UX South Africa

Two products can do exactly the same job, equally well, and one feels cold and templated while the other feels calm and considered.People are terrible at explaining that difference. They're extremely good at feeling it.In this talk, Jackie Zhang makes the case that beneath the visible layer of layout, type and copy sits an invisible one: the response all those decisions create. Reassurance while you wait. Confidence when money moves. Relief after a mistake.He walks through Uber's pickup

Most bad products aren't born from stupidity. They're born from silence.Tomislav Kozačinski has spent over twenty years doing two things that turn out to be the same job: product design and stand-up comedy. On stage, feedback is instant - they laugh or they don't. In a meeting, nobody boos. They say "interesting," and six months later you've shipped something everyone privately knew was wrong.This talk is about the gap between those two rooms.Tom separates politeness from

Some of the most damaging AI failures aren't caused by bad actors or broken systems. They happen when a system works exactly as it was designed to.In this talk, Dr Lizette Spangenberg unpacks what Eric Meyer called inadvertent algorithmic cruelty, the harm that surfaces when an algorithm does its job perfectly and nobody stopped to ask who it might hurt.Drawing on examples from Spotify Wrapped, Facebook's Year in Review, targeted advertising and healthcare AI, she shows how harm enters at

A yoga instructor in a village hall in Northamptonshire drew out every pose on a sheet of paper so that one person in her class could follow along. Twelve years later, Joanna Pawluk still remembers it.In this talk, Joanna traces a line from that piece of paper to the work she does today at Emirates, where she's mapping the end-to-end travel experience for customers who are deaf or hard of hearing.Along the way she makes a point most organisations miss: the people who experience the most friction

Everyone in the room agreed. They thanked you for the work. The research was solid. And a few weeks later, nothing had changed.If that's familiar, this talk is for you.Across 11 years in healthcare, aviation, enterprise systems and consulting, Ignatius Ferreira watched excellent UX practitioners struggle to create impact while others moved things forward with ease. For years he put it down to design maturity, or stakeholders who just didn't get UX.Eventually he realised he'd been

As AI becomes part of more products and services, the challenge isn’t simply how to build with AI, it’s how to build AI that people can trust.In this talk, Shaeema Boer explores what responsible AI means from a product design perspective, drawing on emerging global AI frameworks and her experience designing AI-powered products at Accenture Song.Rather than treating responsible AI as a compliance exercise, she argues that it should be embedded into the way product teams think, collaborate and design

AI isn’t just another design tool, it’s changing how we research, prototype, build products and collaborate as teams.In this session, Supreet Kumar explores AI through 3 practical lenses:AI as a design toolAI as the product we’re designingAI as a new way of workingDrawing on examples from companies including Klarna, IBM, IDEO and Adobe, Supreet shows where AI is already creating measurable value, where it introduces new risks, and why the role of designers is becoming more important—not less.Rather

AI has transformed how quickly we can design, prototype and ship products. But as execution becomes cheaper, one question becomes even more important:What makes human designers valuable?In this keynote, Jason Giles explores why the future of UX isn’t about competing with AI, it’s about strengthening the uniquely human skills that AI can’t replace: judgment, curiosity, critical thinking and evidence-based decision making.Drawing on more than 25 years of experience, Jason reflects on the rise of the