UX Australia 2026

As designers, We have never had more tools, more methods, more frameworks, And yet the feeling of collective life, of shared prosperity, of genuine community, has been slowly slipping. The feeling of collective prosperity, of participation, of belonging, has narrowed, and is almost fading. This keynote begins by asking what a vibrant community actually is: not as an aspiration, but as something with real characteristics that can be named, protected, and designed toward.

Drawing on community-led projects built through reclaimed materials, participatory storytelling, and shared cultural memory, Nila argues that designers carry more agency in this moment, so how can we use that agency? A call to return design to its original purpose: creating the conditions for people to feel prosperous, connected, and part of something larger than themselves.

Over five years of working together across multiple projects, we've accumulated real, practical learnings about what it means to bring genuine context awareness into your design process, and this talk is the distillation of that. Through working case studies drawn from our own practice, we walk through the five dimensions of context, showing not just the theory but how we actually apply it day to day. People love to see how others work, and we pull back the curtain on that in a way that's honest, practical, and immediately useful. It's a technical design talk at heart, but it leaves you with something more: a redefinition of the designer's role in a world increasingly shaped by AI. You'll leave with tools you can use tomorrow, a renewed sense of purpose, and a completely ruined relationship with pesto.

Young people’s expectations of the services they engage with are shaped by their experiences of the broader digital world. In an era defined by hyper-personalised and near-instant online experiences, mental health services are evolving to be just as responsive.

ReachOut Australia intentionally redesigned its PeerChat service model and product to better support changing help-seeking behaviours and address the high-friction entry-point that failed to meet users at their peak moment of need. PeerChat is a text-based one-to-one support service in which young people aged 16–25 can connect with a trained peer worker who has lived experience of mental health challenges. The service was designed to provide an evidence-based offering to young people who lack connection and want to feel heard and understood by someone who can relate. By transitioning PeerChat from a traditional booked model to an on-demand service, the interdisciplinary team removed the barriers of ‘scheduled support’ in favour of ‘in-the-moment’ connection.

Join ReachOut’s Senior Product Manager, Nadine Raydan and Emily Smith, Peer Work Manager, as they discuss PeerChat’s strategic pivot and transition from a booked service to an on-demand model and share the impact of these changes. They’ll share insights from the end-to-end journey of this transition, detailing the initial drivers for change, co-creating with frontline mental health workers and young people, and the outcomes and lessons from the first year of service.

MC’s talk is about how she is approaching the change curve being introduced by AI. Talking through how her team is approaching it, and then showing two use cases of where is has been helpful.

Mobile UX is obsessed with speed.

Fewer steps. One-tap actions. Flows so smooth you barely notice them.

The problem is that mobile design inherited desktop assumptions and disguised them as mobile-first.

We design for focus, continuity and attention. Yet mobile exists in a world of interruption, distraction and fragmented attention.

What if mobile isn’t a smaller desktop at all?

What if it requires its own design principles?

Drawing on years of mobile design experience—and leading UX for one of Australia’s most-used financial apps—Emma Buckland explores why many of the patterns we celebrate in mobile design can increase risk, and what changes when we start designing for the reality of mobile use.

For years digital design has focused on efficiency. Faster systems. Leaner services. Tighter workflows. Organisations measure success through reduced clicks, task completion rates, and time saved. These measures are useful, but they do not always explain why people value an experience. On the other hand, some of the most meaningful moments in human life are inefficient when viewed through a purely operational lens. Long conversations, shared meals, slow rituals, provide richer experience. Research in psychology and behavioural science shows that these are the moments people remember. Yet design practice continues to optimise primarily for efficiency.

This talk explores what happens when we look at digital experiences through a different lens -- the lens of enjoyment. Drawing on work in Human Computer Interaction, behavioural science, and real design research projects from consulting, it shows how experiences that intentionally introduce meaning can increase trust, engagement, and perceived value. The talk will introduce an approach for making enjoyment measurable via indicators that can complement traditional numeric efficiency metrics.

Our proposed talk will discuss our journey developing a central UX and design resource to support library staff in developing user-centered experiences. Our resource, the Library Design Playbook, offers a scaffolded approach to understanding and applying UX concepts, with tangible examples and tools to build confidence and capability in applying the double diamond approach.

By reframing UX as a shared responsibility across all roles, the Playbook promotes a culture where every staff member contributes to improving user experiences. It also highlights the value of specialist design expertise working alongside librarians to elevate library services through collaborative, evidence-based design.

Most digital journeys are designed with an end destination in mind. Search, discover, decide, convert - done. The experience is considered complete the moment someone gets what they came for.

At PetRescue, that destination is a rescue pet finding a loving home. For a long time, that's where our efforts focused. When we examined what actually happens across that journey, we discovered that the most consequential design moment wasn't only the search or finding a match. It was what happened next. Given that a pet can only be united with one household, something easily neglected was the journey for the unsuccessful applicant.

Someone wanting to adopt a pet is emotionally invested and has imagined this pet as a loving companion in their life. With 100 applications for a single rescue pet not being uncommon, the unsuccessful 99 people who inevitably miss out are faced with a decision on what to do next, while feeling heightened emotions often including a form of grief and deep disappointment.

This disappointment can be compounding and lead to a pathway of turning to backyard and unsafe sources - methods which face less barriers - the exact opposite outcome of what the rescue sector exists to prevent. Emotion doesn't stop when a journey ends. It fuels whatever comes next.

This presentation is about how PetRescue is deliberately designing for disappointment - to hold and support people through it, keep them encouraged on the journey, and protect the decision that follows. It's also an acknowledgement to a continued work in progress (it's not completely solved yet!), and an invitation to look at your own products differently: not just at the moment someone succeeds, but at what you've designed (or haven't) for everyone who doesn't.

Invisible disabilities affect 1 in 5 people, yet most UX research processes, workplace tools, and design systems are built as if they don't exist. As a product designer at Movember living with an invisible disability, I've experienced the gap between how products are designed and how people like me actually use them.

This talk explores what happens when the designer is the underrepresented user. I'll share how my lived experience has reshaped the way I conduct discovery and design, challenge "standard" assumptions, and identify the patterns that consistently fail people with invisible disabilities.

Are we designing for everyone, or just the users we can see?

Sam Alderton-Johnson joins Steve Baty for a fireside chat talking about his work reframing co-design as a decolonising practice–one that recognises sovereignty, redistributes decision-making authority, and centres communities who have historically been designed for rather than with.

What does a cluttered footpath have in common with a confusing navigation menu? Drawing on in-depth walking interviews with neurodivergent adults navigating Sydney's public spaces, this keynote reframes neuroinclusion as a design systems challenge. The talk explores how predictability, sensory clarity, legibility and opportunities for recovery shape people's ability to participate in everyday life, and what these experiences can teach us about designing more inclusive environments, interfaces and systems for every mind.

Most of what shapes a healthcare experience was decided before you were in the room – by legislation, conformance requirements, and the data models beneath the interface. If you don't understand what sits there, you're not practising healthcare UX. *You're decorating risk.* The Active Script List was designed to give Australians control over their own prescription data – portable, accessible, theirs. But not every risk was visible in the conformance requirements. And when the experience falls short, nobody blames the infrastructure. **They blame the product.** In healthcare, a form is never just a form. It is a decision-making tool whose data flows into clinical decisions, funding models. dispensing systems, and records stored for years. The wrong simplification doesn't just lose data – *it loses clinical meaning.* The most important UX decisions in healthcare are made upstream, before design even begins. The designers who make the biggest impact are the ones willing to go there – and **ask to be in the room where those decisions are made.**

Designing inclusively is more crucial now than ever before. Given the current state of tech -- especially rapid advances in artificial intelligence and ever-higher stakes in data, privacy, and identity handling -- UX practitioners are poised to make impact on a massive scale. Thus, we hold a great deal of responsibility for ensuring we account for the full breadth of human experience.

It can be daunting to think of expanding our scope from accessibility, which primarily accounts for disability, to consider other aspects of human diversity. With so many aspects to consider -- gender, sexuality, race, cultural heritage, language, geography, socioeconomics, literacy, trauma, and so much more -- where do we even begin?

In this talk, I'll cover foundations and tools to embed inclusive design into your work. I'll discuss key concepts like intersectionality and lived experience, share what approaches have worked with me, and get real about working within limited constraints.

The aim is not to get you thinking about taking an inclusive design course "sometime next year" or to give you a few books to add to your to-be-read list. The aim is to get you started on your toolkit now: with concrete actions and tools you can use in your current project, learning and iterating as you develop your own inclusive design practice.

Designing for the Human Margin is a talk about the precise, mappable territory AI cannot take from design — and why our discipline has been quietly giving it away for twenty years.

For decades, we've designed technology to help people react.

An alert appears. A dashboard turns red. Teams scramble to investigate, triage, and resolve problems after they've already happened.

But what if technology could help prevent problems before they even begin?

As AI becomes embedded into the products we build, UX is undergoing a fundamental shift. Our role is no longer just to design interfaces or simplify workflows. We are designing intelligent ecosystems that understand context, learn behaviors, and proactively help people achieve their goals.

In this talk, I'll share my journey designing AI-powered experiences for complex enterprise environments and the framework that emerged from that work. Rather than adding another AI assistant to the interface, we'll explore how intelligence can quietly work in the background, reduce cognitive load, and help people focus on what matters most.

The future of UX isn't about building smarter interfaces. It's about designing experiences that help people make better decisions before they even realize they need help.

Because the best technology is deeply human.

User experience design often focuses on usability, accessibility, and task success. But even when users complete a task successfully, an interface may still be demanding unnecessary mental effort.

Every extra decision, notification, unclear hierarchy, or fragmented workflow adds to the cognitive load users must manage. These costs are rarely visible in traditional usability metrics, yet they directly affect attention, performance, and user satisfaction.

Cognitive Load Theory offers a way to make this invisible cost visible.

In this talk, Dr Ben Shelton and Cordelia Prangley introduce how cognitive load can be used as a practical lens for evaluating interface effectiveness. Drawing on research from educational psychology and calm technology, the session explores how mental workload influences user performance, decision-making, and attention.

Attendees will learn:

- How cognitive load affects user performance and decision quality - The relationship between perceptual load, attention, and interface complexity - Practical techniques for identifying cognitive overload in real products - How cognitive load insights can lead to calmer, more effective digital experiences

If we want technology to feel effortless, we need to understand the demands it places on the human mind.

Unplanned disruption is where complex systems are most exposed. In transport, it brings together multiple modes, fragmented systems, and teams making decisions quickly with incomplete information. The result is not just operational pressure, but visible gaps in governance, processes, tools, and communication that directly impact the customer experience. At the same time, it creates challenges for both customers and employees, with frustration often building between teams that are each working within different constraints and realities.

This session explores how human-centred design was used to make those gaps visible and actionable. Drawing on practical work across cross-agency collaboration, standardised processes, and shared tools, it shows how mapping the disruption ecosystem, visualising customer and staff journeys, and establishing a shared definition of disruption can support clearer governance, more consistent decision-making, and better coordination in real-time. This program of work helps stakeholders see the broader system they are operating within and reveal the experiences of others across it. This created empathy across teams, reduced some of the frustration that had built up between functions, and gave people a clearer sense of why their work mattered in the bigger picture.

Attendees will leave with practical approaches for mapping complex systems, aligning cross-functional teams, and improving decision-making in high-pressure, real-time environments.

Every UX-er knows the feeling: You've landed in a new project, a new role, or a new organisation, and the brief is vague, the stakeholders have assumptions baked in, and nobody seems to agree on what the actual problem is. The instinct is to trust the process - but what if the process is the problem? This talk flips the script on how we navigate ambiguity, offering eight practical, immediately applicable tools for getting comfortable in the grey zone of not-knowing. Drawing on experience design, cognitive science, and the humbling realities of working in complex organisations, you'll leave with a concrete framework for naming your unknowns, challenging your assumptions, and making better decisions even when the path ahead isn't clear. Whether you're a seasoned practitioner or fresh in your career, comfort with uncertainty isn't a personality trait - it's a skill. And this talk will help you build it.

Attributes and conversations about UX and Product Design leadership often centre on scale and efficiency: growing headcount, enabling company growth, introducing streamlined practices and systems, refining operating models, and driving transformation. Across 25+ years of leading design in startups, agencies, enterprises, and government, I’ve done all of that. I’ve taken on those roles believing I could create meaningful, lasting impact — leaving each organisation stronger than when I joined. But in environments shaped by restructures, mergers and acquisitions, pivots, and strategy resets, many of those visible markers of leadership prove to be fragile and short-lived.

Over time, I’ve come to realise that only one aspect of leadership truly endures beyond tenure. In this talk, I’ll reflect on both the successes and missteps from my journey as a design leader and share what I believe is the one ingredient that outlasts growth strategies, frameworks, and org charts — and what leaders should focus on if they want their impact to genuinely travel beyond them.

All of the most important decisions about a project or company's customers, value, requirements, performance, intent, and impact are made before it's ever given to designers and engineers. That puts developers at a disadvantage of improving outcomes, making change, and accomplishing their goals. In order to have the impact you want to have, you need to move up the decision chain and become involved with strategy.

Designers, in particular, have all of the skills and perspectives needed to become superior strategist, whether they stay at the development level or move into an organization's leadership. However, in order to be effective, they must learn why the traditional approach to strategy is the problem and what new approaches will replace it and give them the influence they desire. This talk will cover what is wrong with strategy, how to fix it, and how to upskill into more impactful (and, often lucrative) careers.