In a few weeks’ time our planning team is jetting off to Austria to attend the World Usability Congress, Europe’s premier UX design conference.
The two-day conference will kick off 16th October in Graz, Austria, bringing together 600 delegates from all over the world with different backgrounds and professions to share knowledge and discuss the future of UX. The conference centres around UX design best practice now and in the future, with keynote speakers from tech powerhouses such as Instagram, Boston Dynamics, and Alibaba.
Here are just some of the topics we’re looking forward to:
Autonomous driving
Digital transformation in the transport industry has been a long-held fascination for our team (check out our articles on the UX of public transport and our thoughts on driverless cars,) so we’re really excited to learn more about the industry's evolving best practises for automated driving. We’ll be gaining insight from experts from an academic perspective (Carnegie Mellon University) as well as a business perspective (BMW).
Applying UX in AI
AI is a vast topic, and we’re looking forward to hearing talks that cover the full gamut of AI applications; from voice and AI algorithms to learning interfaces.While we have a lot of knowledge around voice technologies and chatbots (check out some of our voice projects or some of our recent lab articles for more) we’re looking forward to finding out more about new applications of these technologies.
UX and Robotics
Robotics is a rapidly evolving market, and one that is set to disrupt a huge number of industries worldwide. At the conference we’ll learn more from experts what this paradigm shift will mean for UX, what we have learned from first-wave social bots, and how robotics might influence the day-to-day products we all use.
Everything else!
It would take an article much longer than this to showcase everything on offer at the World Usability Congress, but we’ll also be exploring themes and topics such as the place of UX in agile, evolving UX in eCommerce, how UX can improve industrial safety, and UX psychology.
We’re thrilled to have the opportunity to go to the conference and bring back takeaways that will accelerate the innovation and digital transformation for our clients. If you want to follow what we’re up to, make sure you follow us on Twitter and Instagram for updates. You can also check out the #WUC19 hashtag to get the latest updates on the conference while we’re there.
If you’d like to chat about UX or are looking for help with your next project, get in touch. Our team are all ears, and we’d love to hear from you.
Lauren
UX Planning Lead