Jo Minney
Digital Experience Lead | House Labs
Perth, Australia
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Jo Minney is a small business founder and technical communicator based (for now) in Perth, Western Australia. She is passionate about user experience, data-driven decision making, cats and travel – not necessarily in that order. She’s also an avid maker, from 3D printing to sewing to woodworking, and loves combining technology and creativity to make cool stuff and encouraging others to do the same.
By day, you’ll find Jo working with charities and NGOs helping them to create bespoke digital platforms, conducting usability testing, or running workshops to help organisations level up their digital presence. You might also find her donating her time to help tackle social issues (such as gender inequality, domestic violence and global poverty) through the use of technology, or freelancing as a Nielsen Norman certified user experience research consultant.
Jo is an ambassador, sponsor and lead mentor for She Codes Australia, a social enterprise that aims to make tech jobs more accessible for women, and a has been recognized via multiple awards for her advocacy work related to diversity and gender equity. An accomplished international conference speaker, Jo can regularly be found with a microphone in hand speaking about user experience, accessibility, imposter syndrome, closing the gender gap and pockets.
Area of Expertise
Topics
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.
What working with grass-roots charities can teach us about creative problem solving
Enterprise teams are used to familiar trade-offs: scope vs. deadline, performance vs. cost. But charities and grassroots organizations play by a different set of rules - no real budget, almost no buffer time, and users who can be harmed (not just annoyed) if a system fails. The usual assumptions about risk, tooling, and process don’t survive that environment.
Working with charitable organizations means solving technical problems under conditions most enterprise developers never encounter. It might mean building for users who are experiencing trauma, who are in crisis, who are using decade-old devices on unreliable internet connections, or who have next to zero digital literacy. It might mean deciding between paying for a service, or paying your own wage. Every single decision about technology, architecture, and implementation has to account for limitations that would make most tech leads want to walk away from a project entirely.
This talk won't just share examples of real things we've shipped for charities (including the ugly workarounds, the uncomfortable trade-offs, and the surprisingly elegant solutions that emerged when the 'usual' options were off the table) - it will give you a fresh perspective on problem-solving that might help you find opportunities and solutions you can apply to your own day job next time you're faced with a seemingly insurmountable constraint.
Practical UX Research for Development Teams
Understanding your users - whether through interviews, surveys, analytics, or more structured UX research methods - is key to building good products. Did you know that conducting well-structured usability tests with just five users can uncover over 85% of your product’s usability issues?
In this workshop, we'll cover everything you need to know to:
- choose the right research method
- recruit the right participants
- use best practice Information Architecture techniques (such as card sorting and tree testing) to uncover mental models
- prepare and facilitate usability tests to help improve your products
We'll also dive into how AI can be used in UX research (and whether it should) to reduce costs and time associated with conduction 'proper' research.
Whether you’re a developer, designer, content strategist, or product owner, this workshop will help you confidently plan, conduct, and apply user research findings to your work.
Tested, Typed and Completely Unusable
As good developers* we test components, types, APIs, accessibility rules, and end to end journeys... and then we ship them. Unfortunately, most of the time the interfaces we ship never meet actual humans until they make it to production.
There’s a lot automated testing can’t tell us. Do users understand the language we’ve chosen? Does our information architecture match their mental models? Can they work out what to do next? Do they even notice the shiny new feature we’ve built?
Playwright is great, but completing a Playwright script isn't the same as completing a task - and just five lightweight usability testing sessions can uncover problems that thousands of automated assertions would miss.
Let's explore where automated testing ends and usability testing begins, how to run useful sessions without a research team or enormous budget, and how to turn what you observe into better interfaces—and better tests.
.Net is proprietary, PHP is dead, and everything you know is wrong.
As developers it is easy to get trapped in our comfort bubbles and assume that our 'knowledge' is informed. After all, many of us have spent years around or adjacent to programming technologies, and if we can't formulate educated opinions of those technologies... who can?
The problem is that at least *some* of your opinions are likely based on outdated information, personal experiences that don't reflect the whole, or learned bias.
Why should you care? Because you might be avoiding technologies (or sticking with others) because of those biases, even when they aren't the best fit for you, your employer, or your clients.
Together, let's dive into some of the most popular fallacies about web programming languages and approach them with fresh eyes - most importantly, acknowledging that our biases do exist, and that it is healthy to challenge them (even if we don't act on them).
You probably don't need JavaScript for that (anymore)
CSS is often overlooked by full-stack developers as 'not real code', but it's a critical part of crafting a beautiful, functional digital product. Also, you're probably doing it wrong.
The last few years have introduced some major improvements to CSS that allow for us to do more than ever using *only* HTML and CSS - improving front-end performance, accessibility and code maintainability.
Let's look at some code examples of new CSS features that will let savvy developers ditch the bloated JavaScript, for everything from select fields to dynamic popups, automatic light/dark mode adaptation, accordions, and of course - better animations than ever before!
The UX Research AI Frontier
It's unlikely that AI will ever truly replace UX researchers, but as LLMs come along in leaps and bounds, we'd be pretty silly not to consider whether we can use these tools to 'research' more effectively and save ourselves time and money.
The real trick that we need to discover is... what can we offload to an agent? When do we need real live humans to make sure we're not ending up in AI bubbles? Is there anything AI can do better than humans? And what are the repercussions if we get it wrong?
Nielsen Norman certified UX consultant Jo Minney looks at some of the most common UX research practices and how AI can be integrated into them ethically - and whether or not the trade off is worth it.
Engineering Constraint: What F1 and Web Apps for Charities Have in Common
Formula One teams operate under some of the strictest constraints in engineering - fixed budgets, rigid rules, and razor‑thin margins for failure. But rather than being a handicap, these are a key factor behind F1 driving decades of breakthrough innovation.
Grass‑roots charities work under constraints just as severe, but far less glamorous: Minimal budgets. Tiny teams. Users in crisis, accessing life‑saving services on decade‑old devices over unreliable connections. In this world, the usual assumptions about tooling, risk, and process collapse - and failure doesn’t mean churn or complaints, it means real harm.
When options disappear, creativity stops being optional. Drawing on real charity projects (and lessons from F1), this talk explores the uncomfortable trade‑offs, ugly workarounds, and unexpectedly elegant solutions that emerge when constraints are absolute.
You’ll leave with practical ways to apply constraint‑driven problem-solving to your own work, even when your day job looks nothing like Formula One or solving global poverty.
UX for developers: Why you shouldn't listen to users
Users will happily tell you what they want. That doesn’t mean you should build it! The first rule of usability is to pay attention to what users do, not what they say.
This talk introduces practical UX research techniques that engineering teams can use to take products from good to great - from structured usability testing, to lightweight behavioural analytics.
We’ll explore what each method is good for, where it can mislead you, what tools, costs and tradeoffs are involved, and how to combine qualitative and quantitative signals to make better decisions about what to build next.
NDC London 2027 Sessionize Event Upcoming
DDD Adelaide 2026 Sessionize Event Upcoming
Update Conference Prague 2026 Sessionize Event Upcoming
NDC Oslo 2026 Sessionize Event
AgentCon Perth 2026 Sessionize Event
Devoxx Greece 2026
.Net is proprietary, PHP is dead, and everything you know is wrong. - https://m.devoxx.com/events/dvgr26/talks/3420/net-is-proprietary-php-is-dead-and-everything-you-know-is-wrong
The UX Research AI Frontier - https://m.devoxx.com/events/dvgr26/talks/3421/the-ux-research-ai-frontier
NDC London 2026 Sessionize Event
Laracon AU 2025
Full Stack Architecture for Laravel Developers
https://youtu.be/seX4HqMIAMk?si=XZsSkHi-dfA_8qOR
DDD Perth 2025 Sessionize Event
NDC Oslo 2025 Sessionize Event
WordCamp Asia 2025
Budget-Friendly Usability Testing for WordPress
https://asia.wordcamp.org/2025/session/budget-friendly-usability-testing-for-wordpress/
Laracon AU 2024
Embracing Tall (How I got past Hello World)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwCkwEUtPao
Web Directions Summit '23
Dear Designer... Sincerely, the Development Team
https://webdirections.org/summit/speakers/jo-minney.php
WordCamp US 2023
From Mess to Success: The Ultimate Guide to Mastering Information Architecture
https://us.wordcamp.org/2023/speaker/jo-minney/
Web Directions '22
Information Architecture: More than just a navigation menu
https://webdirections.org/summit22/speakers/jo-minney.php
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