Practical Usability Testing for Development Teams

Did you know that conducting well-structured usability tests with just five users can uncover over 85% of your product’s usability issues?

Usability testing is one of the most cost-effective ways to improve any website or software product. All it takes is a bit of planning - and a video conferencing tool of your choice - to get started.

In this hands-on workshop, you’ll learn how to:
- Recruit and select the right participants for your study
- Develop focused research questions to test what truly matters
- Write usability tasks that yield actionable insights
- Confidently facilitate usability testing sessions
- Interpret and communicate findings for maximum impact

Through a mix of structured learning and practical exercises, you’ll gain the skills to incorporate usability testing into your design or development workflow - no lab or fancy equipment required.

Practical Information Architecture for Development Teams

Have you ever used a website or software product and struggled to find something you knew had to be there? That moment of confusion is often the result of poor Information Architecture (IA).
Information Architecture is the backbone of a product’s content strategy—it’s how information is organized, structured, and labeled to support usability and findability. It covers everything from site maps and navigation to the terminology you use and how you group content.

In this hands-on workshop, you'll gain a practical understanding of IA and how to apply it to your projects. Whether you're a developer, designer, content strategist, or product owner, this session will help you build more intuitive and user-friendly experiences.

You'll learn:

- The core principles of Information Architecture, with real-world examples
- Common IA fallacies and traps—and how to avoid them
- How to perform a content inventory and audit for your product or organization
- How to run and interpret card sorting and tree testing—two essential IA research methods

This workshop blends structured learning with practical, hands-on exercises, giving you tools you can start using right away.

Usability Testing is easier than you think

As developers, it’s easy to assume that customers will use technology the way we expect them to. They don’t, ever.

What if we had a magical way to find out what crazy things customers would try to do with our product… before we built it? Or before we launched it and put it in front of customers?

Anyone can learn to conduct qualitative usability testing, and you can make massive improvements to your products quickly and cheaply - if you test it right. To be clear - ‘user testing’ and ‘usability testing’ don’t mean the same thing.

In this talk, I’ll share the secrets that UX researchers use to take websites or software projects from good, to great - including how to do it, when to do it, and what tools you can use.

Join me and learn about the most cost effective UX research method at your disposal, and learn how to leverage it to build stuff better.

How to get past Hello World

Have you ever needed ‘Hello World’ in real life? Me neither.
Over 15 years ago, I wrote my first line of code. Since then, I’ve coded for some of the world’s largest mining companies, AND taught others the joy of coding. HTML, CSS, and SQL have always been fun puzzles for me, but object-oriented programming languages like PHP, Python, and JavaScript seemed like insurmountable hurdles where I struggled to move past the fundamentals to actually make something useful. I convinced myself that I just ‘wasn’t made to be a programmer’ and resigned myself to being a weird combination of front-end-ish-with-database-knowledge, never achieving the elusive title of Full Stack Developer.
But then, two things happened: I started working on TALL (Tailwind, Alpine.js, Laravel + Livewire) stack projects, and I got a Copilot subscription. Suddenly, the complex tasks that used to be handballed to someone else in the team seemed within reach, and I was up and running on one of the world’s fastest growing development frameworks.
Whether you or someone you know are stuck on the basics, or you are just curious to see how easy it is to spin up a brand new Laravel application from scratch (and how to use copilot so it doesn’t suck) - join me as I demonstrate how I went from ‘Hello World’ to full-stack programming in less than a year!

From Mess to Success: Embracing Full-Stack Architecture

Every web application contains information. Information is the reason that these solutions exist, but the thing that makes any application great is how that information is organised, connected and accessed. Isn’t it unfortunate, then, that this is often an incoherent afterthought!

Well-designed, future-proof databases and high quality user research might seem like opposite ends of the spectrum, but one can’t be great without the other.

Product architecture isn’t *just* a front end or *just* a back end job - and should never be (just) the job of a dedicated architecture team. Learn from a certified-UX-research-consultant-turned-full-stack-Laravel-developer how you can avoid common pitfalls, and make sure your next project is less mess, more success.

I bring a unique perspective to this talk, given that I have such a strong background in data and database design, as well as a globally recognised certification in UX research. This talk is equally relevant for one-man-bands, or large silo’d teams and has something for everyone, whether they’re a software architect, a developer, or a UX designer. While there will be a bit of technical stuff (mainly database and UX research related), the fundamental thing this talk is really about is communication, and why it’s so important in any software development journey. This talk can be delivered as a keynote.