Clicking through these cold war slides gives an uncomfortable mixture of nostalgic appreciation for the retro aesthetic combined with serious heebie-jeebies for the content.
The slides appear to be 1970s/1980s informational or training images from the United States Air Force, NORAD, Navy, and beyond.
UX London 2023 is over.
That feels weird. I’ve spent most of this year planning for this event. It’s been something that’s coming towards me. Now it’s in the rear-view mirror. Surreal.
I’ve talked about this with other conference organisers. Some of them get the post-conference blues. It makes sense. You spend so much time pouring all your energy into something and then one day, suddenly it’s done. No wonder smart folks book some holiday time for the week after a big event.
Luckily for me, the organisation of UX London isn’t all on my shoulders. Far from it. Louise did all the hard work: planning, logistics, execution. All I had to take care of was the line-up.
Before the event, I was already feeling pretty darn happy with the line-up I had assembled. Now that the event is over, I’m feeling even happier. I was blown away.
There were some speakers on the line-up that I already knew would deliver the goods. I’ve seen them speak before. They’re a safe pair of hands. But there were other speakers I had never met before, much less seen them speak. I was pretty sure they’d be great, but I couldn’t be certain.
Well, it turned out that literally everyone was fantastic. I know, I know—that sounds highly improbable. Out of 15 people, no duds? But take it from me, every single one of them was terrific. You kinda had to be there.
Imran, Vim, Daniel, Trine, Vitaly, Mansi, Stephen, Asia, Amy, Paul, Stacey, Ignacia, Stefanie, Hannah, and Dave—thank you, thank you, thank you!
I’ve been getting a heartwarming buzz from reading how much people got out of the event…
Eliza Lawson finished her summary by saying:
So many amazing things to take away from the conference. But I think the main one for me is “I want to do that. I could do that. I’m GOING to do that…one day.”
Anastasiya Korolkova came as part of the scholarship programme:
☺️ Thank you to everyone involved in organizing this remarkable event. Your dedication and hard work created a truly remarkable and enriching experience. I am sincerely grateful and eagerly look forward to what the future holds for UX London.
Jojo Tulip finished their detailed write-up by saying:
Couldn’t recommend UX London enough, it was awesome 😎👍
Jan Henckens said:
A good mix of inspiring talks and practical workshops, top-notch organisation and cool venue meant we had a great time (and we might already want to go back next year 😀)
And I’m equally pleased that the speakers got so much out of the event…
Huge thanks to Jeremy Keith for inviting me, and the team at Clearleft for organising a great event.
UX London was amazing - full of wonderful UX folks who genuinely care about using their skills to do good.
I bring back with me relationships and ideas that go way beyond the gathering!
I’m going to bask in this post-conference glow for a little while. Then it’s time to start planning the next event…
In just a couple of weeks, I’ll be heading to Bristol for Pixel Pioneers. The line-up looks really, really good …with the glaring exception of the opening talk, which I’ll be delivering. But once that’s done, I’m very much looking forward to enjoying the rest of the day’s talks.
There are still tickets available if you fancy joining me.
This will be my second time speaking at this conference. I spoke at the inaugural conference back in 2017 when I gave a talk called Evaluating Technology. This time my talk is called Declarative Design.
A few weeks back, Oliver asked me some questions about my upcoming talk. I figured I’d post my answers here…
Welcome back to Pixel Pioneers! You return with another keynote - how do you manage to stay so ever-enthusiastic about designing for the web?
Well, I’d say my enthusiasm is mixed with frustration. And that’s always been the case. Just as I’ve always found new things that excite me about the World Wide Web, there are just as many things that upset me.
But that’s okay. Both forces can be motivating. When I find myself writing a blog post or preparing a talk, the impetus might be “This is so cool! Check this out!” or it might be “This is so maddening! What’s happening!?” …or perhaps a mix of both.
But to answer your question, the World Wide Web never stays still so there’s always something to get excited about. Equally, the longer the web exists, the more sense it makes to examine the fundamental bedrock—HTML, accessibility,progressive enhancement—and see how they’re just as important as ever. And that’s also something to get excited about!
Without too many spoilers, what can we expect to take away from your talk?
I’m hoping to provide people with a lens that they can use to examine their tools, processes, and approaches to designing for the web. It’s a fairly crude lens—it divides the world into a binary split that I’ve borrowed from the world of programming; imperative and declarative languages. But it’s a surprisingly thought-provoking angle.
Along the way I’ll also be pointing out some of the incredible things that we can do with CSS now. In the past few years there’s been an explosion in capabilities.
But this won’t be a code-heavy presentation. It’s mostly about the ideas. I’ll be referencing some projects by other people that I’m very excited by.
What other web design and development tools, techniques and technologies are you currently most excited about?
Outside of the world of CSS—which is definitely where a lot of the most exciting developments are happening—I’m really interested in the View Transitions API. If it delivers on its promise, it could be a very useful nail in the coffin of uneccessary single page apps. But I’m a little nervous. Right now the implementation only works for single page apps, which makes it an incentive to use that model. I really, really hope that the multipage version ships soon.
But honestly, I probably get most excited about discovering some aspect of HTML that I wasn’t aware of. Even after all these years the language can still surprise me.
And on the flipside, what bugs you most about the web at the moment?
How much time have you got?
Seriously though, the thing that’s really bugged me for the past decade is the increasing complexity of “modern” frontend development when it isn’t driven by user needs. Yes, I’m talking about JavaScript frameworks like React and the assumption that everything should be a single page app.
Honestly, the mindset became so ubiquitous that I felt like I must be missing something. But no, the situation really has spiralled out of control, much to the detriment of end users.
Luckily we’re starting to see the pendulum swing back. The proponents of trickle-down developer convenience are having to finally admit that it’s bollocks.
I don’t care if the move back to making websites is re-labelled as “isomorphic server-rendered multi-page apps.” As long as we make sensible architectural decisions, that’s all that matters.
What’s next, Jeremy?
Right now I’m curating the line-up for this year’s UX London conference which is the week after Pixel Pioneers. As you know, conference curation is a lot of work, but it’s also very rewarding. I’m really proud of the line-up.
It’s been a while since the last season of the Clearleft podcast. I hope to remedy that soon. It takes a lot of effort to make even one episode, but again, it’s very rewarding.
Back in November of last year I announced that UX London would be returning in 2023 and that I’d be curating the line-up again. That’s where I’ve been putting a lot of my energy over the last six months.
The line-up is complete. If I step back and try to evaluate it objectively, I’ve gotta say …hot damn, that’s a fine roster of speakers!
Imran Afzal, Vimla Appadoo, Daniel Burka, Trine Falbe, Vitaly Friedman, Mansi Gupta, Stephen Hay, Asia Hoe, Amy Hupe, Paul Robert Lloyd, Stacey Mendez, Ignacia Orellana, Stefanie Posavec, Hannah Smith, and David Dylan Thomas.
Take a look at the complete schedule—a terrific mix of thought-provoking talks and practical hands-on workshops.
On day one, you’ve got these talks:
Then on day two:
And that’s just the talks! You’ve also got these four excellent workshops on both days:
That’s a lot of great stuff packed into two days!
In case you haven’t guessed, I am very excited about this year’s UX London. I would love to see you there.
As an appreciation for you putting up with my child-like excitement, I’d like to share a discount code with you. You can get 20%—that’s one fifth!—off the ticket price using the code CLEARLEFT20.
But note that the standard ticket pricing ends on Friday, May 26th so use that code in the next week to get the most bang for your buck. After that, there’ll only be last-chance tickets, which cost more.
Looking forward to seeing you at Tobacco Dock on June 22nd and 23rd!
I was up in Edinburgh for the past few days at the Design It; Build It conference.
I was supposed to come back on Saturday but then the train strikes were announced so I changed my travel plans to avoid crossing a picket line, which gave me an extra day to explore Auld Reekie.
I spoke at DIBI last year so this time I was there in a different capacity. I was the host. That meant introducing the speakers and asking them questions after their talks.
I’m used to hosting events now, what with UX London and Leading Design. But I still get nervous beforehand. At least with a talk you can rehearse and practice. With hosting, it’s all about being nimble and thinking on your feet.
I had to pay extra close attention to each talk, scribbling down potential questions to ask. It’s similar to the feeling I get when I’m liveblogging talks.
There were some line-up changes and schedule adjustments along the way, but everything went super smoothly. I pride myself on running a tight ship so the timings were spot-on.
When it came to the questions, I tried to probe under the skin of each presentation. For some talks, that involved talking shop—the finer points of user research or the design process, say. But for the big-picture talks, I made sure to get each speaker to defend their position. So after Dan Makoski’s kumbaya-under-capitalism talk, I gave him a good grilling. Same with Philip Lockwood-Holmes who gave me permission beforehand to be merciless with him.
It was all quite entertaining. Alas, I think I may have put the fear of God into the other speakers who saw me channeling my inner Jeremy Paxman. But they needn’t have worried. I also lobbed some softballs. Like when I asked Levon Sharrow from Patagonia if there was such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism.
I had fun, but I was also aware of that fine line between being clever and being an asshole. Even though part of my role was to play devil’s advocate, I tried to make sure I was never punching down.
All in all, an excellent couple of days spent in good company.
Hosting was hard work, but very rewarding. I’ve come to realise it’s one of those activities that comes relatively easy to me, but it is very hard (and stressful) for others. And I’m pretty gosh-darned good at it too, false modesty bedamned.
So if you’re running an event but the thought of hosting it fills you with dread, we should talk.
I’d like to play it cool when I announce the latest speakers for UX London 2023, like I could be all nonchalant and say, “oh yeah, did I not mention these people are also speaking…?”
But I wouldn’t be able to keep up that façade for longer than a second. The truth is I am excited to the point of skittish gigglyness about this line-up.
Look, I’ll let you explore these speakers for yourself while I try to remain calm and simply enumerate the latest additions…
The line-up is almost complete now! Just one more speaker to announce.
I highly recommend you get your UX London ticket if you haven’t already. You won’t want to miss this!
Oliver asked me some questions about my upcoming talk at Pixel Pioneers in Bristol in June. Here are my answers.
I know I’m being tease, doling out these UX London speaker announcements in batches rather than one big reveal. Indulge me in my suspense-ratcheting behaviour.
Today I’d like to unveil three speakers whose surnames start with the letter H…
Just look at how that line-up is coming together! There’ll be just one more announcement and then the roster will be complete.
But don’t wait for that. Grab your ticket now and I’ll see you in London on June 22nd and 23rd!
I am positively giddy with excitement to tell you about some more speakers you can look forward to at UX London 2023:
I have more confirmed speakers but I’m going to be a tease and save them for a separate announcement soon. You can expect more of the same: smart, fabulous people with all kinds of design experience that they’re going to share with you at UX London.
But why wait for another speaker announcement? Get your ticket to UX London 2023 now!
Please put your fingers on the desk in front of you and move them up and down rapidly in the manner of a snare drum…
I’m very happy to announce the first four speakers for UX London 2023:
This is shaping up nicely! You can expect some more speaker announcements before too long.
But don’t wait too long to get your ticket—early-bird pricing ends this month on Friday, February 24th. Then the price goes up by £200. If you need to convince your boss, here are some reasons to attend.
I very much look forward to seeing you at Tobacco Dock on June 22nd and 23rd this year!
I’ll be speaking at this free early evening event with Arisa Fukusaki and Cassie in Brighton on Monday, February 27th. Grab a ticket and come along for some pizza and nerdiness.
This looks like an excellent—and free!—online event centred on privacy and safety. It’s got Eva PenzeyMoog, Robin Berjon and more!
I am very excited to announce that UX London will be back in 2023!
We’re returning to Tobacco Dock. Save the dates: June 22nd and 23rd.
Wait …that’s only two days. Previously UX London was a three-day event and you could either go for all three days or get a ticket for just one day.
Well, that’s changing. UX London 2023 will be condensed into a two-day event. You get a ticket for both days and everyone shares the experience.
I’m very excited about this! I’m planning to make some other tweaks to the format, but the basic structure of each day remains roughly the same: inspirational talks in the morning followed by hands-on workshops in the afternoon.
As for the who’ll be giving those talks and running those workshops …well, that’s what I’m currently putting together. For the second year in row, I’m curating the line-up. It’s exciting—like a planning a heist, assembling a team of supersmart people with specialised skillsets.
I can’t wait to reveal more. For now though, you can trust me when I say that the line-up is going to be stellar.
If you do trust me, you can get your super early-bird ticket, you’ve got until this Friday, December 2nd.
The super early-bird tickets are an absolute steal at £695 plus VAT. After Friday, you’ll be able to get early-bird tickets for the more reasonable price of £995 plus VAT.
Keep an eye on the UX London website for speaker announcements. I’ll also be revealing those updates here too because, as you can probably tell, I’m positively gleeful about UX London 2023.
See you there!
Excellent advice from Stuart.
Watch—and more importantly, listen—to this five minute video to get the full effect.
dConstruct 2022 was great fun. It was also the last ever dConstruct.
If you were there, and you’d like to re-live the magic, the audio from the talks is now available on the dConstruct Archive. Here they are:
Thanks to some service worker magic, you can select any of those talks for offline listening later.
The audio is also available on Huffduffer on the dConstruct Huffduffer account. Here’s the RSS feed that you can pop into your podcast software of choice.
If you’re more of a visual person, you can watch videos of the slides synced with the audio. They’ve all got captions too (good ones, not just automatically generated).
So have a listen in whichever way you prefer.
Now that I’ve added the audio from the last dConstruct to the dConstruct archive, it feels like the closing scene of Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Roll credits.
Wow, what a day. A really diverse selection of talks that went all over the map. From building vast world-changing health systems, to scaling and archiving global online communities, to the beauty and joy of calligraphy. And lasers. I enjoyed the lot, which is rare for me at an event like this.
A rather lovely write-up of the final dConstruct!
Above all it was nice to see the diversity of approaches and reasons for doing ‘design’ / art / whatever. Some of us are solving the hard problems, some of us are thinking philosophically or creating new tools, and some of us are just having fun – and all approaches are valid and useful.
A great write-up from Hidde on dConstruct 2022 and how the speakers tackled the theme of design transformation:
They talked about turning a series of penstrokes into art, lasers into fireworks, human experiences into novels and patient data collection into a minimal effort task.
A lot of our work in web design and technology has a power to transform and that is wonderful, especially when we manage to be intentional about the how and why.
I met up with a supersmart programmer friend of mine a little while back. He was describing some work he was doing with React. He was joining up React components. There wasn’t really any problem-solving or debugging—the individual components had already been thoroughly tested. He said it felt more like construction than programming.
My immediate thought was “that should be automated.”
Or at the very least, there should be some way for just about anyone to join those pieces together rather than it requiring a supersmart programmer’s time. After all, isn’t that the promise of design systems and components—freeing us up to tackle the meaty problems instead of spending time on the plumbing?
I thought about that conversation when I was listening to Laurie’s excellent talk in Berlin last month.
Chatting to Laurie before the talk, he was very nervous about the conclusion that he had reached and was going to share: that the time is right for web development to be automated. He figured it would be an unpopular message. Heck, even he didn’t like it.
But I reminded him that it’s as old as the web itself. I’ve seen videos from very early World Wide Web conferences where Tim Berners-Lee was railing against the idea that anyone would write HTML by hand. The whole point of his WorldWideWeb app was that anyone could create and edit web pages as easily as word processing documents. It’s almost an accident of history that HTML happened to be just easy enough—but also just powerful enough—for many people to learn and use.
Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed Laurie’s talk. (Except for a weird bit where he dunks on people moaning about “the fundamentals”. I think it’s supposed to be punching up, but I’m not sure that’s how it came across. As Chris points out, fundamentals matter …at least when it comes to concepts like accessibility and performance. I think Laurie was trying to dunk on people moaning about fundamental technologies like languages and frameworks. Perhaps the message got muddled in the delivery.)
I guess Laurie was kind of talking about this whole “no code” thing that’s quite hot right now. Personally, I would love it if the process of making websites could be democratised more. I’ve often said that my nightmare scenario for the World Wide Web would be for its fate to lie in the hands of an elite priesthood of programmers with computer science degrees. So I’m all in favour of no-code tools …in theory.
The problem is that unless they work 100%, and always produce good accessible performant code, then they’re going to be another example of the law of leaky abstractions. If a no-code tool can get someone 90% of the way to what they want, that seems pretty good. But if that person than has to spend an inordinate amount of time on the remaining 10% then all the good work of the no-code tool is somewhat wasted.
Funnily enough, the person who coined that law, Joel Spolsky, spoke right after Laurie in Berlin. The two talks made for a good double bill.
(I would link to Joel’s talk but for some reason the conference is marking the YouTube videos as unlisted. If you manage to track down a URL for the video of Joel’s talk, let me know and I’ll update this post.)
In a way, Joel was making the same point as Laurie: why is it still so hard to do something on the web that feels like it should be easily repeatable?
He used the example of putting an event online. Right now, the most convenient way to do it is to use a third-party centralised silo like Facebook. It works, but now the business model of Facebook comes along for the ride. Your event is now something to be tracked and monetised by advertisers.
You could try doing it yourself, but this is where you’ll run into the frustrations shared by Joel and Laurie. It’s still too damn hard and complicated (even though we’ve had years and years of putting events online). Despite what web developers tell themselves, making stuff for the web shouldn’t be that complicated. As Trys put it:
We kid ourselves into thinking we’re building groundbreakingly complex systems that require bleeding-edge tools, but in reality, much of what we build is a way to render two things: a list, and a single item. Here are some users, here is a user. Here are your contacts, here are your messages with that contact. There ain’t much more to it than that.
And yet here we are. You can either have the convenience of putting something on a silo like Facebook, or you can have the freedom of doing it yourself, indie web style. But you can’t have both it seems.
This is a criticism often levelled at the indie web. The barrier to entry to having your own website is too high. It’s a valid criticism. To have your own website, you need to have some working knowledge of web hosting and at least some web technologies (like HTML).
Don’t get me wrong. I love having my own website. Like, I really love it. But I’m also well aware that it doesn’t scale. It’s unreasonable to expect someone to learn new skills just to make a web page about, say, an event they want to publicise.
That’s kind of the backstory to the project that Joel wanted to talk about: the block protocol. (Note: it has absolutely nothing to do with blockchain—it’s just an unfortunate naming collision.)
The idea behind the project is to create a kind of crowdsourced pattern library—user interfaces for creating common structures like events, photos, tables, and lists. These patterns already exist in today’s silos and content management systems, but everyone is reinventing the wheel independently. The goal of this project is make these patterns interoperable, and therefore portable.
At first I thought that would be a classic /927 situation, but I’m pleased to see that the focus of the project is not on formats (we’ve been there and done that with microformats, RDF, schema.org, yada yada). The patterns might end up being web components or they might not. But the focus is on the interface. I think that’s a good approach.
That approach chimes nicely with one of the principles of the indie web:
UX and design is more important than protocols, formats, data models, schema etc. We focus on UX first, and then as we figure that out we build/develop/subset the absolutely simplest, easiest, and most minimal protocols and formats sufficient to support that UX, and nothing more. AKA UX before plumbing.
That said, I don’t think this project is a cure-all. Interoperable (portable) chunks of structured content would be great, but that’s just one part of the challenge of scaling the indie web. You also need to have somewhere to put those blocks.
Convenience isn’t the only thing you get from using a silo like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Medium. You also get “free” hosting …until you don’t (see GeoCities, MySpace, and many, many more).
Wouldn’t it be great if everyone had a place on the web that they could truly call their own? Today you need to have an uneccesary degree of technical understanding to publish something at a URL you control.
I’d love to see that challenge getting tackled.
Matt shares some details on what he’ll be speaking about at dConstruct:
I’m going to talk generally around tools for togetherness which is my new framing for my long-running territory of general curiosity: how can we be together online, what we can do there, what it does to us, what are the design considerations, etc.
Get your ticket if you haven’t already!
I’m one of eight speakers – there’s a robotic artist, a neuroscientist, and a calligrapher. It should be an excellent day.
Today is the first day of UX London 2022 …and I’m not there. Stoopid Covid.
I’m still testing positive although I’m almost certainly near the end of my infection. But I don’t want to take any chances. Much as I hate to miss out on UX London, I would hate passing this on even more. So my isolation continues.
Chris jumped in at the last minute to do the hosting duties—thanks, Chris!
From the buzz I’m seeing on Twitter, it sounds like everything is going just great without me, which is great to see. Still, I’m experiencing plenty of FOMO—even more than the usual levels of FOMO I’d have when there’s a great conference happening that I’m not at.
To be honest, nearly all of my work on UX London was completed before the event. My number one task was putting the line-up together, and I have to say, I think I nailed it.
If I were there to host the event, it would mostly be for selfish reasons. I’d get a real kick out of introducing each one of the superb speakers. I’d probably get very tedious, repeatedly saying “Oh, you’re going to love this next one!” followed by “Wasn’t that great‽”
But UX London isn’t about me. It’s about the inspiring talks and practical workshops.
I wish I were there to experience it in person but I can still bask in the glow of a job well done, hearing how much people are enjoying the event.