Tags: discovery

When I told you about the schedule for UX London 2026, I said:

After your afternoon workshop there’ll be one final closing talk at the end of each day before we head to the bar.

These closing talks are a way of bringing everyone back into the same space after spending the afternoon in different workshops. It feels right to start the day and end the day with a shared experience.

On day one, discovery day, the closing talk will be delivered by Michael Kibedi. It’s called Whose English gets to be default?

Ben Sauer will be giving the closing talk on day two, design day. His talk is called Story before screens.

Finally, on day three, delivery day, the closing talk will be from Lou Downe. It’s called Bad services, which also happens to be the title of their brand new book!

As you can see, each day at UX London is crafted to be a distinct one-day event, but all three days also flow together nicely.

If you haven’t got a ticket yet, grab one now before the standard pricing ends at midnight. And don’t forget that you can use the discount code JOIN_JEREMY to get a tasty 20% off.

There’s just under a month to go until UX London 2026—exciting!

You can peruse the full schedule if you need to decide wether you’re coming for just one day or for all three. The event is designed to flow together, from discovery day to design day to delivery day, but each individual day is also designed to be a standalone experience by itself.

Day one on Tuesday, June 2nd has a focus on research:

1. Maria Isachenko will talk about how You don’t need more research time: You need a system that keeps research in product decisions.
2. Melin Edomwonyi covers Validation as a UX superpower.
3. Marley Dizney Swanson will present From insight to impact: A hypothesis-driven framework for product teams.
4. Luisa Berta will be talking about Turning failure into opportunity.

Day two on Wednesday, June 3rd is all about the nitty-gritty details of design:

1. Julia Petretta kicks things off with From onboarding to “a-ha!”: Designing the moments that really matter.
2. Andrea Grigsby has a case study called Why must things be this way? Designing with intention.
3. Piccia Neri puts a positive spin on accessibility with her talk, The best creative brief.
4. Hidde de Vries will explain why The future of UX is green: On the Web Sustainability Guidelines.

Day three on Thursday, June 4th will cover collaboration and design systems:

1. Ben Callahan will impart Wisdom from the trees.
2. Lucy Blackwell and Alex Edwards will give a case study on Putting the user at the centre of your design system.
3. Rachel Ilan Simpson will take us From 0 to scale: Building and transforming design at startups & scale-ups.
4. Matt LeMay will cover why The communication of the thing IS the thing

And those are just the morning talks!

On each day you’ll have your choice of workshop for the afternoon.

1. Feyikemi Akinwolemiwa will cover Future friction: Horizon scanning for UX.
2. Natasha den Dekker will help you answer the question How well do you know your users? Exploring assumptions through play
3. Chris How’s workshop is Yippee IA: Information architecture for digital designers
4. Oore Babatunde will help you put together UX practitioner’s code of ethics.
5. Lucrezia Ponzano will take you From chaos to clarity: A tactical workshop for real alignment.
6. Ben Callahan will guide you through Assessing organisational culture.

After your afternoon workshop there’ll be one final closing talk at the end of each day before we head to the bar. I haven’t announced those speakers yet, but believe me when I say they’re going to be quite special!

UX London 2026 is shaping up to be an excellent three days of design. Get your ticket now if you haven’t already got one.

(And just between you and me, you can use the discount code JOIN_JEREMY to get a whopping 20% off any ticket price!)

In exactly six weeks time, UX London is happening!

I am ridiculously excited about this year’s line-up—I can’t wait to see the talks and get hands-on in the workshops.

If you haven’t yet got your ticket, now is the time. There’s a flash sale this week: use the discount code FLASH20 to get a whopping 20% of any ticket. Do it before the end of Friday!

Whether you’re coming for all three days or choosing one focused day, you’re in for a treat.

• Day one on Tuesday, 10 June is discovery day.
• Day two on Wednesday, 11 June is design day.
• Day three on Thursday, 12 June is deliver day.

Head on over to the website to get all the details and then get your discounted ticket.

See you there!

Check it out—here’s the line-up for UX London 2025!

This is going to be so good! Grab a ticket if you haven’t got one yet.

UX London takes place over three days, from June 10th to 12th at a fantastic venue in the heart of the city. To get the full experience, you should come for all three days. But you can also get a ticket for individual days. Each day has a focus, and when you put them all together, the whole event mirrors the design process:

1. Day one: Discovery
2. Day two: Design
3. Day three: Delivery

Each day features a morning of talks, followed by an afternoon of workshops. The talks are on a single track; four consecutive half-hour presentations to get you inspired. Then after lunch, you choose from one of four workshops. All the workshops are two and half hours long and very hands-on. No laptop required.

On discovery day you’ll have talks in the morning about research, content design, strategy and evaluating technology, followed by workshops on discovery and definition and behavioural design.

On design day there’ll be talks on interface design, a healthcare case study, inclusive design, and typography, followed by workshops in the afternoon on data visualisation and ethics.

Finally on delivery day you’ll get talks on conversion design, cross-team collaboration, convincing stakeholders, and improving design critiques, followed by workshops on facilitating workshops and getting better at public speaking.

Every workshop is repeated on another day so you’ll definitely get the chance to attend the one you want.

Oh, and at the end of every day there’ll be a closing keynote. Those are yet to be revealed, but I can guarantee they’re going to be top-notch!

Right now you can get early-bird tickets for all three days, or individual days. That changes from March 15th, when the regular pricing kicks in—a three-day ticket will cost £200 more. So I’d advise you to get your ticket now.

If you need to convince your boss, show them this list of reasons to attend.

See you there!

Back in June I documented a bug on macOS in how Spaces (or whatever they call they’re desktop management thingy now) works with websites added to the dock.

I’m happy to report that after upgrading to Sequoia, the latest version of macOS, the bug has been fixed! Excellent!

Not only that, but there’s another really great little improvement…

Let’s say you’ve installed a website like The Session by adding it to the dock. Now let’s say you get an email in Apple Mail that includes a link to something on The Session. It used to be that clicking on that link would open it in your default web browser. But now clicking on that link opens it in the installed web app!

It’s a lovely little enhancement that makes the installed website truly feel like a native app.

Websites in the dock also support the badging API, which is really nice!

Like I said at the time:

I wonder if there’s much point using wrappers like Electron any more? I feel like they were mostly aiming to get that parity with native apps in having a standalone application launched from the dock.

Now all you need is a website.

The biggest issue remains discovery. Unless you already know that it’s possible to add a website to the dock, you’re unlikely to find out about it. That’s why I’ve got a page with installation instructions on The Session.

Still, the discovery possibilities on Apples’s desktop devices are waaaaay better than on Apple’s mobile devices.

Apple are doing such great work on their desktop operating system to make websites first-class citizens. Meanwhile, they’re doing less than nothing on their mobile operating system. For a while there, they literally planned to break all websites added to the homescreen. Fortunately they were forced to back down.

But it’s still so sad to see how Apple are doing everything in their power to prevent people from finding out that you can add websites to your homescreen—despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that push notifications on iOS only work if the website has been added to the home screen!

So while I’m really happy to see the great work being done on installing websites for desktop computers, I’m remain disgusted by what’s happening on mobile:

At this point I’ve pretty much given up on Apple ever doing anything about this pathetic situation.

Where have all the websites gone? – Chris Coyier

I know I sound like an old man when I go on and on about RSS, but really, it’s sitting right there and is apparently what a lot of people miss.

Open sourcing the Product Planning Prompt Pack

This is very generous of Anna! She has a deck of cards with questions she asks in product planning meetings. You can download the pack for free.

marcus.io · Making RSS more visible again with a /feeds page

Personal website owners – what do you think about collecting all of the feeds you are producing in one way or the other on a /feeds page?

Sounds like a good idea! I’ll get on that.

Methods - 18F Methods

A very handy collection of design exercises as used by 18F. There’s a lot of crossover here with the Clearleft toolbox.

A collection of tools to bring human-centered design into your project.

These methods are categorised by:

1. Discover
2. Decide
3. Make
4. Validate
5. Fundamentals

Defining design principles at EMBL | Journal | The Personal Disquiet of Mark Boulton

Mark describes the process he favours for creating (discovering?) design principles, like the ones for EMBL (I must remember to add those to the collection).

All you do is be mindful of when the team repeats design desires. This could be several members of the team say the same thing in a slightly different way, or that you keep circling around and around a problem but struggle to articulate it. By being mindful at all times to this a team can quickly pull together principles that are derived from doing the work on their particular problem rather than principles which are imposed on the work. An important difference.

PWA Discovery: You Ain’t Seen Nothin Yet | Infrequently Noted

Smart thinking from Alex on how browsers could better indicate that a website is a progressive web app (and would therefore benefit from being added to the home screen). Ambient badging, he calls it.

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a button in the URL bar that appeared whenever you landed on a PWA that you could always tap to save it to your homescreen? A button that showed up in the top-level UI only when on a PWA? Something that didn’t require digging through menus and guessing about “is this thing going to work well when launched from the homescreen?”

Springboard – Coming soon from Clearleft

The latest Clearleft product will be like having an intensive set of discovery, collaboration, and exploration workshops in a box. Perfect for startups and other small businesses short on time or budget.

It starts in Spring but you can register your interest now.

Galaxy Zoo and the new dawn of citizen science | Science | The Observer

A lovely piece of mainstream news reporting on Galaxy Zoo and the other Zooniverse projects, and the broader role of Citizen Science.

Hueniverse: Beginner’s Guide to Discovery – Part II: People vs. Machines

A great explanation of how open technologies like microformats and OpenID enable greater discovery of data.

Twitter / MarsPhoenix: Are you ready to celebrate?...

In the future, all great scientific discoveries will be conveyed in 140 characters.

I’ve always been a space geek. Therefore, I’ve always wanted to go to the Kennedy Space Center. There’s a museum there and a bus tour you can go on. The tour stops five miles away from the launch area and while you can’t go into any buildings, the activities within are explained to you.

I fulfilled a fantasy this week. Not only did I go to Cape Canerval but I managed to get an “access all areas” look around the place.

It’s all thanks to an engineer called Benny who listens to Paul Boag’s podcast. In a startling revelation, it turns out that Paul’s listeners are in fact rocket scientists. The NASA “friends and family” day just happened to fall right at the end of Refresh Orlando. Benny invited Paul along. Andy and myself invited ourselves along.

As it turned out, there hadn’t been one of these open days since 2001. We were very, very fortunate and privileged to be allowed behind the scenes at NASA.

In contrast to the regular tour, we drove right up to the launch pads, including launch pad B, which had Discovery rolled out and ready for launch on December 7th. We also got to go inside the Vehicle Assembly Building, something that is normally not allowed. It’s incredibly huge. I mean this is seriously big. Imagine a really big building and then imagine it being bigger.

Best of all, we went inside the orbiter hanger. Endeavour was inside. A space shuttle… a freakin’ space shuttle! That was just so incredibly cool, I can’t even begin to describe it.

I hope I’m not coming across as gloating here: I really just want to share my excitement. It was quite an experience to get so close to the ultimate geek toys. The only way it could have been any better was if Jessica could have been there. Soulmate that she is, I think she might be an even bigger space geek than me.

Clearly, my descriptive powers aren’t up to the task of cataloguing the day’s sights, so I’ll just point you to this photoset on Flickr.

Thanks, Benny!