Photo by Clearleft  – https://www.instagram.com/uxlondon/

For three full days, designers of all levels and countries gathered at UX Fest 2021 for a fully online conference centered around interaction and product design. It was a chance to reconnect with the UX community with talks on everything from user research and product strategy through UX writing and growth design.

The conference was spread over three afternoons and included a combination of over a dozen short talks, live Q&As and panel discussions. Day one was all about the product, from discovery to knowing when to kill a product, day two focused on inclusivity and accessibility, while day three was about designing for growth.

On day one, Teresa Torres, a discovery coach, explored the key differences between project-based discovery and continuous discovery, giving teams a clear benchmark to aspire to. Meanwhile, Amy Zima, product manager at Spotify, offered practical advice about how to assess whether time’s up for your feature.

Scott Kubie, a UX consultant, gave a session on how to get the writing done (for products). He empowered teams with a simple and reliable framework for making words part of the process and getting the design writing done. Vicky Tan, product designer at Spotify, focused her session on aligning work with your mission.

Day two was all about inclusivity, learning about the harmful biases that cause users to make bad decisions and how to prevent blind spots from hurting those who use products. Gregg Bernstein, lead user researcher and author, gave a lecture on finding the information necessary to make an informed decision.

David Dylan Thomas focused on designing for cognitive bias. He used real-world examples to identify some particularly harmful biases that frequently lead users to make bad decisions. While, Sheryl Cababa, VP of Strategy at Substantial, gave methods to prevent any negative outcomes from product design.

Finally, on day three, it was time to go behind the scenes of how some leading brands have scaled and will learn effective strategies for building better products at pace. Molly Norris Walker, head of Design & User Research at InfluxData, explained how to develop a menu of core actions that add business value and can engage users.

Fonz Morris, Lead Product Designer at Netflix, gave a session on what it means to be a growth designer and what are the challenges. He highlighted the best practices such as the metrics to track and the user research techniques to use. Meanwhile, Krystal Higgins, onboarding specialist, gave an overview of the best onboarding.

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