What do UX designers, researchers and managers need to know about AI?
UX Brighton 2024 is tailored for UX professionals seeking clarity and direction in the evolving landscape of AI. This one-day event is an essential opportunity for designers, researchers, and managers at all levels to gain a realistic understanding of AI’s role in UX.
The conference will feature experienced professionals and academics discussing AI’s practical applications in UX. They will provide insights into AI frameworks, principles, and tools, focusing on their direct relevance to everyday UX work. This pragmatic approach is designed to alleviate concerns about AI, offering a clearer vision of how AI can enhance UX practice.
Attendees will benefit from structured learning, networking with peers facing similar challenges, and engaging in discussions that foster a deeper understanding of AI in UX. The event aims to equip participants with knowledge that can be immediately applied to their work, enhancing their skills and employability.
Join us at UX Brighton 2024 to gain practical AI insights, connect with like-minded UX Designers, Researchers, Product Managers, (and Developers, hopefully) and enhance your UX career in a supportive fun environment.
Learn new approaches and glean fresh insights that will bring solid benefits for you, your colleagues and your clients.
Some of the smartest, most insightful and entertaining people I've met. And that was just the audience. The speakers were great, too.
Mike Kuniavsky, Xerox PARC
All the things AI can do – Will Taylor
There’s an old quote: “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” And with AI, it can feel like every week brings a “decade’s worth” of new technologies and ideas.
As a UX researcher or designer, it’s hard to keep track of the AI technologies that we can add to our products. So this talk is a primer. It’s a visual, guided-tour of what’s available - what’s “on the menu” - to help you design amazing new experiences for users.
This talk aims to inspire you, help you discover new technologies, and steer your design and research with a clear understanding of what is practical and buildable. To future-proof yourself, you’ll also learn a practical system for staying on top of emerging AI technologies in your field and matching these technologies to your users’ needs.
About Will
Will Taylor is a seasoned designer and engineer who has been designing and building startups for the last 12 years.
He is the founder of Workflow.design, an AI company for the creative industry. Workflow was voted among the top 1% of European startups by Focal ’24 and has been nominated for multiple design and product awards from Awwwards.
Previously, he was the founder and principal designer at the startup Rota, which was acquired in 2022. Will holds a master’s degree in Theoretical Physics from the University of Oxford and, between startups, is a qualified mental health coach.
Human conversations with grids of numbers – Glenn Jones
The rise of large language models signals a new era in machine learning. Yet, these grids of numbers, while impressive, offer a faltering facade of true human communication. Past research reminds us that conversation is a beautiful, chaotic, and profoundly human tool that resists easy replication.
However, there is a seed in generative AI of something to come: tools that can generate individualised and ethereal interactions. Emerging reasoning capabilities that can interact with the experiences we have built for humans, which act as agents on our behalf. These systems hold the promise of eventually working in collaboration with us, through our greatest tool – spoken and written language.
In this talk Glenn will explore possible AI driven user experiences. What will be the place for graphical interfaces in a world of conversational AI? Will chat UI design patterns prove to be just a passing adolescent phase – something we’ll all soon look back on with a wry smile.
About Glenn
Glenn Jones is a tech founder and advisor with a passion for seamlessly blending UX design, product leadership, and strategic thinking. He led the design and product function in the start-up he co-founded, working for clients such as The Guardian, FT and Washington Post.
Unconventionally, he has in-depth expertise across many different fields of the digital industry. His mind moves from data, coding, to considering UX, all while strategizing product commercialization. You might find him doing all of these things at once. After being involved in two successful tech exits, Glenn spends his time researching AI and advising high-growth teams.
People won’t use your shiny new AI product – Hannah Beresford
Incorporating AI into products is exciting, but what happens when real users start interacting with these features? Hannah Beresford has conducted extensive user testing on AI-driven functionalities and uncovered surprising behaviours. Using innovative testing techniques tailored specifically to AI features, she’s found that users often don’t respond to AI the way you’d expect.
In this talk, Hannah will share her discoveries, including unexpected insights into how people really behave when faced with AI and what that means for product design. If you’re working with AI, this talk will challenge your assumptions and provide practical tips for designing AI features that users will actually adopt.
About Hannah
Hannah Beresford is a Design Research Manager at Deloitte Digital, where she plays a key role in shaping AI-powered solutions used by thousands of people.
Her mission is to ensure that artificial intelligence enhances human experiences by addressing genuine user needs.As AI evolves, especially with the rise of Generative AI and its transition to more conversational interfaces, Hannah is dedicated to making these systems simpler, smarter, and more intuitive.
Her work centres on understanding how humans interact with AI and ensuring that these interactions feel natural and seamless.
Calibrating user trust in AI products – Manú Bartlett & Ewa Koc
In this session Ewa (UX Designer) & Manú (UX Researcher) will talk us through a variety of case studies from AI powered products which have successfully built calibrated trust in their users.
Taking their own experience building an AI search tool for seasoned experts in patent intelligence as the starting point.
Exploring three key elements for building user trust:
How to explain how your product works
- It’s not about how an AI makes a decision, it’s why
- Case study: Derwent Innovation’s AI search
How to ‘humanise’ your AI product to build trust
- Case study: ChatGPT
- How to harness good bias to personalise your AI: Feedback, training on the fly & data sources
How to teach users to use the Al product correctly
- Responding to actions
- Error messages
- Interactive onboarding
About Manú & Ewa
Manú Bartlett
Manú has worked as a UX Researcher for over 6 years, starting off with microfinance users for a fintech inclusion organisation in Mexico in 2017, then working as an in-house researcher for the British Government, followed by Opencast UK Tech Consultancy and last year she joined the global leader in data products: Clarivate Analytics.
She is an Anthropologist who won the prestigious Fulbright scholarship to study for a masters degree in Design & Anthropology at Parsons Design School, the New School in NYC.
She also holds a BA in Economic Geography from the London School of Economics (LSE).
Her work unites the iterative process of design thinking with in-depth ethnographic & quantitative research to understand the needs and desires of users in complex contexts.
Ewa Koc
Ewa is a senior UX designer with a background in linguistics. Formerly at Roche Diagnostics, a global healthcare leader, she now works at Clarivate, focusing on IP Intelligence Solutions.
She completed her master’s degree in UX/UI at Ramon Llull University of Barcelona and has previous experience in marketing and technical writing.
Ewa is particularly interested in accessibility and data-driven design, enabling her to make a meaningful impact in the digital world.
Emerging UX patterns beyond the chatbot – Pablo Stanley
Pablo will share his experience designing AI-powered tools.
We’ll look at key UI/UX patterns that help users interact with AI in a natural way – going beyond just using a chatbot.
We’ll learn about simple and effective flows that make AI features easy to use.
This talk is for teams who want to make AI tools more user-friendly and bridge the gap between humans and the little robots powering our apps.
About Pablo
Pablo Stanley is a Latin designer based in Mexico. He is the co-founder and CEO at Musho & Lummi — AI design tools aimed at unlocking people’s creativity. Previously, he co-founded Carbon Health and Blush, and held roles as a staff designer at Lyft and lead designer at InVision.
Pablo gives talks and workshops around the world on product design, animation, illustration systems, storytelling, accessibility, behavioral economics, challenges of being a designer, doodling, and the art of comics.
He has a YouTube channel called Sketch Together, where he shares design tutorials, livestreams, critiques, and other fun stuff. Pablo also hosts various podcasts, including ‘Diseño Cha Cha Cha’, which features interviews with Latinxs in the tech industry. He’s the doodler behind Open Peeps, Avataaars, Humaaans, Open Doodles, Bottts, and Buttsss.
Moreover, Pablo is a talented writer and illustrator, known for his comic series ‘The Design Team’, portraying the lives of startup designers.
In his latest endeavor, Pablo aims to share his wealth of experience and passion by creating design courses for emerging designers.
Robots vs Designers: Mastering AI and Prompt Engineering to Amplify Creativity and Career – Dr Philip Bonhard
AI is all the rage, isn’t it? You can’t read the news without someone proclaiming it to be the best thing since sliced bread or the bringer of doom. But what does it really do and how will it affect your job? If ChatGPT can generate a business proposal for a start-up in the tone of voice of Coca-Cola ads and generate a website to go with it — will we need copywriters and designers in the future?
In this talk, Phill will explore what designers need to know about AI beyond the hype, how they can stand out from the crowd, and what they should do right now to stay relevant and 10x their productivity. AI will be many things, but it should be an opportunity for growth!
About Philip
Dr Phil Bonhard is the Head of Experience Design for Homes/Mortgages at Lloyds Banking Group, the UK’s biggest home purchase lender. In a nutshell, his teams are responsible for considering human needs before jumping to solutions and then helps to get the right designers on board, like UX, Service, Visual Designers and researchers.
Before that, he headed up Experience Design for the Economic Crime Prevention Platform, which included all matters fincrime, Fraud and Authentication. Prior to joining Lloyds, Phil worked in academia, big consulting firms and ran his own design agency. He holds a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from University College London.
Most importantly he’s passionate about designing products and services that make people’s lives better. He also likes to build stuff for his three little children and tinker with his raspberry pie/arduino board with the occasional Lego thrown in. He strongly believes that building/prototyping stuff and experimenting is more important than describing it.
Synthetic Users in an Organic World – Kwame Ferreira
‘I am large, I contain multitudes’ said Walt Whitman. Multimodal models contain all of humanity’s digitised organic reality. From deep web forums to all social, YouTube, product reviews, websites, and scientific publications… all make up a primordial soup we use to recreate ourselves so we can best simulate and predict organic behaviour.
We are creating a digital reflection of humanity, capturing the nuances of our thoughts, emotions, and behaviours.
We can delve into the complexities of human psychology, and understand motivations, biases, and preferences. We are not only using this knowledge to predict future behaviour, and personalise experiences, but also to develop new products and services.
In this talk, Kwame will take us on a three-part journey on how to think about Synthetic Users — where we are and what future is being desired and created. All through the lens of having built Synthetic Users and a few other companies.
About Kwame
Kwame Ferreira is a designer and serial entrepreneur based in Lisbon and San Francisco.
He is the founder of Syntheticusers.com, a global user and market research platform that accelerates and democratizes research within organizations by synthesizing human behavior using frontier models.
Kwame is also the founder of the award-winning Bond-touch.com, a pioneer in emotional wearables that use touch as a language. He created Planet Centric Design methodology at Impossible.com and helped kickstart ventures like Fairphone.com, TheVinylFactory.com (to take a break from digital), Enchufada.com, and many others.
The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI – Maggie Appleton
The web is becoming an eerily lifeless place. Its public spaces are filled with a mix of bad faith actors and automated predators like bots, advertisers, clickbait attention-grabbers, and angry twitter mobs. Like a dark forest, all the living creatures are quietly hiding out of sight. Generative AI systems are about to make this situation worse. We now have tools that can churn out tens of thousands of words, images, and videos in seconds. The volume of mundane, low-quality, and uninspired content published to the web is about to explode. How will we find original insights under this pile of cruft? How will we figure out which authors are flesh-and-blood humans we can form emotional and intellectual relationships with? And does it even matter if something was made by an AI instead of a human?
About Maggie
Maggie is a designer-developer-anthropologist hybrid interested in tools for thought, end-user programming, and novel interfaces for language models / other “AI” capabilities. She’s currently a lead design engineer at Normally – a design and prototyping research studio based in London.
Highlights from previous years
UX Brighton is proud to be partnering with the following organisations
Fantastic conference - a fresh mix of new ideas, provocative speakers, and a highly engaged audience. Well worth the trip.
Alex Wright, Director of User Experience at the New York Times
