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UX Australia 2025: Professional Development for Design Professionals and Leaders

August 27-28, 2025 | ACMI Melbourne and Online
In-person & Streaming | 21 Sessions | 2 Days

UX Australia 2025 brings together Australia’s leading design practitioners for two intensive days focused on the most pressing challenges shaping our industry. The program is carefully curated by Steve Baty, with sessions from experts across technology, healthcare, government, and cultural sectors, we’ll deliver actionable strategies for navigating AI integration, scaling inclusive design, and elevating UX’s strategic influence.

Here’s some of the key topics and areas we’ll be covering.

AI & Technology Integration

UX Australia provides critical guidance on responsibly integrating AI into design practice while maintaining human agency and design quality.

Opening Keynote: Over-reliance and deskilling: 2 long-term AI problems
Christopher Noessel, Design Principal
AI promises great benefits but introduces serious risks. Chris will address the challenges of over-reliance (when users trust AI output too much) and deskilling (when users lose capabilities handed off to AI). Through examples from popular culture including Bluey and Little Britain, he’ll demonstrate practical design patterns to mitigate these risks while preserving human agency in user experiences.

(Re)Designing Research: How AI is shaping research practices
Stephanie Moss, Head of Design and Research Operations, SEEK
Emerging technology is rapidly transforming research practices, bringing both challenges and opportunities. This session provides practical exploration of how AI is reshaping research methodologies, the quality frameworks needed to maintain standards, and how researcher roles are evolving in AI-augmented environments.

Designing for Spatial Computing & the Apple Vision Pro
Oliver Weidlich, Director of Design & Innovation, Contxtual
A year after the Apple Vision Pro launch, amazing enterprise and consumer applications are exploring new ways to combine physical and digital worlds. Oliver shares key design guidelines and great examples from Australia and globally, plus Contxtual’s experience designing their launch-day app “Day Ahead” and their vision for everyday spatial computing.

The Death of the User: UX in a Fully Personalised World
Tori Sanderson, Managing Director, Avian
UX has always been about finding patterns and designing shared experiences. But what happens when every experience is individually tailored and generated? As AI accelerates hyper-personalisation, the concept of “the user” as shared archetype starts dissolving. This session explores what UX means when every interface is unique, every journey is generated on-the-fly, and every person engages with an entirely different product.

LLMs in government service design
Harry Court, UX Designer, myLot
Government service design has incredibly effective principles and patterns, but complex services like statutory planning have historically resisted these approaches. At myLot, they’ve made progress using large-language models to handle the variables in questions like “can I build a shed in my backyard?” This brings new design challenges around making LLM affordances clear while leveraging proven government service patterns.

Research Excellence & Strategic Discovery

Modern UX professionals need sophisticated research capabilities that balance traditional rigor with modern agility and business alignment.

The Continuous Discovery paradox: rigour vs. agility
Erietta Sapounakis, Head of UX/Product Design, Stan
Continuous Discovery uses frequent, small research activities throughout product development—essentially an agile approach to product research. While praised by product practitioners, UX researchers worry it could lead to less rigorous research and devalue their expertise. This talk critically evaluates Continuous Discovery against traditional UX research, sharing practical learnings from a pilot implementation and considerations for whether this method fits your team and product.

Beyond the Method: Ethnography as a Mindset
Bec Purser & Sophie Goodman, Transport for NSW
What if we saw ethnography not just as a research tool but as a way of thinking that could fundamentally reshape design and strategy? This session explores embracing an ethnographic mindset rooted in deep curiosity, empathy, and critical reflection to move beyond surface-level insights. Drawing on real-world examples, they’ll show how this mindset leads to more innovative, inclusive, and human-centered solutions.

Beyond User Needs: Speaking the Language of Business to Drive Decisions
Ruth Ellison, Research Director, Propel Design
Many UX practitioners excel at understanding users but struggle with strategic buy-in. Valuable insights often fail to influence decisions because they aren’t framed using business impact language. This session focuses on the crucial mindset shift to become a strategic partner, covering three core skills: building business acumen, storytelling with data, and proactive alignment seeking to identify where user needs fuel business goals.

How Futures Design practices can strengthen research output
Sheree Hannah, Design Director, Designit
Sheree Hannah explores how UX research can draw inspiration from futures design practices to transform insights into narrative-driven stories that engage stakeholders and team members. Through global case studies and Designit’s work, she’ll address the common challenge researchers face of ensuring insights don’t get disregarded. By leveraging design fiction, speculative prototyping, and visual storytelling, research findings become powerful catalysts for empathy, innovation, and meaningful change.

Inclusive & Accessible Design

Building truly inclusive products requires both technical expertise and cultural change leadership, moving beyond compliance to create genuinely accessible experiences.

Keynote: Designing Beyond Visibility: Neurodivergent Perspectives and the Hidden Layers of UX
Matija (Tia) Squire, Director, Untapped Talent
Hidden disabilities like autism and ADHD are often overlooked in mainstream UX conversations, yet they shape how millions experience the world. Drawing on her lived experience as a neurodivergent person and global inclusive design work, Tia explores how UX can move beyond surface-level accessibility to deeper cognitive and sensory inclusion. Through storytelling and strategy, she challenges designers to reimagine usability and safety for those whose needs are often masked or misunderstood.

Designing for Every Australian: Trauma-Informed and Emotionally Accessible Digital Experiences
Taryn D’Souza, Principal UX & Service Design Consultant
Australia ranks among the highest in youth bullying within OECD nations, profoundly affecting mental health in rural and remote communities. This session explores how trauma-informed design bridges the gap between standard accessibility guidelines and complex realities faced by Australians dealing with bullying, addiction, and mental health challenges. Drawing from work with a leading Australian mental health charity and remote user research across Western Australia and Queensland, it demonstrates embedding empathy and trauma awareness into digital experiences.

Practical tips to integrate inclusive design into your everyday work
Viv Dinh, Principal Product Designer
How often do you consider disabilities, language, culture, age, and different experiences in your design process? This presentation demonstrates how easy it is to incorporate inclusive design practices into everyday work—even when accessibility isn’t a primary organizational focus. Viv shares insights from designing for users with disabilities, low tech-savviness, and non-native English speakers, exploring common design patterns that may not be fully accessible and offering alternative solutions for immediate implementation.

Auslan and Access in UX
Shawn Phua, Founder, Auslanism
This Auslanism Workshop session focuses on Auslan and access, exploring barriers and solutions for Deaf and Hard of Hearing individuals in Australia. Key topics include Auslan’s importance as a primary language for many Deaf Australian UX users, challenges accessing interpreters and communication supports, NDIS funding limitations, business responsibilities for Deaf-friendly access, and strategies for self-advocacy and improving accessibility in workplaces, education, and public services.

Inclusive design for audiences with alcohol and other drug challenges
Ally Tutkaluk, UX and Digital Specialist, Lives Lives Well/Queensland University of Technology
Inclusive design is lauded as UX best practice, yet certain groups’ needs in navigating digital products remain widely unknown—even when those products may save lives. People with alcohol and other drug challenges experience mental, emotional, and practical impacts affecting how they access and use digital products. Drawing on experience as both UX designer at a mental health charity and PhD candidate in inclusive design, Ally explores why inclusive design implementation faces systemic barriers.

Designing for people who’ve been let down before
Billie-Mae Kennedy, Head of Design, Pragma Partners
Research isn’t neutral—especially when working with people harmed by the very systems you’re trying to improve. This talk explores respectful, trauma-aware research with communities who’ve experienced violence, exclusion, or failure from government and services. It’s about rebuilding trust, communicating safety, and showing up differently as a researcher. Billie-Mae shares lessons from work with people with disability, survivors, and others often excluded from policy conversations, including what not to do and what real co-design looks like when power and history are present.

Leadership & Service Design

Strategic professionals need capabilities for driving organizational change, building influence without formal authority, and creating human-centered systems at scale.

Fireside Chat: Leadership and Design Practice
Seb Chan, CEO, ACMI
Seb Chan joins Steve Baty for an intimate conversation exploring the intersection of leadership and design practice, offering insights for professionals ready to step into strategic roles and drive organizational change through design thinking.

From Governance to Ground: Service Design Without Power
Dr. Anita Gisch, Managing Director, Gisch Consulting
What if you can see something is broken but don’t have power to fix it? Drawing on 20+ years working with professional services firms navigating complexity and cultural inertia, Anita shares what actually works when trying to improve systems without formal mandate. The session unpacks common misconceptions, reframes workplace influence, and explores how people, strategy, and systems interact beneath the surface, ending with 10 practical ways to lead service design without power.

Scaling Design in Healthcare SaaS: Dealing with the past, Building for the Future
Lucas Arundell, General Manager of Design & Customer Research, Magentus
Lucas shares unique challenges and opportunities of expanding design practice within a company built on decades of healthcare software success. Like many organizations undergoing transformation, it’s not simple to create products with a blank slate while supporting legacy products and helping users benefit from modern technology—cloud migration, web and mobile over desktop platforms. With AI’s growing importance in healthcare, ensuring user needs are understood and supported in clinically safe ways becomes crucial for building trust between creators and end users.

Soft Power: Designing the Infrastructure of Care
Dr. Lena Belin, Strategic Design Advisor
Care is often seen as personal value or soft add-on—but what if it’s actually missing infrastructure in how we design systems? Many systems fail not because they’re broken, but because they were never built to hold the full weight of human need. Lena introduces Soft Power—seeing care not as sentiment, but as infrastructure: an invisible layer shaping how people experience safety, trust, and belonging. Drawing from work across tech, government, and social sectors, she’ll explore why care is central to sustainable design and introduce frameworks for designing Infrastructure of Care across four dimensions.

Lessons from Designing for Small Communities
Kiri James, Business Designer, Mimosa Partners
As globalisation presents new challenges, what insights can we gain from designing for smaller, close-knit communities? Kiri reflects on her experiences as a business designer living in Margaret River, exploring how community helps shape organizational accountability and what larger organizations can learn from small community dynamics.

Designing for belonging: finding and keeping close people in the modern world
Ryan Hubbard, Director, Hinterland Lab
How do we think about belonging as a structural issue in modern society? How do we better design experiences, services, and our own lives to increase belonging? This session explores worldwide trends and three big ideas from Hinterland’s design research project that has been featured in the New York Times, Atlantic, and Wall Street Journal.

The Conference Experience

It’s not just about the talks either, there’s two days to connect with fellow attendees and speakers.

Format & Networking: A single track ensures every attendee experiences the full program, with a networking reception right after the sessions on Wednesday the 27th, structured breaks designed for substantive conversations, and representation from diverse industries including technology, healthcare, government, education, and cultural sectors. It’s fully catered, with world class coffee, so you can get the very most from your time there.

Accessibility & Inclusion: There’s Live captioning for all sessions, comprehensive dietary accommodations, and design considerations for diverse attendee needs.

Professional Development Value: UX Australia has always been about immediately applicable insights, rather than vague talks about the future. This year features timely, immediately actionable insights for AI integration, advanced research methodologies, inclusive design implementation strategies, and strategic communication skills essential in an evolving industry.

Pricing & Options:

• In-person: $1,195 (includes full catering, networking reception, session videos)
• Streaming: $595 (includes live access, interactive chat, on-demand video access)
• Hundreds off for for freelancers (that’s anyone paying their own way), education professionals, early career practitioners, and non-profit employees

Full schedule and detailed session information: webdirections.org/uxaustralia/schedule.php

UX Australia 2025 represents a critical professional development opportunity for design practitioners ready to lead in an era of technological transformation and increased emphasis on inclusive, human-centered solutions.