Previous speakers 2015 - 2023

2023	Invisibility	UX Copenhagen 2023 “Invisibility”. Don Norman once said something like “Good UX design is invisible, bad UX is everywhere”. Creating “invisible” UX is not an easy feat though! At UX Copenhagen 2023, we’ll be looking at what goes into the development of creating invisible services, processes, and usable products, and at some of the other “invisible” things we do as designers, like using listening skills, methodologies from psychology, and even manipulation. We will look into how to highlight biases among ourselves, how to focus on what’s missing from our designs, and how to pinpoint unintended consequences. There will be talks about the hidden ways in which some parts of the population are systematically overlooked and excluded from the world we live in, highlighting racism, ageism, and gender, and discussing how we can prevent this.
	Angelos Arnis is a strategic designer who builds the structures and conditions for holistic and resilient systems that enable impact, cross-functional collaboration, and intentional change. He is using design to create more equitable conditions for the planet and its people. For the past 15 years, he has been working with product/service companies and startups. He is the co-founder at Joint Frontiers, and a co-host of ‘Human, the designer’. Additionally, Angelos is a community organizer at DesignOps Assembly and IxDA (Helsinki chapters), as well as an alumnus organizer of Joint Futures, UXHel, DSCONF, & Junction Hackathon. In his free time, he enjoys making music and playing computer games.	Our collective futures: There is no planet B In this closing keynote, Angelos Arnis will look at how designers can use their skills and tools to influence a truly green transition and shape a sustainable, equitable, and just future for all. We will talk about how strategic design, sustainable thinking, and systems approaches can help us create solutions that benefit our communities and the world we live in.
	Shir Zalzberg is a Senior UX manager at Salesforce. Previously, she led the design team at OverOps, and has also worked with multiple startups and tech companies. Besides her work, Shir is the founder of Startup Designers, a design community with over 20K members and multiple initiatives. For her work with the community, Shir was recognized as Forbes Israel 30 under 30 2021. She completed her MBA at IE business school and recently relocated to Amsterdam from Israel.	Data visualization to drive change: Learnings from 4 years of UX community surveys Between 2018 and 2022, Shir Zalzberg gathered massive amounts of data, running four surveys with thousands of participants in the UX community she manages. The surveys tackled subjects like salaries, gender gaps, age and experience gaps, the job of UX designers vs. managers, design tools, and more. In the workshop, she’ll cover best practices for data visualization. She’ll teach us what visual changes she has implemented over the years to help drive change, and what lessons she has learned about how data visualization can impact the greater community.
	Jen Blatz is a Lead User Experience Researcher and Designer with expertise that lends itself to any industry. Jen’s path to UX started in journalism and graphic design where she learned the importance of aesthetics, organization, and catering content for the consumer. She has worked in a number of fields including finance, mortgage, cloud storage, security and pet health. Jen loves being active in the UX community to learn and grow while helping others do the same. She is the co-founder and president of the UX Research and Strategy group, a 501c3 organization, with an international presence with thousands of members and followers. She is the organizer of WIAD (World Information Architecture Day) locally, and speaker for several meetup groups and international conferences like UX Australia, Convey UX, IAC (Information Architecture Conference), UX New Zealand, UX Research and Insights Summit and more.	Workshop: Spontaneous Talks Frameworks People love stories. We are told time and time again the value of storytelling when we present our UX work. But this is a workshop about Spontaneous Talks Frameworks (STF for short). These are a bit different from your traditional fairy tale that follows the arc and structure of a story. STF may not have a rising action, a climax, or a resolution. Heck, you might go as far to say that STF are not really stories at all. Spontaneous Talks Frameworks are less about describing a narrative, and more about quickly organizing your thoughts, using a framework. A Spontaneous Talks Framework helps you to organize your thoughts to present UX designs or research findings to your stakeholders. STF can be a fabulous crutch when you need to speak on a topic that you have not prepared for in advance. In this workshop, Jen Blatz will teach you how to organize your thoughts with these easy frameworks. You will learn how to use this thought organization technique to answer anything — and use it to present your UX work. You will: Know how to answer (because you organized your thoughts) Feel confident in speaking (because now you know your answer) And just do it (that is, speak with less anxiety because you organized your thoughts) Sometimes neither you nor your stakeholders have the time for a full presentation. These hacks allow you to present information on a short timeline. Spontaneous Talks Frameworks help you break up your story into smaller, consumable chunks so it’s easier to organize and remember.
	Tobias Christian Jensen is a certified professional in Accessibility Core Competencies (CPACC) by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP), an experienced public speaker, and chair of the Nordic Accessibility Community Group under W3C, promoting inclusive design in the Nordic countries. Working with digital transformation and inclusivity at Siteimprove, he teaches designers, developers, and business leaders on the importance of getting digital accessibility right, and how to do it.	Workshop: The Use of Color in the Dark Ages Each day, we will have 3-4 practical, 1.5 hour workshops to choose from after lunch. Tobias Christian Jensen, Accessibility Expert with Siteimprove, will be the hosting “The Use of Color in the Dark Ages”: “What do medieval sculptors, tiny Pacific Ocean islands, and poorly stuffed lions have in common with digital design? Color plays a quintessential role when we design. Yet we often struggle with using color in a way that makes our intentions clear to everyone and meets the requirements for inclusive design. Through stories and hands-on exercises, we will take a trip through time and travel back to the 12th century and beyond to see what we can learn from those who came before us.”
	Tiziana has more than 18 years of experience in the industry. She is a senior instructor, teaching interactive design, UX and web front-end at different secondary institutions. She has a background that includes a degree in graphic design, a master’s in Media Psychology and several professional certifications, along with years of design and web development. She is a co-leader of the San Diego chapter of the Interaction Design Foundation. She strives to create the best user experiences that will persuade without manipulation, and strongly believes that ethical design can change the world for the better. She is a member of the Ethical Design Network and maintains its blog.	Workshop: Psychological insights in UX UX psychologist and interaction designer Tiziana d’Agostino will be hosting a workshop at UX Copenhagen 2023, sharing with us the most important psychological insights that will help us create the right product that in turn delivers real value. “Successful products require a deep understanding of people, and to achieve this, we must use psychology. She will also emphasize how we should use psychology ethically to increase customers’ wellbeing, and will offer us practical advice that we can implement in our work immediately.
	Piccia Neri helps agencies, businesses, designers & developers thrive and win on the web by putting their users at the centre of their process. She does this as a UX and accessible design consultant on projects, as a course provider, trainer, coach and workshop leader. She speaks at conferences globally on UX and accessible design. She also organizes the Design for Conversions conference, which focuses on helping agencies design products that convert more, by putting people first.	Visible, Beautiful, Creative, and Accessible! “Accessibility is the death of creativity”; “You can’t be creative and accessible”; “This site may not be accessible or useful, but it’s because it’s creative!” How many times have you heard the above, or a combination thereof? On the modern web, there is a tendency to identify “creativity” with “objects that move very fast on the screen without any apparent reason”. If creativity needed animation, we might as well set fire to most of the world’s museums. There is also a tendency to identify “accessible” with “ugly” and “sacrificing imagination”. Piccia Neri will debunk these myths in her talk, showing how your website – and business – can be visible, beautiful, creative, accessible – and at the same time, extremely profitable.
	Bettina Høiler has a Master’s degree Service Systems Design from the University of Aalborg in Copenhagen, and a Bachelor’s degree in International Hospitality Management from Copenhagen Business Academy. She currently works as a senior UX and Service Designer at the Danish insurance company Alm. Brand Group, where her focus is on designing great customer experiences and employee processes within the claims area. Bettina has experience working with design in all parts of the financial industry (banking, insurance, and pension), as well as in consultancy. Her passion for people and for helping them – for instance by providing great customer experiences – is what led her into the field of UX and Service Design. Fun fact: Her favorite design tool is the Service Blueprint.	Should insurance companies care about the discovery of systemic racism and gender bias in medical devices? “Last year, I went to a UX conference where one of the topics was ‘Discrimination in the healthcare sector’. The problem raised during the talk was the discovery of systemic racism and gender bias in medical devices. The example they gave related to an oximeter, which research suggests works less well for patients with darker skin. Working at an insurance company with many health insurance customers of varying gender and skin color, I began to wonder whether this is something we should care about and take responsibility for. Of course, we are not to blame for the inadequate testing of medical devices on a narrow user segment, however, do we not have a responsibility to ensure that the partners that we collaborate with e.g. to service a health insurance customer such as private hospitals, are made aware of these issues and take notice of them when treating our insurance customers? From a UX perspective, I believe the issue with biased medical devices can jeopardize the customer experience, and the customer relationship altogether. Thus, I would argue that we should care about this invisible and unintended discrimination that becomes the consequence. In the end together with our partners, we are the ones responsible for the customer experience.”
	Rina is a ballerina turned product designer, currently based in Los Angeles. She is one of the founding members at Mooch, a fintech startup in the crypto/defi space with a community of 450,000+ where she leads design and research. In the last 10 years before her career change into tech, she was training and dancing professionally as a ballerina— dancing around Singapore, the U.S, Japan, and Spain. Her notable honors from her ballet career include dancing on stages of the Barcelona Opera House and the Metropolitan Opera House, leading second senior prize at the 2017 U.S Ballet Competition, and working directly under world renowned dancers/directors. As a career changer herself, she loves to help empower other career changers whether that be helping craft their personal brand, and identifying their transferable skills. Rina’s story has been featured in press such as Business Insider and Built in, and she’s spoken at non-profits and institutions such as the University of Arizona, Triangirls UK, GirlGenius, CareerFoundry, and Ideate Labs. Currently outside of work, she is one of the 12 chosen mentors for a fellowship program, mentoring first generation WOC in college aspiring to work in tech.	The invisible similarities ballet and design have in common Product designer and Ballerina, Rina Takikawa will be speaking at UX Copenhagen 2023 about her career transition from classical ballet to technology. In this talk, she will also be sharing the invisible similarities ballet and design have in common, and how she navigates her design process through the lessons she has learnt as a ballerina.
	Rachel Gogel (she/her) is a Paris-born, San Francisco-based queer creative director and designer whose skills range from branding, strategy, and design management to art direction, editorial, and product design. She runs her own small consultancy as an independent creative culture officer where her approach is informed by experiences both in-house and agency side. Over the last fifteen years, Rachel has continued to use design as a tool for change — from launching story-driven initiatives at Departures and Godfrey Dadich Partners to building multidisciplinary teams at The New York Times’ award-winning T Brand, GQ, and Meta. In 2022, some of her main projects included supporting internal brand work at Airbnb, advising on Jeff Staple’s new magazine MYLES, and building a brand identity for Jacqueline Novogratz’s latest passion project, Anew. Outside of her studio practice, she is also the Women in Leadership & Design (WILD) Chair on the AIGA SF Board of Directors and an Adjunct Professor at the California College of the Arts (CCA) where she teaches classes called “Leadership by Design” and “Designing Your Career” for graduate students completing their Master’s in Interaction Design. As a passionate design leader and experienced people manager, Rachel believes in fostering inclusive spaces that unlock human potential.	Dear Boss, you need help. Sending everyone home to work was a catalyst for people to reexamine not only how, when, and where they work, but why, resulting in deep, structural changes to employee expectations. But what drives engagement at work is the same factor now as it was pre-pandemic: an employee’s relationship with their manager. This is why Rachel Gogel believes that good people managers matter more now than ever before. Being forced into remote work exacerbated an underlying issue at many organizations, which is: Most don’t provide the necessary tools to foster great (or even good) people leaders. With hybrid work models becoming the new norm — in which fully in-person and remote work are two ends of a fluid spectrum of options — the role of the “boss” is effectively evolving. While most people associate “the future of work” with the rise of the entrepreneurial generation or the development of emerging “work-from-anywhere” models centered on employee wellness, we’ll explore the inevitable next wave of design leadership. Throughout this talk, Rachel shares some of her research and key findings so that the people leaders of tomorrow can act boldly to reimagine an employee experience that is more purposeful, individualized, and mobile — and prepare them not just for post-pandemic “normalcy” but for the year 2030, when most companies will be decentralized, the majority of the workforce will be self-employed, and the project-based economy will be prevalent.
	David Dylan Thomas, author of Design for Cognitive Bias, creator and host of The Cognitive Bias Podcast, and a twenty-year practitioner of content strategy and UX, has consulted major clients in entertainment, healthcare, publishing, finance, and retail. As the founder and CEO of David Dylan Thomas, LLC he offers workshops and presentations on inclusive design and the role of bias in making decisions. He has presented at TEDNYC, SXSW Interactive, Confab, An Event Apart, LavaCon, UX Copenhagen (several times now!), Artifact, IA Conference, IxDA, Design and Content Conference, Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise, and the Wharton Web Conference on topics at the intersection of bias, design, and social justice.	The Content Design of Civil Discourse: Turning Conflict into Collaboration In the current political climate, it seems like we’ve all but given up on productive, respectful discourse. However, there are simple design and content design choices we can make that encourage collaboration over conflict, even when dealing with hot-button issues. In this session we’ll look at real-world examples of how the way we phrase a question or design an interaction can have a huge impact on the quality of conversation, and the three rules they share.
	Lisa Talia Moretti is a Digital Sociologist and User Research Principal at AND Digital in the UK. Over the last 15 years she has worked as a researcher and strategist across service design, content and branding. She is an Associate Lecturer at Goldsmiths, Cardiff University and Plymouth University, and a Research Fellow at The Governance Lab. Lisa is also the Co-Chair of BIMA’s AI Council and the Sovrin Foundation’s Working Group on Guardianship. In 2020 Lisa was named as one of Britain’s 100 people who are shaping the British digital industry in the category Champion for Change.	Designing for relationships When was the last time you helped someone do something online? Do you have any formal ‘authority’ in place? Perhaps you’re a parent or a guardian or have a power of attorney in place for your mum, dad or a grandparent. Who would help you if you lost mental capacity or were no longer capable of making your own decisions all of the time? For the 55 million people living with dementia and the 10 million more who get diagnosed every year, getting support is not a random thought experiment (WHO, 2022). It’s their day-to-day reality. Informal and formal support are a key feature of human life and as a result, our services should be flexible enough to cope with a supporter-in-tow on the other end of a screen, telephone or paper form. However, despite their everyday occurrence, supported journeys are often treated as outliers in service patterns; they’re not prioritised, poorly understood and under researched. Why do we make it so difficult for people to get the help they need? A lack of supported journeys isn’t just a design flaw. In some instances, their absence becomes outright service failure. In this talk, Lisa Talia Moretti will share lessons of being part of a multidisciplinary team looking to modernise the lasting power of attorney service in the UK. Her biggest insight? We need to design for relationships, not just users.
	Oliver Schöndorfer is a user interface and app designer from Austria. He’s not a UX ninja unicorn rockstar, but he’s hopelessly in love with everything type. He runs a UI design business, and does typographic consulting for international clients.	Unleash the Invisible Power of UI Typography, Workshop Text is an essential part of every user interface. However, many apps seem to neglect that. This results in a lost opportunity for branding at least (looking at you, Roboto), and at worst, bad UX. Typography to the rescue! After this entertaining and inspiring workshop, you will have practical guidelines on how better to choose and use typefaces for your next UI design. With this new knowledge, you can let the uniqueness of your project shine without losing functionality.
	Joachim Blicher is a highly skilled and versatile multidisciplinary designer, specializing in strategic UX design. He is known for his effectiveness in solving problems by utilizing user insights and behavioral design principles to create human-centered designs. Joachim has a talent for simplifying complex information, making it valuable and tangible. For over a decade, he has worked with major companies and national agencies in Denmark, helping them provide seamless digital experiences. With a background in software development, Joachim possesses a strong and natural curiosity for tech and design. He has gained extensive knowledge and hands-on experience, enabling him to design creative solutions using the latest technological possibilities.	Workshop: Solving invisible problems Designing for risk can be hard to test and validate because conventional testing methods aren’t always feasible or accurate. That doesn’t mean you’re limited in your design options though! Our thoughts and decisions are heavily influenced by unconscious biases. In this workshop, you’ll learn how to solve untestable scenarios using persuasive design techniques that leverage psychological biases to drive desired behaviors.

2022 Speaker

Previous speakers 2015 – 2023