After three years without in-person events, we are excited to welcome you back with an invigorating opening keynote: Bridging the World through Cross-Cultural Creativity & Innovation, by one of the Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business, Yiying Lu.

In this talk, Yiying Lu integrates her ten years of experience in the Art, Technology, and Business world. She uses bridges as a metaphor to inspire and empower audiences to be global citizens to bridge divides, bring people together, and engage with cultures from around the world. As Yiying shares her experiences and design case studies that make you cry — and laugh, you will discover:

• Bridging Function & Fun: her story about being the artist of the “Twitter Fail Whale,” and Web 2.0 icon seen by millions; and her cross-cultural redefinition and a new mindset about “Fail,” which enables and empowers you to look beyond the conventional meaning of failure, encourage and inspire you to create something new
• Bridging Tech & Art: her creative journey of creating the Dumpling 🥟 Boba Tea🧋emojis used by billions of people
• Bridging East & West: her creative process behind the localization campaign for a global company Disney in its new market, China, which successfully recruit 100,000 new employees for its opening in Disney Shanghai
• Bridging Business & Culture: her design process by using creative building blocks — colour, typography, and iconography that helped make localised identities for a global VC firm in India & Korea that transcend linguistic barriers
• Bridging Work & Life: her effort during the pandemic helping working professionals alleviate stresses and illuminating purposeful and community-driven activity from evolving remote work circumstances

Yiying is also our 2022 official Creative Director for Web Directions Summit, where she created the Sydney Harbour Bridge as part of her “Bridges around the World” Art project. She believes innovation comes from learning and bridging the gaps from the seemingly opposite sides with respect and understanding of both sides. This way, we can truly generate new business & cultural values that are key to benefit our future.

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The rise and rise of a new class “generative AI” applications perform an astonishing array of tasks: writing press releases and blocks of code, crafting commercial-quality art, simulations of lifelike animations of the human form, even spinning out works of cinema - all from a text prompt. Generative AI raises ethical, legal and technical questions about both ownership and the role of human creativity in the mid 21st century. Will these tools serve us - or replace us?

Join Mark Pesce in a freeform and interactive conversation with domain experts in art, intellectual property, economics and artificial intelligence, to learn from them how they see our generative future. Bring your hardest questions, and your thorniest dilemmas. We may not solve them - but we’ll get to think them through together.

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Information overload, shrinking attention span, anxiety, stress, disappointment, eyestrain, sleep disorders, depression, fear, social comparison, bullying, loneliness, and addiction are some of the emotions users experience while using technology products. As creators, we are tasked to navigate the tightrope between commerce and culture and create a new product or service under extreme uncertainty and stress. A joyful mindset empowers designers to have rich and fulfilling careers and lives by creating meaningful value for users. Let me show you how.

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I'll talk about the impact of tech on us—our communities, our environments, our places—via the new and old forms of shared infrastructures that tech can create, or diminish, and how they in turn embody, and shape, what we stand for as communities, societies. These are 'social infrastructures', such as streets, libraries, parks, playgrounds and the like, but also the 'increasingly social' infrastructures of energy, water, waste, mobility and so on, as well as new understandings of nature-based technologies, shared spaces, shared housing, shared resources. These new and old forms can address our shared systemic challenges, but this requires new forms of interdisciplinary design practice, drawing from UX and service design as much as architecture and urbanism, as well as innovative modes, and increasingly by public sector and governments, as much as private sector. I'll draw from project work all over the world, but also locate it firmly in an Australian context, including the work of Melbourne School of Design as a 'design school for the 21st century'.

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There are multiple modes of working with data in React, from client-side fetching, to server-side fetching, to React 18's new concurrent features, and even incremental-static-regeneration.

This talk demystifies how React apps consume and use data, and will leave developers more confident about working with I/O in their React apps.

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Redux is one of the core pieces of the React development ecosystem. But just because it's a standard doesn't mean it's the right fit for every occasion. In this talk, the speaker tells us why her company is moving away from Redux as a tool for state management and what are other strategies they use for the same.

In this talk, the user talks about the disadvantages of Redux and some cases in which it's not a good fit for the state management of a React project. Depending on the use case, alternatives for Redux include the useState hook, React Query to handle data fetching, and React Contexts to share data that are required by many components within an application. Each of these is explained with examples.

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Well, this is embarrassing. Having spent a decade shifting code from the server to the browser - all in the name of building faster, more usable apps - it looks like we might have taken things a bit too far. We’ve started doing things ourselves that the browser can give us for free, and are sometimes even degrading the user experience in the process.

As a reaction to this, we’re seeing the rise of frameworks like Remix and NextJS, and even the introduction of server-side components to React itself. These aim to adjust the balance between server-side rendering (SSR) and running code on the client-side and - hopefully - improve both the user and developer experience.

Of course, all of these new technologies raise questions of their own. For example:

• What is the difference between them? What are the benefits of one over another?
• How mature are they? What are the risks of adopting them now?
• Is there anything we can’t do with these frameworks that we could do with pure client-side Javascript?
• I’m using client-side library <X>, will it work with these technologies?
• Should we just have stuck with writing PHP all along?

This talk will attempt to answer some of these questions. It will not be advocating one particular framework over another. Instead, it will be a clear-eyed assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of each. Nor will it be saying that we should always use SSR. Instead, we’ll examine the fundamental technical constraints involved in delivering performant web applications, and in doing so get ourselves into a better position to judge the degree to which SSR is appropriate for our particular use-case.

Attendees will leave with a better understand of what sort of apps will benefit most from this new breed of tool, and what sorts of apps might not be worth the effort. They'll also have a better understanding of how Remix, NextJS and Server Components fit into the React ecosystem, how they can navigate the future of React, and whether they could have avoided embarrassment by just sticking with PHP all along.

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Google collects performance information from all sessions on opted-in Chrome browsers into its Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) database. It then uses this information as a ranking factor for its search engine, but it also makes this information publicly available for everyone to view. I used this data to analyze and compare the performance of the leading JavaScript frameworks. In particular, I looked at the likelihood that websites using each framework will have good Core Web Vitals (CWV) scores. Along the way I encountered several surprising results, and solved at least one mystery. See how your favorite framework ranks vs all the rest!

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Component architectures and design systems have brought our CSS and our JavaScript code even closer together, directly leading to the sudden rise of CSS-in-JS. It seemed like a necessary consequence of this was the need to introduce more runtime code to generate our styles, but Vanilla Extract shows us what CSS-in-JS can look like when combined with the time-tested ideas behind CSS preprocessors.

In this talk we’ll examine the history behind Vanilla Extract, how TypeScript can let you write more maintainable CSS at scale, and how the world of CSS preprocessing still has plenty of room left for new ideas.

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Front-End development has changed a lot in the last 15 years. Browser compatibility has stabilised, browsers have added a *lot* of functionality, JavaScript has had a massive makeover and CSS has added lots of tools that make hard things easy. But in the middle, we wrote a lot of code - and you might have to read it.

In this talk I'll go through a modern history of front-end best practices. We'll look at how the tools available, and the constraints we had, impacted the way we built. Hopefully this will help you understand how we got where we are, and how to approach code (and browser APIs) that work in an old paradigm.

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Developing for each platform individually is so 2010s. These days, with React Native’s component system providing base-level UI constructs, we can efficiently develop for every platform while not sacrificing any particular platform’s uniqueness. Taz will review the approach they’ve taken while developing Guild, and the creation of their Mondrian cross-platform responsive design system as well as how they’ve accommodated the differences in navigational experiences across platforms to accomplish a codebase that can be 95+% shared across every platform.

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We are used to thinking of APIs as interfaces between back end and front end, endpoints to fetch or send data from. But pretty much anything that another product or service uses in their code can be an API. This talk is about APIs that sit squarely in the front end, specifically ones used for theming and any type of visual customisation.

A theming API can leverage native web languages directly (allowing us to write HTML and CSS, often with the aid of a templating system) or provide a layer of abstraction over them (e.g. with customisable properties we can attach values to). Or it can use a combination of both. What are the advantages and costs of either approach, both for consumers and maintainers? And how can we choose what’s best for our use case?

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A #LowJS approach is an appealing alternative to the ever-increasing complexity being used to build web applications (sardonically named “Single Page Apps”). A number of interesting frontend LowJS toolkits have emerged including HTMX and Basecamp’s Hotwire. In particular, Hotwire is an alternative approach to building modern, dynamic, accessible, responsive web applications without using much JavaScript by sending HTML (instead of JSON or XML) over the wire. To show what’s possible, we’ll get technical and dive into a full-blown, real-world application which uses Hotwire with Server-Sent Events (SSE) generated by a reactive backend using Kotlin Coroutines and Flows.

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As much as we all like working on greenfields projects, most of the work we actually do is on existing codebases. And existing codebases have technical debt. Technical debt makes code hard to modify. Being hard to modify slows down to development. So, how do we deal with this? We refactor!

But, refactoring is an inherently risky process. It's very easy to break things in any complex system, especially if the test coverage is less than ideal. Worse, it's possible to ruin users' experience by accidentally fixing bugs that their workflows had come to rely on. To combat this we need to ensure that our refactor doesn't change the existing behaviour in any way, while also leaving us free to add new functionality.

We're going to have a look at how to decide when we actually should refactor, and how we can use tests to ensure we maintain the existing behaviour. We'll have a look at our options for testing JSX, and the pros and cons of snapshot tests. And we'll finish up with a demo, putting it all together.

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This talk is about reactive programming and superpowers of RxJS in context of modern web frameworks. The session will contain the basics of reactive programming in the modern web and how it helps developers to solve real-world problems. As a part of that talk you will see the actual real-world cases and how RxJS helps Angular developers and how it might help you!

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Did you know there’s an algebraic structure for functions? Apparently, functions can be monads. And that means they’re also applicative functors, and covariant functors. Not only that, but they also happen to be profunctors too… All of which may sound like a load of gobbledygook. And that’s OK. But since React components happen to be functions, we can apply some of these mathematical tricks to manipulate them in interesting ways. And it may even change the way you think about functions in the process.

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You’ve seen them before. Confusing and frustrating design patterns that seem to be chasing you everywhere you go, from one website to another. Perhaps it’s a birthday selector dropdown that always starts in 2022, or a date picker that prompts a clock wheel, or tooltips that — once opened — always cover the input field just when you need to correct a mistake. They are everywhere, and they are annoying, often tossing us from one dead-end to another, in something that seems like a well-orchestrated and poorly designed mousetrap.

In this talk, we’ll take a closer look at some frustrating design patterns and explore better alternatives, along with plenty of examples and checklists to keep in mind when building or designing one. We’ll look into birthday input, mega-drop-down-hover-menus, disabled “Continue” buttons, draconian password requirements, unusable sliders, poor inline validation, invisible tooltips, broken filters and of course scrolljacking — along with identifying buses and fire hydrants.

The insights are coming from usability tests and user research conducted by yours truly or our colleagues in the community. You’ll walk away with a packed toolbox of techniques that you’ll be able to apply to your projects right away.

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I’ll make the case that Jobs to be Done work as a great “exchange” currency to facilitate strategy discussions around value between designers, business stakeholders and technology people, and share some lessons I’ve learned on how to use Jobs to be Done to engage the stakeholders and influence business decisions that drive product vision forward.

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Storytelling" appears to be a magic word when it comes to creating user experience—we use it to evoke design ideals, to summon the creative spirit, or to cry out for a narrative link across the complex world of devices and short attention spans. In the context of design, we often talk about using the three-act structure, characters, and how conflict is a key essential ingredient. It’s considered an essential skill for an effective presentation. But is it all there is?

A published science-fiction writer herself, Steph spent a few years learning from the art of making documentaries, crime fiction, novels and the shortest of stories. In this session, Steph will show how understanding the essence and practice of story opens a world of possibilities and adds another dimension to your experience design toolset. Better still, it’s less of a mystery than what you might think.

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When you look up the synonyms for friction, you’d get a list of suggested words that might sound a little negative e.g.

• agitation.
• irritation.
• resistance.
• abrasion.
• attrition.
• chafing… (yikes)

Words that you might not want the audience or the stakeholders that you’re designing for to ever feel.

Friction goes against the basic principles that we, as designers, are taught and what we'd apply regularly; “keep it simple, reduce the clicks to the goal, don’t make them think”... sound familiar?

But what if you were told that designing for friction can actually have a positive, meaningful and powerful impact, further beyond the immediate experience?

In this talk, Patima, MD of PetRescue - a progressive tech charity - will send your tails wagging for the ways that friction can be irritatingly good in design.

Get ready to hear about the ways in which PetRescue designs for deliberate friction to create long lasting impact and positively encourages social change via their globally recognised pet adoption platform, www.petrescue.com.au.

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As we move toward Spatial Computing, the next era of computing after Mobile, we need to change the constraints of our UX and UI design from 2D rectangular screens to 3D. More importantly, we need to reimagine the role of computing to appropriately enhance the physical world with digital capabilities. At Contxtual we’ve been exploring Spatial Computing use cases with a range of headsets and prototypes.

During this talk Oliver will cover:

• Key principles for designing for augmented reality
• Moving from 2D to 3D UI design
• Multi-modal design for contextual interactions
• Prototyping for augmented reality headsets

While AR might not be in everyone’s current job description, the future of Spatial Computing will be a fundamental shift in how people use technology and the time to start preparing is now.

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What does it take to design a better future? Mel will open your design mind - and share some of the ways Nook are using civic technology to get more people involved to make the world a better place. Making Open is a content design kit and set of interactive storytelling tools for advocates, civil society, and people in government and businesses.

It's for people who care about; social justice, alleviating poverty, government integrity, anti-corruption, sustainable development of natural resources, energy transition, environment protection, climate change resilience, and making sure people can participate in decisions that affect their communities.

Weaving content, design, and technology; Making Open helps people simply understand and explain the dry and technical stuff such as the policies, systems, standards, and data that needs to be put in place to make positive change and transformation happen. It also a channel to connect global changemakers, helping them share knowledge and stories.

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A brand is more than a logo or a visual identity system. Brand is reputation. It is how people perceive and engage with a business. At Thoughtworks we actively seek engagement with the world. We want everyone to have equal access to our ideas, our insights and our software. Our commitment to diversity and inclusivity is a driver of business strategy. So when it came to refreshing our global brand, we took an inclusive approach to the design. Starting with the choice of colour palette and fonts we then addressed the many things getting in the way of accessibility. This included changing our tools and ways of working across the organisation. In this talk, I'll share how we approached the redesign of Thoughtworks to achieve accessibility and usability across all our digital channels.

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Forward-thinking companies have made huge strides in creating parallel pathways for senior designers who do their best work as an individual contributor. This talk illuminates the pathway for senior designers, shares specific examples of what senior designer career progression looks like, the leadership roles that senior designers are uniquely placed to do and how to form a partnership with your design manager to help you find the most fulfilling work of your career.

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How to operate a global product design team. Overcome timezone barriers, build team collaboration, rapport and effectiveness in an organisation.

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Today’s world generates data at unbelievably rapid rates. It is important to leverage the available data to better understand the bigger picture. Data scientists and UX researchers often have the same destination but different routes. This talk gives an overview of how Data Science can complement UX research, including quantitative and qualitative methods. It introduces the Data Science pipeline along with describing useful applications for UX research like identifying users to interview, finding different segments of customers and generating data for usability studies. It highlights interesting instances of how the two fields can help each using real-life examples from Spotify, Airbnb, Tesla, etc.

By the end of this session, audience members will have a better grasp of the capabilities and processes of Data Science. They will be able to identify opportunities where Data Science can support and enhance UX research. They will feel motivated to encourage their UX research and Data Science teams to work closer together to understand business and user needs.

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The discipline of design has historically produced primarily fixed products. Even the term "product" implies the end of a process, or something that is completed and unchanging. But we know that the intent of the designer and of the person experiencing the design are engaged in an ongoing conversation.

Digital products have drastically increased the pace of that conversation, introducing faster iteration, new modes of interaction, and – importantly – space to imagine a future in which a person's intent directly defines their experience of digital interfaces.

This session will connect historic explorations of adaptable design with contemporary developments, including Google's Material Design, looking toward a truly adaptive future that accounts for more devices and more people in more contexts.

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When new users arrive at your product, their onboarding experience is the process that welcomes and guides them towards lasting success. But in a team’s quest to address their worries about meeting short-term metrics and feature awareness, onboarding often gets condensed into just a one time, frontloaded flow, missing out on its longer potential. In this talk, you’ll get an overview of what it takes to design a better onboarding experience through guided interaction.

We’ll cover how to fit onboarding into the user journey, why guiding users through interaction is a more effective strategy than relying on passive instruction, and how designing for new users connects to designing a better product overall.

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We finally got a proper layout system for the web, and each browser release seems to bring with it another new feature that promises more creative, performant, or intuitive CSS. Each new feature is exciting on its own, but where it gets really interesting is when we combine these things.

In this talk I'll walk you through a recent history of CSS layout, demonstrating how thinking has evolved, and new features have become possible because of earlier decisions. You’ll discover the possibilities, and the complexity that lies at the intersections. Leave this talk with a deeper understanding of how CSS layout works, the inspiration to try combining different features, and a little peek at what might be around the corner.

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CSS has developed so much over the past few years. We have Flexbox, grid, and container queries (soon). Having said that, CSS allows you to build any layout you want. Unfortunately, we still don't care too much about preventing CSS issues upfront.

Ahmad will discuss defensive CSS, a term he coined to describe CSS that is future-proof and defensive. As a result, we can prevent or at least reduce layout issues. Moreover, designers can use the defensive concept to design components that account for some edge cases.

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Front end performance used to be a relatively simple task–minifying, concatenating and gzipping, a bit of smushing of images, and all done. But in 2022 it's far more than that, and only becoming more complex.

New patterns and technologies, like native lazy loading and resource pre-fetching have given front end developers greater control over performance, but these often come with subtle challenges that can hinder, not help performance. Core Web Vitals have changed the stakes–making performance a key quality signals for page rank. But CWV isn't a one-and-done–they continue to evolve, and new measures, like Interaction to Next Paint (INP) may supplement, or event supplant the first generation of Core Web Vitals measures.

At Summit, Henri Helvetca, Head of Developer Community at WebPageTest will bring us up to speed with the core practices and vital technologies in front end performance today.

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In this talk, Google's Thomas Steiner, Developer Relations Engineer focused on Project Fugu, will provide an overview of the many Web capabilities the cross-browser effort code-named Project Fugu has brought to the Web Platform.

Not only will he look at individual APIs, but also cover new use cases these APIs have made possible, which, effectively, enabled some core industry partners to build their products for the Web, most notably Adobe Photoshop.

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Text content forms the foundation of everything we do on the web, it doesn’t matter if you are building an admin system, a marketing website, or a product, you will have to work with text. CSS and font specifications have evolved, so whether you are scaling, wrapping, responding or designing something to make an impact, there are many practical, responsible and fun solutions for working with text based content on the web.

We’ll look at modern approaches and technical solutions for working with text, including variable fonts, css text tricks and features for the serious or party side of your projects. You’ll learn techniques that will help you build flexible and maintainable content right now and explore some of the exciting developments to look out for in the future.

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Unfortunately, when developing WCAG2, the Working Group did not envision the current world where mobile is almost ubiquitous. For example, on a mobile device there is no continual access to a keyboard (unless someone is using it as an add-on to the device – or using a Blackberry Classic). WCAG2 requires that all content be accessible to the keyboard interface, but it does not require that all content be accessible to a mouse or to a touchscreen user – which is essential on a mobile device. WCAG2.1 does include some mobile accessibility requirements, but doesn’t go far enough.

Gian Wild chaired the Mobile Site Sub-Committee to develop a set of Mobile Site Testing Guidelines that are available under Creative Commons. These guidelines are meant to be used in conjunction with WCAG2 (and WCAG2.1) to ensure that sites are accessible to people with disabilities using mobile and tablet devices.

Accessibility is important to all – not everyone using your mobile app, device or wearable will be fully functioning: either because they have a disability or they are simply engaged elsewhere. Gian Wild talks about the things that are essential to avoid when designing mobile apps, devices and wearables to ensure that everyone can use them. She talks about specific mobile accessibility features: pinch zoom, native screen readers, haptic keyboard etc, and system accessibility settings: font size, screen rotation, high contrast etc

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Did you know that an Undo button can be an accessibility feature? It is if your product is a content creation tool. Accessibility is as important for your admin and content creation tools as it is for front facing products.

If you've ever wondered what content creation features are useful to people with disabilities, or how you can help your creators to easily make more accessible content, then the ATAG (Authoring Tools Accessibility Guidelines) standard is what you need. It's a bit different than WCAG in ways that are useful for web apps and software.

Using ATAG as a guide, this talk will walk you through an accessibility features list to help refine your requirements and prioritize your backlog. The right preference settings, keyboard shortcuts and documentation in your app can help everyone build a more accessible web.

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Things have been going hard for CSS the past year.

In this talk we’ll take a look at some of the new and future additions to CSS that change the way we write our code: @layer, @scope, the :has() selector, native nesting, and more to architect cleaner, clearer, more maintainable CSS.

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Well-written instructions, informative code comments, thoughtful READMEs, and content strategy can take complex code and make it accessible to all developers. Documentation is the key to teaching the next generation of developers, passing work to successors, and helping developers better understand their own work.

When I was an engineer, docs created by my colleagues were crucial to quick onboarding and ramping up on complex internal systems. Now, as a full time technical writer, I rely on our engineers to be able to concisely explain how features work so I can further improve the documentation experience. The documentation is best when everyone, developers and product, feel empowered to write documentation.

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Most developers rely on open-source software daily to build applications. In the JavaScript ecosystem, we use thousands of NPM packages installed as dependencies on our computers. This trust-based exchange of knowledge has helped the industry grow rapidly, but how much can it really be trusted? Between 2020 and 2021, the number of software supply chain attacks grew by 300%.

This includes attacks run via open-source packages. What types of attacks can happen? What can they do? How can we protect ourselves? In this talk, I will address all these questions and more to raise awareness of the issue, help you identify vulnerabilities, and provide some potential solutions.

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Can we get rid of passwords yet? They make for a poor user experience and users are notoriously bad with them. The advent of WebAuthn has brought a passwordless world closer, but where do we really stand?

In this talk we'll explore the current user experience of WebAuthn and the requirements a user has to fulfil for them to authenticate without a password. We'll also explore the fallbacks and safeguards we can use to make the password experience better and more secure. By the end of the session you'll have a vision for how authentication could look in the future and a blueprint for how to build the best auth experience today.

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Temporal is a new ECMAScript spec that provides a modern date/time API with timezone support. This session will explore the motivations for this new API and how you can make use of it.

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Startups cost a lot of money to build - from figuring out the right tech stacks for the product to investing in marketing and advertising to hiring the right team to keep the momentum going. Many startups raise funds before they prove sustainable profits but how can one build a startup the traditional way - or "bootstrapping" in Silicon Valley's terminology - without much outside financial resources? In this session, you will learn tried-and-true strategies from Stella Guan, the founder of a design education startup, Path Unbound, on how her company was able to be relentlessly resourceful in acquiring critical building blocks and continue to grow without VC funding.

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Most people are visual learners who absorb information from visual aides (diagrams, images, compositions, charts) which helps us map that content in our minds. Everyone can benefit from seeing the ‘grand vision’ as a starting point for product launches. The problem is our conventional methods of learning are usually focused on text which may not resonate with people trying to get a sense of what they will be getting into.

One way to address the need to convey critical information to a group who may be visually biased in their learning is to use illustrations like Roadmaps. A Roadmap is a great way to showcase ideas, products and resonate with your team what the big plans are. Beyond just a simple chart or diagram they can be useful as communication documents to align all stakeholders and get ready to dive into the details. Learn what is possible with using an illustrative Roadmap to tell a story and inform your team on all the critical details in an intuitive and fun way.

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Building a product from scratch can be a daunting task. In this talk, Carmen Chung, Director of Product at Fl0, will discuss how to navigate the world of unknowns when bringing a product from conception to completion - and how to lay the groundwork for success and scalability.

Follow along as she discusses how her team built a feature from scratch that is now used and loved by over a million people around the world - and the lessons they learnt along the way.

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Faced with challenges that are probably familiar to many Agile teams, our team was at a turning point. We were struggling to not only deliver work of value, but to deliver anything at all. Dissatisfaction was high, and retention was low.

Something had to change. The team took a leap of faith, and adopted a “Shape Up” style of Product Development, fundamentally changing the way we prioritised, organised, and delivered.

Two and a half years later, and still going strong, we will share how we dug our way out, and now find ourselves planning our 16th “cycle”.

Some of the things we’ll learn about:

• Responsibility and accountability
• Mitigating delivery risk
• Showing progress
• Focus and breathing space
• Starting together; Finishing together; Celebrating together

(*Shape Up is Basecamp’s guide for doing product development)

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In this session, we'll be discussing how to build a strategy bridge - a tool that can be used to connect an organisation's strategy to its execution. We'll cover the importance of having a clear and concise strategy, how to build buy-in from your team, and how to create a process for turning your strategy into action. This talk is perfect for business leaders who want to learn how to create a framework for success.

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Here at Deakin University Library we aim to meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA compliance. We try to embed accessibility into everything we do, but we have challenges:

• we have dozens of platforms serving up content to our students, researchers, staff, and community
• we have better visibility of accessibility compliance across some platforms over others
• we struggle to have a 'bird's eye' view of the current state of accessibility across our complex digital ecosystem
• we are dependent on auto-generated reports, which are limited in what criteria they can assess

Sound familiar? To address these challenges, we decided to conduct a multi-platform accessibility audit across 16 of our content platforms and use the results to identify, implement and advocate for improvements.

Some amazing bonuses of the approach we took include:

• developing a repeatable process and toolkit for future audits,
• increased awareness amongst library colleagues and platform managers around accessibility, and
• some deep team capability growth in accessibility testing, reporting, tools and techniques.

This presentation will unpack drivers, decision points, process and outcomes of our approach. Plus we’ll share some tips and tools for doing this in other organisations!

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This talk will break down where and how accessibility fits into each step of the lifecycle of a digital product, keeping things bite-size and moving towards improvement and accessibility maturity. Perfect is impossible but we can and should always chase better.

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This session will draw a parallel between how Git transformed the software development culture, and how OKRs are doing the same for strategy/leadership.

The goal is to bridge the gap between product teams and execs and explain the value of the framework with a new angle.

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Product Management roles are, by their very nature, not clearly defined compared to those of our co-workers. Freedom to focus on the things that matter from day to day is part of the job description. It’s absolutely glorious but it can also get us into some serious trouble if we’re not careful.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does a product manager. Our jobs naturally bump up against others in the organisation and it can be hard to tell where product management stops and functions like marketing, corporate strategy, design, research and execution start. And, as shapeshifters, we have a natural tendency to quietly fill the gaps when we see them.

This talk will cover which areas we sometimes need to extend our roles into, where we should step back, what we need to communicate about our jobs to our stakeholders and what we neglect at our peril.

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A bold and meaningful product vision provides many benefits for any product. Yet, creating and reaching a product vision comes with many hurdles.

In this session we will cover some useful practices important in creating and realising this product vision. We will also cover several key decision points that you’ll need to navigate through critical in realising this product vision.

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Product Managers across the globe have focused on putting the customer at the centre of their journey, investing significant amounts of time and effort in identifying their pain points and attempting to use technology to create improved outcomes. However, as we know, many products and startups fail. Why?

To ensure products succeed, Product managers must move beyond foundational customer insights that suggest product market fit and design digital products by putting price at the centre of the conversation. Let’s chat about a few simple steps that can increase your products success!

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The concept of "Product-Led" has been a key driver for many SaaS products' success. However, we've found while many product companies want to do "PLG", they don't know how to. Additionally, most companies think it just applies to "free trial" SaaS products. We'll dispel those myths and walk you through how to start the journey of PLG, or if you're already on the journey, how to get more sophisticated and drive even more value. Join us as we talk through frameworks, practical applications and real-life examples of how Product-Led has taken on hardware products, services industries and yes, even SaaS products.

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Content-focused research is an under-appreciated, under-used way you can make your digital experiences resonate and connect more deeply with your audience. It’s therefore also a key path to creating measurably improved business impact!

In this presentation, you will hear about content research case studies that transformed web experiences. You’ll also learn:

• 9 key methods of content-focused research
• How to create a body of audience-centered content insights for your whole product team to leverage
• How product designers, product managers, content pros, and software developers can collaborate on content research efforts
• Tricks and tips for using some of the most common content research platforms and tools in use today.

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Content strategy is clearly critical to your organization, but where do you start, and how do you grow it into a true practice? Whether you’re a lone content person tasked with creating a content strategy practice from scratch, or a leader struggling to scale one up, this talk will introduce you to a blueprint you can use to create and manage a content strategy practice that is sustainable, sustainable, and successful.

Talk is based on themes from my book, "From Solo to Scaled: Building a Sustainable Content Strategy Practice

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Most people working in digital content genuinely want to help people. If their users get frustrated, it’s not because of a lack of care or empathy. Rather, the way many organisations think about, create and manage content prevents them from really understanding their users, which in turn makes it difficult to meet their needs.

As the official Australian trainers for Content Design London, we’ve taken over 200 people through an intensive 2-day content design course. Again and again, we see our participants have the same lightbulb moments. We’ll talk about some of those moments, and how the methods and tools of content design help participants build on their care for users to really meet their needs.

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With personalisation becoming the next big thing to deliver customer-friendly experiences, let’s come together to unleash the power of content fragments and their potential in delivering at-scale personalisation.

Benefits?

• Better lifecycle management of content
• Seamless delivery of end-to-end personalisation
• Quick delivery to market to capture customers in the moment
• Improved business operations with better systems and processes
• Real-time marriage of CX and technology

See hands-on experiences and examples that you could apply to your workplace from the next day! Sounds exciting? Come along then!

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Content designers are amongst the top 15 fastest growing roles in Australia for 2022. But, they are more than just writers. They're systems thinkers, storytellers and people connectors. Their unique blend of technical and user experience knowledge can take products and projects to the next level.

The relationship between content and engineering goes beyond design: from understanding systems, structures and models of content, to the experimentation, delivery and measurement of it. This session will take you through the hidden talents of a content designer. You may just find the missing piece in your team.

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There's a reason why tech companies big and small are building out teams of content designers. But more than often, they're brought in at the very end to polish strings, or just 'find another word for...'. Not only is this a disservice to how our designs could be better, it overlooks the simple power of questioning, ""is this saying what we really need it to say?"", which can unlock the reach and impact our products could have. Working in tandem with your product design counterparts — and finding a fluid way to do so — can have a true impact on the way people perceive and find value in the tools we're building. I've seen this myself as both the first content designer at a growing startup, and at the likes of Spotify and Canva. Whether you're working with a writer, or doing your best to craft the words yourself, I'll be sharing some tactical ways you can make language a key part of your design process. These practices have helped me foster a healthy and collaborative relationship with the designers I've worked with, improved the rigour in our content design user tests, and create artefacts that aren't just strings in Figma or long copy docs.

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In a fast-paced agile environment, getting wireframes and prototypes in front of users is critical to success. Yet content, which provides context and direction, is often left out of this step. Worse still, content designers are left out of the room. This talk explains and shows why content designers and UX researchers need to work together from usability testing, to prototypes, all the way to having content designers in the room for usability testing—and what you need to look for.

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'Information Architecture' is *not the same* as navigation design. There - I said it. More specifically, navigation design is where UI and IA overlap - and is just the tip of a very important iceberg. Whether you're working on intranets, applications or websites, we'll talk about some of the things you might not be thinking about (but probably should), and some tools and techniques you can use to nail the information architecture of your next project, even if you don't have the budget to hire a dedicated Information Architect.

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The AEC Twitter account was widely applauded for its education, outreach and intervention during the recent Australian Federal 
Election. People loved the sassy and iconic voice and tone applied.

The Director of Media and Digital Engagement Evan Ekin Smyth talks to us about treading the fine line in social media communication when the stakes are as high as democracy itself.

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Agile content design is iterative. It means listening to your users, understanding their needs, and improving content as you go. That doesn’t always mean making big changes. In this session, using real-world examples, I show how small changes can make your content land better with users.

I lift the hood on ASIC’s Moneysmart website, and explain how we put agile into practice. I share our content design process: how we plan, craft user stories, test content, set goals and measure performance. So you can adapt and apply this to your own practice.

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In this talk, I'd like to share some tips and habits I've picked up over the years from my colleagues and mentors about how to move from being just a 'developer' or 'programmer' to becoming a lead software engineer.

What can you do to show initiative among your peers? How do you stay up-to-date with the current trends in your field? How do you handle conflict with other team members, especially when it's clear that they do not understand your point of view?

It's well known that percentage of women and POC decrease significantly as you climb higher in the career ladder. While I found plenty of resources helping me to understand programming and libraries, I really struggled with finding actionable advice and role models in my life who understood my experience in tech and understood how to take the next step in their career to that senior role. That gap is what I want to address in my talk

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The Autonomy of Developerhood is about how the world of code allowed me to gain a level of autonomy that I never dared dream of. How it gave me an out, of not just my financial situation or the sexist surroundings I found myself in, but also an out of my own preconceived notions regarding maths and technology, all very related to an internalised sexism I wasn’t even aware of until I had left it behind.

YouTube and other platforms democratized film and video making, taking away the need for expensive equipment and unattainable connections; programming did the same for innovation.

I’m going to share the exact steps I took from completely un-techy jobs to becoming a developer, as I remember that being something I desperately needed to hear myself only about 3 years ago…

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I've flip flopped between engineer and manager three times already. I'm quite aware that this is not an unusual thing to do. There's a heap of flip floppers out there! At Atlassian I'm in a new managers group. Interestingly there are many managers in the group that have previously been managers but joined Atlassian as an engineer. So what's wrong with us? Why do we keep changing our role? Is it boredom? Are we crazy? I think there's actually method to the madness. Each time we make a change it's intentional and there's a purpose, and whilst some say it can hurt your career, I'd like to take you on a journey to explore why flip floppers are a very valuable breed!

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Being involved in open source communities can improve existing skills, gain new skills, meet new people and opportunities, and better your career prospects. More and more companies are using open source and seeking people with open source experience. If you're just starting out or have been in the industry for some time, open-source can lead you to unexpected places. I'll talk about what are the benefits and challenges of working in open source and put in a little bit about my own journey. I was late to open source, got involved in a project by accident, and became an Apache Software Foundation board member and VP of open source training at a company.

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Have you ever felt like you don’t actually deserve your success? Like you don’t belong, and everyone is going to discover you’re a fraud? If so, you’re in good company.

A whopping 58% of tech workers report experiencing imposter feelings currently in their career, including employees from Apple, Google, Facebook and Uber. And when I started as a software engineer, I quickly became one of them.

So why do so many of us feel like we’re undeserving of our success? What’s the cause of this industry-wide lack of self-confidence? And what can we do about it? I needed answers. Because as a former-psychologist, I should be able to fix this in no-time, right? (wrong..)

In this talk, join me on my journey of changing careers and navigating through a new industry while feeling like an imposter. Find out why you shouldn’t have to tackle imposter feelings on your own, and get the tools and insights you need to turn an imposter life into imposter moments.

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Throughout my career, the management path always felt like it was inevitable. And I never really liked that.

Because if I want to grow in my career and contribute to the organisation in a meaningful way, why should that come at the expense of doing what I love?

Can’t I be a leader without being a manager?

In my talk I want to share my experience around the emerging path of “leadership as an individual contributor” and how I continue to help shape the design practice at Roam Digital while still growing in my career (on my own terms).

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While every person's journey in the tech industry is different, there are a number of common roadblocks and issues that most of us - if not all - will face. Things like career progression, burnout, and how to deal with rejection.

Whether if you are a person starting out in their career, or looking to learn from someone else's misadventures and mistakes - At least this talks is better than aimlessly searching on Google.

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The never-ending debate is finally done. Designers need to learn how to code. This isn’t just a fun quip, it’s a necessity in an ever-changing career path.

With the popularity of the "Product Designer" role, the expectations, responsibilities, and outputs of all Designers have increased as a result.

So what do we, as Designers, have to know? What do companies value? How do we make ourselves beyond valuable? Do we all have to become unicorns, or can we just wear one hat?

In this talk, you'll gain clarity on understanding shifting roles in the industry, and how to get proactive with professional growth.

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The change from office work to remote asynchronous work was drastic. Suddenly starting my new job was going from bedroom to home office. I made a lot of mistakes at the start but I learned a lot too.

This talk will help you through the change, even if you’re already in a remote position. We will look at communication, knowledge management, time management, your health and wellbeing, maintaining social relationships and whether hard pants should go. Remote and async work is not going away, let’s make the most of it!

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As a freelance designer, every place I work and every single designer I met will ask about going freelance - no exception.

I would love to answer those questions - What to expect? Will I get work? How does it all work? Will I regret it?

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What is Neurodiversity? - and what is it not? Let's remove the stigma and embrace the benefits of thinking different! Let's look at the evolutionary theory behind neurodiversity and why teams benefit by actively including and nurturing neurodiversity. What does hiring look like if you want to be inclusive? What does a supportive environment consist of? How do you unlock super powers that might currently be suppressed by having to conform to neurotypical expectations? Are you aware of the daily struggles due to workplaces and processes being kitted out for neurotypical employees? eg. Are you aware of and meeting employee needs? - from office lighting to social events, from verbal cues to task paralysis? The chances are, if they are female - they might not be aware of their own needs! Did you know that the average age for ADHD diagnosis for anyone born male is single digits, and goes up to 45 for anyone born female! We need to talk more openly, we need to educate ourselves, and we need to hard-shove the paradigm from silent disability to proud positive super power.

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Career track curators Mags Hanley, Steve Gillies and Georgina Robilliard bring their many years experience in mentoring, advising and hiring to make over CVs live on stage. Attendees will have the chance to have their CV madeover, with lessons for all alongthe way.

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