It’S 2013, and I'm lounging on the hardwood floor of my childhood bedroom with a blasphemous book that I smuggled home from college: Sam Harris’ Letter to a Christian Nation. I devour the whole thing in a single sitting. It feels like Harris is letting me in on a giant secret, a Big Truth that my very Christian upbringing had kept hidden from me. God is dead, he says. We killed him a few hundred years ago and replaced him with a sophisticated scientific understanding of life, the universe, and everything.

Fast-forward six years, and I’ve started to realize that the God vs. science situation is a bit more complicated than Sam Harris led me to believe. The more I learn, the more I suspect that rationalists only managed to kill a very narrow and anthropomorphic conception of God. People who study complex systems started using new words to talk about god-like phenomena — metaphors that are more palatable to secular minds. I believe these new words can help scientifically-minded people better understand what it actually felt like to believe in God before science became a Thing. Let’s take a tour through the pantheon of 2019 and explore what these seven “gods” might teach us in our era of ecological crisis and post-truth confusion.

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Conductive threads allow us to weave the web and interaction right into our garments. This creates new opportunities for expression and the socialization of technology, reducing the screens between people and the world, and allowing us to be more present where we are.

Thus far such work has had to be done on a couture (by hand, one-off) basis but technological advancements promise enabling a new future by integrating such capabilities into the textile manufacturing process, producing interactive garments at scale. In this talk Nina Walia will share design considerations from her extensive experience, including personal principles she follows, initial learnings about interaction, and how dynamics about who is involved affects design.

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A panel on the current and emerging trends in digital money.

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Not too long ago, improving web site performance was a relatively straightforward task. A bit of gzipping here, some concatenation there, judicious use of image compression, and hey presto, faster sites.

But as the complexity of what we build has increased significantly, the number and size of the assets we deliver has exploded, our job in ensuring highly performant sites and applications is increasingly complex.

So who better to help us navigate the most recent developments in web performance than the creator of WebPageTest, Patrick Meenan. In this session, Patrick will explore different ways to measure the "user experience", what the newer metrics like Time To Interactive mean and how best to detect and analyze performance issues.

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API standards, from SOAP to REST to GraphQL, have evolved to meet the needs of API providers and developer consumers. They make APIs "intuitive" by making them predictable. When product designs bump up against the constraints of standards, you can choose to force a fit or break from convention and invest in educating developers about your choices.

Through case studies (incl. Facebook's Open Graph, Slack's workspace apps project) we'll examine the tradeoffs, consequences, and some learnings about how to get your developer community to come along with you.

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A few years ago, HTTP2 was the hot new technology that was going to solve all of the web’s performance woes. But like a bad 80s movie sequel, the promise turned out to be a little better than the reality.

So what went wrong? In this talk, Peter will dig in to the data to find out if it’s the technology or developers filling the space provided. Now that HTTP2 is an established technology, learn how to take advantage of the features it provides within the confines of reality.

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Have you ever wondered how Math.random() works? Or how an inherently deterministic system can produce random numbers at all?

Lachlan takes a deep dive into the world of randomness, and reveals the mystery surrounding this widely used, but little understood, utility function in JavaScript. He'll deconstruct the underlying algorithms and demonstrate just how predictable its output can be, and explain how different types of randomness can be used for solving different types of problems.

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Developing a UI component library for a large organisation with many different products is a challenging endeavour. A good system will strike the right balance between consistency and flexibility and will afford developers efficiency and quality. These are characteristics difficult to get right up front.

At the ABC, we are continually iterating our component library to improve a key measure of success: adoption. We want teams to want to use it! This talk will discuss some of the challenges we’ve faced, how we approach trying to find the right level of component granularity and cover some illustrative examples of the changes we’ve made to get more developers of ABC digital products on board.

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CSS has come a long way in recent years, bringing style and interaction to the web. For example just look at all the cool things you can do now with CSS animations!

However there are some common components that people are still reaching to JS to solve when they can achieve the same thing with CSS. Things like: Modals, tooltips, mobile menus, accordions and carousels.

What if I told you that each of these can now be done with CSS alone? That way the functionality renders at the same time as the design and makes it usable by more people.

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You’ve probably heard of GraphQL by now, and maybe even learnt a bit about the nuts and bolts of how it works. However, as a dyed-in-the-wool web developer, you might be a little unsure about whether it can be of benefit to you or not. Is it really a good idea to move away from standards like REST, which we’ve come to know and love?

In this talk, rather than drilling into GraphQL, we’ll try stepping back and looking at the bigger picture. I’ll start by examining how the evolution of web development has led to a growing schism between ‘back-end’ and ‘front-end’ development, and how REST can sometimes exacerbate this problem. Next, I’ll argue why, for the sake of our users, web-developers shouldn’t just consider themselves to be 'front-end' developers, and instead need to take ownership of at least part of their backend too. Then I’ll show how, by accepting this, web developers can see GraphQL as not so much just a technology, but as a tool that empowers them to take back control of their destinies.

REST is not going away any time soon. However, I believe it has contributed - at least in part - to a wall between front-end and back-end developers, which is slowing us all down. Attendees to this talk will learn that, whilst GraphQL won’t be the answer to all of our problems, it may well be the thing that helps us break down the wall, move faster, and produce truly delightful web applications for our users.

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While the web's been around 30 years, and JavaScript more than 20, it's only in relatively recent years we've been using JavaScript, and other web technologies to build complex, sophisticated applications.

But the discipline of Software Engineering has been grappling with this challenge for well over half a century, and we Front End Developers can learn a great deal from the patterns and practice that have emerged from that discipline.

In this presentation we'll focus on SOLID, an approach to object oriented programming that emphasises 5 principles for building more understandable, flexible and maintainable apps, and how we can apply these principles to developing for the web.

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Developments in Sensor & Browser Apis has opened up many opportunities for your website to react and respond based on the users device, environment or input. As of right now there are many great Sensor & Browser APIs that you can take advantage of including Light Sensors, Gyroscopes and Audio and because these APIs are all available in more devices than you would think they are more accessible than ever.

In this presentation we’ll look at some of my favourite features and examples, like how we can improve the visual representation of our conversational UIs using web audio and speech apis, or how we can change the user interface based on the ambient light detected in the users environment. We’ll explore the the possibilities, tools and resources so you can get started creating engaging and creative effects, visualisations and experiences in your projects tomorrow.

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A truly global application will need to support many different languages and cultures. Translating static text is the primary concern, but what about more dynamic content? There are numerous formatting differences around the world for dates, numbers, currencies, and more — even between cultures using the same base language.

Translating this dynamic content on the web has traditionally involved specialised libraries with reams of formatting data, all of which needs to be loaded over the network. But today’s browsers are providing ever more in-built formatting options via the Intl.* APIs. This talk will give you an overview of what they do, and how you can support a wide array of locales without adding Yet Another Library to your stack.

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Machine learning has really come of age thanks to ever increasing compute power and access to troves of data, what if we could respect the privacy of the users and run it on their device without sending data to a central server. Introducing tensorflow.js a JavaScript implementation of the very popular ML library from google, you can run it in inference mode or even train a model if you'd like.

In this talk we'll explore what's currently possible and some potential use cases.

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Security is hard. Using the same password for everything is easy.

Over the years, we've made it easier for users to do ths right thing, from email-based verification to one-time passwords via email and security tokens. But nearly all these solutions require you to have your mobile phone, or security device with you. And if you're overseas, you might have additional problems.

Let's look at mechanisms for biometric authentication with web applications. There are a few out here, and this talk will help you understand the options and implementation, together with a live demo.

Biometric security? Because you rarely leave your face and voice at home!

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Most of our interactions with technology aren’t really intuitive. We’ve had to adapt to it by learning to type, swipe, execute specific voice commands, etc… but what if we could train technology to adapt to us?

Programming for hardware in JavaScript has already been made accessible with frameworks like Johnny-five, but, combining it with machine learning, we have the opportunity to create new and smarter interactions.

In this presentation, I will talk about how to build a simple gesture recognition system using JavaScript, Arduino and Machine learning.

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Scaling design teams is the super power we all wish we had. We define processes, create tools, and invest in systems, confident that we'll be able to replicate high quality experiences and products at scale. But it's humans all the way down, so how can we make sure we are you looking after our humans in the process of organizing, automating, and systematizing our teams? How can we develop processes that center on the people whose day-to-day practices they affect, at the same time that we make strides toward efficiency, speed, and scalability?

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Design culture is about rediscovering the human side of business. UX Design is becoming an increasingly valued part of all kinds of organisations, although there are still pockets of resistance.

So how do we manage design in organisations to achieve their full potential? Better UX design maturity makes an organisation more competitive and more effective at delivering great products and services. This talk goes through case studies from years of leading product development — both successful and not — to show that investing in design culture will help an organisation achieve greatness.

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At Atlassian in the Design Systems team, we've started thinking about the design system we build and maintain as a service. But who are the consumers of this service? And what do they want (and need).

In this presentation, I'll look at how we dig deeply into who the consumers of our systems are, and some of the things we've done (some that worked, others that didn't) in meeting their needs.

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There are many examples of how invisibility in society is increasing. More and more is happening behind the scenes: data generation, algorithmic computation, and decision-making. It’s becoming harder to grasp the wider effects of individual and corporate actions based on things that are invisible to us. At the same time, the level of trust in society is decreasing.

Fake-news and scandals of companies that misuse data hits us every day.

What is fake and what is true? And who should we trust?

Because trust is essential: Human interactions, relationships and systems are all based on trust.

Every day, we put our trust into people, organisations and services.It’s fundamental to our communication - a vital currency.Fictional entities like brands, communities, democracy and trade only exists if we all trust them.

We need to design for trust.

This session explores how we can design for trust in the things that we can't see. Trusting Invisibility!

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Today, the internet owns our lives. Every website and app we touch knows us: our personal information, our inane ramblings, our deepest secrets. Security has never been more crucial, yet it’s a rare topic outside of ISM teams and hackers. And through the design lens, it’s completely missing.

Good user experience design is necessary for good security. We can craft paths of least resistance that match paths of most security. We can educate our users on what is good practice and what is security theater. We can build secure flows that are usable, not obstructive or annoying.

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• How can you conduct relevant and usable research
• Unearth invaluable insights in unusual situations
• Challenge predictable research processes

Kevin Wilkins, CX Practice Lead at Tquila ANZ will share lessons learned from a decade's experience managing user research and product owners needs.

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After many long hours of analysis you've finally distilled your weeks of customer research findings into a fine and beautifully presented set of personas. Look at them there up there on the wall! Alka, Brianna, Charlie... So succinct! So well photographed!But then they JUST SIT THERE, and don't DO anything!

When we design new products we are designing for new behaviours. So let's get your personas up on their feet and DOING THINGS - by making them the heroes of your design stories.

Design stories, or scenarios, are 'day in the life' descriptions of how your new product will fit into the lives of your users and customers. They help crystallise and communicate your product vision and capture key design constraints in ways that personas can't. Let's talk about how stories can bring your personas to life and kick start your design process.

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In the ever-evolving Digital World, machine learning is significantly changing the way we approach design and digital experiences.

This talk will explore how our Design and Product Development practices are changing through collaboration with data scientists to harvest the potential of big data and using it to improve experiences through prediction and personalisation.

It will cover process enhancements, and frameworks that are guiding our practise changes.

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“Conversation Design” is the new frontier in UX right now, but what exactly does it mean? What have we learnt so far? And what are our UX challenges as we design and adapt user interfaces to be led by conversational interactions?

Amy Cleary will outline some key principles in Conversation Design, drawn from her own experience researching and designing start-up to enterprise level chatbots, as well as from reviewing conventional research in the field.

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As designers we all want to do our best work, but somewhere between the methodologies, reviews, best practice and stakeholder management, we settle for a solution that’s good enough. This talk delves into the often rushed or neglected step of utilising user insights alongside creative thinking.

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At Qantas, like many Australian companies, they're are constantly looking for ways to allow customers to better self-serve their experience in their channel of choice. As part of a multi-year strategy focused on reducing long wait queues on the phone and empowering customers to solve all their queries in minimal time - we've helped design and develop a new way for customers to have a conversation with the most iconic Australian brand.

This isn't just about building a basic chatbot or removing customer agents from the funnel. Oliver Maruda, Innovation Lead at Arq Group will take you through the steps and challenges in solving some of the most complex problems using AI, ensuring accuracy at scale, but most importantly, help you get started on a path of how you too can enable your brand to start having real conversations with your customers utilizing AI and handover to humans when appropriate.

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Knowing your user’s story is central to a great onboarding experience – but how do you actually tell that story?

At some point you need to write the content of your onboarding: words, sentences, value props, the works. Ultimately, it’s the content that helps your users achieve their goals.That’s a lot of heavy lifting for just a few bits of text. As it turns out, writing your onboarding is a real job, and it’s often harder than you might think. The hardest part of all is figuring out where to start.

In this presentation, Jonathon Colman shares an approach and a few tools that make it easier to write a great onboarding experience.

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Agile is awesome for startups who need to get the idea out to the market ASAP, get feedback and try to survive in the meanwhile.

On the other hand, large organisations with very mature products/platforms simply cannot employ pure agile, hence they fall back on waterfall or hybrid models. But there's another way - a 2-speed mode of building rapid, throwaway prototypes (to determine the *right* product) and then afterwards build them *right* if they prove to be viable. I'll also cover some useful experimentation techniques to support the process.

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OKRs are on the rise, but too many teams are still rushing their implementation before the team is ready. Switching from producing deliverables to delivering value takes time, and there are significant cultural changes that need to happen first.

In this talk, Sten will introduce a simple 4-stage maturity model for outcome-driven teams, and show how you can grow your goal-setting muscle to move up the ladder.

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As Product Managers, it is arguable that we have one of the most critical roles in building a shared understanding of the problem so that our team can build world-class products. But, we know it’s a lot easier said than done. Scaling product management thinking within your team enables you, as a product manager, to focus on the complex, hairy questions, like the long-term vision of the product as your team becomes empowered to make good, product decisions on their own.

This talk addresses the benefits of getting your team to think like a product manager (for both you and your team!) and practical exercises on how to build that product muscle within your team.

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As a head of product for an accelerator / incubator Cheryl works with several startups every 3 months, taking them from napkin sketch to "product market fit" using lean startup methodologies.

Here Cheryl will talk about how to find the seeds of insight and how to turn that into product.

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In 1999 a now infamous book called The Pragmatic Programmer was first published, and the mindset it introduced took the software development world by storm. After 20 years, a flick through the pages shows it’s filled with timeless advice that, with a little bit of examination and re-interpretation, can help anyone nurture a pragmatic product mindset.

Pragmatic product people are early adopters & fast adapters. They are inquisitive, critical thinkers and Realistic. The quintessential Jack-of-all-trades.We’ll explore the essential traits of a pragmatic product person, re-interpret the practical learnings from the book into a modern product context, discover many insightful parables along the way, and learn how we can approach all angles of modern product development with a pragmatic mindset to improve the way we work with our teams to build amazing products.

This presentation will be an enjoyable & compelling journey on how software programming techniques that were written 20 years ago, can be seamlessly applied to modern product design practices in organisations today.

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From the outset of a project there are risks that you end up designing for particular or the wrong customers rather than the right ones. In this talk I will be covering ways at Zendesk we minimise bias to to ensure teams have full context of the problem space and the users.

More often than not organisations don’t have a dedicated UX Researcher or there is not one available for every scrum team. Nonetheless, it is helpful to learn about your users in these practical and lightweight ways so that your products are well informed and have a clear definition of what you are solving.

Learning about your users does not have to be a full blown project in itself, some of methods give you enough insight to make critical decisions around product development. At Zendesk we use some of these techniques as ways to learn about our customers to help us in both design and product development.

We'll cover

• The impact of bias from the inception of a project
• Knowing who to recruit for a project
• Ways to interview and language to avoid bias
• Survey design and how words can derail the outputs
• Getting the team involved as a check
• Triangulating with data to help

This talk is relevant to anyone and everyone, but is particularly useful for those with an existing customer/user base and who don’t interact with them much. You’ll be inspired to learn about your users more and know how to do so.

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Humans are story telling animals. And the best way to persuade and convince people is often through story. In this presentation, Omar Andrade explores the mindset and process for crafting influential stories. Mashing together design thinking, lean startup and classic storytelling structures to craft influential and simple stories that motivate people to action.

Using story prototypes to understand value and eliminate wasteful narratives that miss the mark, this session will get you thinking about how you approach influence in organisations.

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Product teams in enterprises are focused on growth now more than ever, yet much of what we hear about growth is geared towards startups. Enterprises face unique challenges that require product teams to think differently in order to achieve growth at scale.

Peter Ikladious, Director of Growth, will share how he is able to drive growth at one of the world’s largest enterprise companies. In this session, you’ll learn how IBM uses data, design within product to ignite and ultimately sustain growth.

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Nick will share a framework to help you define and measuring value in ways that inspires teams to differentiate, drive retention and build long term relationships.

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Those of us that started out designing for print remember the feeling of relief when a job we had been working on for weeks or months came back from the printer. It was the sign that we could call that job done, celebrate our hard work and move onto the next thing. Now, as many of us have shifted to in-house product teams, the launch of a feature is just the beginning of endless iterations. It can be hard to get that feeling of closure. Teams can suffer from burnout or get stuck in a feature factory.

In this talk I want to explore some techniques teams and individuals can use to avoid or reduce the negative effects of the way we build products.

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