More are arriving. I’m due to start speaking in a few minutes. But there’s a problem with my laptop. It connects to the external screen, then disconnects, then connects, then disconnects. The technicians are on the stage with me, quickly swapping out adaptors and cables as they try to figure out a fix.

This is a pretty standard stress dream for me. Except this wasn’t a dream. This was happening for real at the giant We Are Developers World Congress in Berlin last week.

In the run-up to the event, the organisers had sent out emails about providing my slide deck ahead of time so it could go on a shared machine. I understand why this makes life easier for the people running the event, but it can be a red flag for speakers. It’s never quite the same as presenting from your own laptop with its familiar layout of the presentation display in Keynote.

Fortunately the organisers also said that I could present from my own laptop if I wanted to so that’s what I opted for.

One week before the talk in Berlin I was in Amsterdam for CSS Day. During a break between talks I was catching up with Michelle. We ended up swapping conference horror stories around technical issues (prompted by some of our fellow speakers having issues with Keynote on the brand new M1 laptops).

Michelle told me about a situation where she was supposed to be presenting from her own laptop, but because of last-minute technical issues, all the talks were being transferred to a single computer via USB sticks.

“But the fonts!” I said. “Yes”, Michelle responded. Even though she had put the fonts on the USB stick, things got muddled in the rush. If you open the Keynote file before installing the fonts, Keynote will perform font substitution and then it’s too late. This is exactly what happened with Michelle’s code examples, messing them up.

“You know”, I said, “I was thinking about having a back-up version of my talks that’s made entirely out of images—export every slide as an image, then make a new deck by importing all those images.”

“I’ve done that”, said Michelle. “But there isn’t a quick way to do it.”

I was still thinking about our conversation when I was on the Eurostar train back to England. I had plenty of time to kill with spotty internet connectivity. And that huge Berlin event was less than a week away.

I opened up the Keynote file of the Berlin presentation. I selected File, Export to, Images.

Then I created a new blank deck ready for the painstaking work that Michelle had warned me about. I figured I’d have to drag in each image individually. The presentation had 89 slides.

But I thought it was worth trying a shortcut first. I selected all of the images in Finder. Then I dragged them over to the far left column in Keynote, the one that shows the thumbnails of all the slides.

It worked!

Each image was now its own slide. I selected all 89 slides and applied my standard transition: a one second dissolve.

That was pretty much it. I now had a version of my talk that had no fonts whatsoever.

If you’re going to try this, it works best if don’t have too many transitions within slides. Like, let’s say you’ve got three words that you introduce—by clicking—one by one. You could have one slide with all three words, each one with its own build effect. But the other option is to have three slides: each one like the previous slide but with one more word added. If you use that second technique, then the exporting and importing will work smoothly.

Oh, and if you have lots and lots of notes, you’ll have to manually copy them over. My notes tend to be fairly minimal—a few prompts and the occasional time check (notes that say “5 minutes” or “10 minutes” so I can guage how my pacing is going).

Back to that stage in Berlin. The clock is ticking. My laptop is misbehaving.

One of the other speakers who will be on later in the day was hoping to test his laptop too. It’s Håkon. His presentation includes in-browser demos that won’t work on a shared machine. But he doesn’t get a chance to test his laptop just yet—my little emergency has taken precedent.

“Luckily”, I tell him, “I’ve got a backup of my presentation that’s just images to avoid any font issues.” He points out the irony: we spent years battling against the practice of text-as-images on the web and now here we are using that technique once again.

My laptop continues to misbehave. It connects, it disconnects, connects, disconnects. We’re going to have to run the presentation from the house machine. I’m handed a USB stick. I put my images-only version of the talk on there. I’m handed a clicker (I can’t use my own clicker with the house machine). I’m quickly ushered backstage while the MC announces my talk, a few minutes behind schedule.

It works. It feels a little strange not being able to look at my own laptop, but the on-stage monitors have the presentation display including my notes. The unfamiliar clicker feels awkward but hopefully nobody notices. I deliver my talk and it seems to go over well.

I think I’ll be making image-only versions of all my talks from now on. Hopefully I won’t ever need them, but just knowing that the backup is there is reassuring.

Mind you, if you’re the kind of person who likes to fiddle with your slides right up until the moment of presenting, then this technique won’t be very useful for you. But for me, not being able to fiddle with my slides after a certain point is a feature, not a bug.

The line-up for UX London is now complete!

Two thematically-linked talks have been added to day one. Emma Parnell will be talking about the work she did with NHS Digital on the booking service for Covid-19 vaccinations. Videha Sharma—an NHS surgeon!—will be talking about co-designing and prototyping in healthcare.

There’s a bunch of new additions to day three. Amir Ansari will be talking about design systems in an enterprise setting and there’ll be two different workshops on design systems from John Bevan and Julia Belling.

But don’t worry; if design systems aren’t your jam, you’ve got options. Also on day three, Alastair Somerville will be getting tactile in his workshop on sensory UX. And Trenton Moss will be sharing his mind-control tricks in his workshop, “How to sell in your work to anyone.”

You can peruse the full schedule at your leisure. But don’t wait too long before getting your tickets. Standard pricing ends in ten days on Friday, June 3rd.

And don’t forget, you get quite a discount when you buy five or more tickets at a time so bring the whole team. UX London should be your off-site.