Transcription
(Music Playing)
VITALY FRIEDMAN:
Hello, everyone. Hello. Well, indeed, it was like what so many years while it was in this very stage. And it was such a bad talk. I highly recommend you to watch it, to know everything not to do on stage,(...) everything. It was like slides full of text. And I think it was like free images and stuff. And it was also like really, really bad talk. Like a really great example. Should go in the Guinness World Records for like the worst kind of thing ever. But when I was preparing for this, I was thinking that now that I kind of come back here-- thanks, Marc, for having me back-- I thought I might be starting off by telling you a bit of a story, a story about my life. Is it a safe place to share a story of my life?
This group is very excited, I can tell.
Well, I can tell you where it all started for me. Now, this was the very beginning of my journey.
There must be also sound.
(Video Playing)
Oh, yeah, it’s coming. So who remembers this?
Ah, yes. This was the game I was playing almost nonstop for days and months and almost an entire year to save the princess of Persia. And just in case you’re wondering, you have like 59 minutes, and then you have to go through a lot of levels. And then in the end, you will be saving the princess. I never saved the princess.
I never did. And I had to watch a YouTube tutorial walk through to understand how to actually do that. It was such a painful experience. I never made it. That’s unbelievable. But then a few years later, in 1997 or eight-- I think it was eight-- I discovered a website, you know, the website.
I highly encourage you to play it tonight. It’s still like you can find ways to play it. But I discovered this. Anybody remembers this?
1998 was it?
This was the very first website that I discovered before Google, before Yahoo, before anything. And this was coming from Munich. I4U was the website. And it wasn’t Flash because Flash didn’t exist back then. There was no Flash back then. No, this was Macromedia Shockwave.
Oh, and I wanted to do this for living every single day. I wanted to do this as much as I can. I got so excited. And so you don’t want to see the first websites that I created either. But then I discovered this. Oh, sorry.
This. Now this changed my life forever.
This was a website from 2009 from a Spanish designer and artist called Ivan Ferreiro. Anybody from Spain?
Ivan Ferreiro is very famous in Spain now, maybe because of his website. I don’t know. But this is where video text and teletext and design and pixels and CSS.
We actually met everything in one single place. You can actually type in the numbers and navigate from one place to the next. Or you can click. But who would click if you can just type the numbers? And then if you look forward, look how far we’ve come. This is what we can do on the web today.(...) We can magical, magical things. We can drive in a portfolio by sitting in the car and then have perfect gravity and all of that and stumble upon things and break things and collapse and everything. It’s incredible, right? It’s quite impressive that we can do that with relatively(...) poor machines, potentially, as well in a browser. That’s quite impressive. And then, of course, you have wonderful, wonderful websites like this. This is probably one of my favorite websites ever, which is a puppet theater website from Poland.
Everything fits well. It’s a puppet theater, so carousels are like in a puppet theater. You can kind of drag it and handle. It’s all kind of nice and cute. And of course, if you keep going, you kind of got to the point where we put a lot of APIs into this and weather and forecasting and buildings and live feeds and all of that. And this is where we are today. That’s seriously impressive. And I’m really, really impressed to see just how much we’ve come, how far we’ve come in this, like, what, 25 years? So why on Earth do we still have this?
Is it the pinnacle of what we believe is, like, the best way to authenticate people or to check if they are the right people or not? Right? And we don’t see this anymore, right?
Not as much as we used to, because it has reincarnated in a different shape and form, in form of crosswalks and traffic lights. And I don’t know about you, but I really feel like I want to get it right. My day starts every single day with a puzzle. It’s like the God gives me the puzzles to solve for living. This is what I do for living every single day, plus cookie pop-ups clicking, that too, right? And so when I look at this, I get really worried on this area.
Like, technically,
like, technically, it’s still a crosswalk, I think. But I don’t want to do this again. I think, kind of, it gets going, it keeps going. And then, of course, sometimes it’s just much more boring, like this.(...) What? This is wonderful. Like, this is the pinnacle of what we ended up doing in terms of UX, right? But then, this is actually also what I’m doing most of my life now.(...) Not necessarily, like, writing those beautiful things, where you have to take a cup of coffee and sit down and realize and understand what you’re actually supposed to do here. But my life, most of the time, is now spent with the European Parliament.
And so we’re working on a big revamp of the European Parliament, moving from 130 websites into one.
And that must be available in 26 different languages. That must be also fully accessible. We have different search engines. We have a lot of different CMSs. That’s a massive effort. And that’s very, very challenging. And of course, accessibility and UX is the major part of that revamp, right? And for me personally, it all started, really, by looking at, how do we actually get from something that’s, of course, a lot of legacy applications, and maybe many of you are working on enterprise, where you get this, right? You have this a lot, maybe. Anybody feels like home here?
I hope not.
Some people maybe do. And so how do we move away from this? And how do we actually change that? Not to mention some things like this, which is--
every time I encounter this, I feel like I really hope that nobody is going to call me, because I will not be able to make that decision at that time, right? And so how do we move away from those things? Because again, much of the time that I’m spending of my life, I’m working in applications or systems where people cannot choose what they’re using.
It might be health care, right? It might be accounting. It might be public services. It’s just using the tools that they’re using, supposed to use, and you can’t really change that. And so in those things, in those situations, I want to make sure that people can do the job well. And that also goes in the perspective of accessibility.(...) Because what I want to come and look at today, moving all the way from where I started to where I am today, trying to see how can we actually design better, more accessible, and inclusive experiences by default, and what it actually even means in 2025.
And I think one really critical point to keep in mind about this is that you can find it all over the place. There are plenty of checklists about accessibility.
We just tick off a couple of checkboxes, and then you basically are accessible. Well, if you are compliant, it doesn’t mean that it’s actually usable, right? It doesn’t mean that it’s actually even accessible as well. And so accessibility is not a compliance checklist. It’s actually an effort. And I think we often forget that. It’s an effort to keep a digital experience meaningful to as many people as possible, right?(...) And very often what you find is, at least this is the experience that I had. People think still, like 20, 25 years later, that’s so surprising. There is still a very strong perception that accessibility is disability.(...) It’s just to cater for people who happen to be disabled. But people don’t think of themselves as being disabled.(...) Any people, often people don’t think like that at all. And they often don’t think, especially when it comes to stakeholders and business decision makers, that accessibility features are a nice add-on. But it doesn’t really apply necessarily. It’s very difficult to make a strong case still, even despite the European Accessibility Act for that.
But the example that I always bring in is that, well, I wear computer glasses when I’m working. And I think that many of you are using glasses as well. Now, sure, glasses are accessibility feature. It’s an accessibility feature that many of us are using. And still, we don’t think that accessibility applied to us. But still, what you’ll find a lot of design teams doing is trying to create or add or embed or augment accessibility into their work by default, silently, without asking for permission ever. This is an example from booking.com, which is, of course, inspired by inclusive design,
modeled by Microsoft, right? We’re looking at the different dimensions, touching, seeing, hearing,
but at the same time also looking at different attributes or sites of that. It could be permanent, it could be temporary, it could be situational.
And what booking team decided to do is to map each of those senses that we have on the left towards what it means for travelers,(...) for people who will be using or might be using booking.com. So that might mean accessible flights. How do we design for that,(...) around that? Also, you might have a distracted driver, right? You might have a noisy train station and situations like that. And of course, it keeps going towards speaking, thinking, hearing, and so on and so forth. So it’s not just for specific situations,
but it’s really embedding accessibility from the start. Another way of doing this, and this is what Go! .TK ended up doing, is creating accessibility personas.
So they basically encourage all designers to have specific names for typically different types of users. And they also describe the scenarios about what it’s like to be having this sort of condition, for example, or to be using a device in a particular way and actually go through training to understand how it works and how to test for it.(...) So that always can be happening kind of under the scenes.
But to me, it’s actually much more-- there is something that’s much more significant there as well.(...) And that’s the mapping. That’s the mapping of the messy reality that we currently experience almost every day into something that we as designers can deal with. And you will see in a moment why we’re speaking about this now. But typically, as we’re designing anything, our main job is to map the reality. And that reality is often very complex, very messy, very unknowable. There are a lot of unknown unknowns, especially in complex environments. And it’s often contradictory.(...) It’s often evolving all the time. It’s always changing very, very fast. And so we as designers have to take a look, a very close look at this, with research, with anything that we know about a particular type of user and so on, and try to map it well. And that’s really significant part of the job that we’re doing, right? We’re mapping the reality into the problem space to then find solutions to those problems that we have discovered. But this mapping, right, requires us to really observe what people are doing.(...) This also requires us to understand the domain that we’re designing for, and then of course get to user needs, and in fact, then move to the solution space. That’s not very surprising. I don’t want to bore you with this. But I think what’s really significant is that we have become so good at this part. I mean, we can do magical things in Figma. We can do magical things in designs world, right? In the UI world. But I think a lot of the times, what really fails is this mapping.(...) This mapping from reality into the problem space, that’s really then becomes a solution, a really nice solution for something that is not really a problem, especially when we don’t consider accessibility needs early on.
Now, how does it relate to what I’m speaking about here? Well, I want to kind of start by looking at some of the different areas where this can apply. And one of the areas that I think is really significant, and I think I need to jump here, unfortunately,(...) because I have a little bit too many slides. Just a second, everyone.(...) If I can only find it,(...) I can, I can.(...) That’s designing for stress and emergencies.
We usually don’t think about the situations because they kind of consider it to be exceptions. But if you’re designing certain particular kind of type of product, what we always need to understand to create this really proper mapping between the problem space and reality is to understand that no product leaves an isolation.
Why am I talking about this now? Because every time we start working on pretty much anything, we find that the first thing that we need to ask is not just, of course, the user needs and what we know about the users, but we need to understand the specific context in which our product is being used.
No product leaves an isolation. Very often you have a product that is being used by a user along with 20 other tabs, 10 other products, 1,500 other emails that they have to reply to, but we need to understand that context really well.
And what I mean by that is, for example, if you look at something like this,
we can actually, of course, have a conversation. Is it a good design? Is it a bad design? But it doesn’t really answer any question because we don’t know how it’s actually used. So we need to understand how it’s actually used. Is it like this?
Is it more like this? Is it somewhere in the dark room with a really bad connection and really bad screen? What is it like? This has a tremendous impact about what we’re going to design. And in many ways, when we’re looking at examples like this here, or like this,
when you are working on something like this, sorry about that if anybody has any negative impact of this illustration, I would say, but if you work on something like this, failures or mistakes or errors can be quite critical or can be hurtful, to say the least. The same goes for wonderful applications like this.
Right? Or you might say, why would you do this?
I mean, why? Imagine somebody would wake up in the morning thinking, today I’m going to design this app. It’s going to look exactly like this. I need to show everything, everything, like what, 20, 30, 40 different input fields. Let’s bring it on. But it’s an extremely effective application(...) because it was designed for a very specific context in the situations of emergency. You need to have everything in front of you. Now the problem is,(...) you might have everything in front of you, but it’s not the only thing that you need to kind of keep in mind, right? Because the other thing is, what about the accuracy of the decisions being made?
Are people stressed when this occurs? Very often I get the brief and the brief says,
show everything on a screen in a dashboard.(...) We can do that. That’s a solution for that, right? But the question is then really, can we help people do what they want to do when they happen to be in stressful situations?
And for me that means that we need to understand what stress even means. Now stress is a body’s response to a situation it cannot handle. It’s a sign of mismatch where people can control their own skills and the challenge in front of them. And basically stress is the feeling of failure. I cannot cope with whatever it is that is in front of me. And there are of course different levels of stress, right? Frying, surviving, struggling and then crisis. And this is of course the worst on the right, right? But what I had to study is in situations where people have to do the work and they have to do the work fast and well, how do I make sure that when people are in stress, they don’t make mistakes?
How can we do that? We usually don’t think about it as a kind of as a use case, but we maybe should be. Because when you look at the impact of stress, of course it has a massive challenges for people, disrupts attention, memory, cognition. It also makes prioritization very difficult. You cannot think clearly. It’s very difficult to draw logical conclusions, right? People often feel paralyzed and stuck. They also heavily rely on judgment instead of being accurate. They also heavily rely on intuition. Just think that they feel is right, right? And they cannot really logically reason about that. So what you get if you actually don’t consider this sort of situation, the people will instinctively just do things. Basically based on their impulses. This can have tremendous implications. I mean, of course, not in the context of European parliament necessarily, but if you’re designing for healthcare, this is definitely use case in one of the case studies that you kind of have to consider, right? So how do we fix that? How do we address that? Well, ideally we wouldn’t of course,
we’ll try to prevent the situation from happening in the first place. But sometimes you can’t do that. So what you can do is of course, to design the emergency response ahead of time.(...) So if something critical is going to happen, some decisions will have to be made. We need to have a very clear plan of action. Because what really helps people in situations when they’re distressed or when they’re under a lot of pressure is some concept of a plan or some sort of order. Order is very, very important. So if you just throw your interface as it always is to them, they will often make irreversible mistakes, sending money to the wrong account and stuff like that, right? We need to create an order. And I’m not talking about simple things like, let’s clean up the interface, remove everything that’s not necessary. That’s a given. That’s just what we do in 2025 anyway. But we need to create a sense of order on the task that people will be performing.
I don’t know if multitasking really exists.
There is a myth that it exists. It never worked for me, right? So if people can do multiple things in the same product at the same time, right? Maybe having multiple tabs and so on and so forth, that might actually be more challenging for them. So maybe in those situations, which are especially critical, we need to encourage single tasking instead of multitasking.(...) Again, plan of action is important. One thing that has become really significant in these sort of situations is to design by showing one thing at a time,
right? This is, of course, what Gov. UK invented a while back, where the idea is, well, let’s break a complex form into a lot of simple steps, right? If you have like a big form, 30 steps, 40 steps, that’s okay as long as they’re simple and predictable. They will have statuses. Each of them will have statuses so you know how you’re progressing. You can also leave and save an exit, but you never have to go through a form with, let’s say, 20 or 25 pages. They’re just not necessary.
At the same time, what I think is also quite important is that we need to be very careful about the default that we’re designing, the presses, the actions, the order of buttons and stuff like that. And then, of course, if there are certain things that are happening, one thing that would be really challenging in those sort of situations is to have a confirm button,(...) right? If you say you send the money and then you have a confirm button because many people will instinctively click on it. That button must look different, must be different, must be in a different place, cannot be just, hey, confirm. So built-in safeguards means that whenever we’re actually getting to a very critical point, we probably want to have somebody else maybe checking in or reviewing somebody’s input, right? And then, of course, when it comes to, for example, some critical tasks, we want to make sure that they have kind of visible on the dashboard that people are using, right? It’s one little thing, but it can be actually quite severe, quite important, right? Well, at this point, I would typically throw chocolate, but I’ve forgotten them in the hotel.
I’m sorry, I’ll have to give you chocolate later, I guess. The other thing is actually quite significant, and of course, that’s probably something that we all will be dealing with every now and again, or all the time, I assume, is that there are a lot of people, of course, around the world, 300 million people who have some kind of color weakness or are color blind, right? And of course, we learned over all these years that it’s always safe to never rely on colors alone to communicate anything. But for me, whenever I throw in this sort of information around in business rooms, it doesn’t really find ground. It’s very quickly still dismissed, and I’m not quite sure why it’s like that. It feels like it’s maybe not as necessary, right? But I always show examples, very simple examples. And I show examples of what it’s like to have a particular condition or leave, let’s say, with color blindness, because this creates relatedness and empathy, right? So, for example, if you have color blindness or color weakness, then it’s very difficult to distinguish between chargers with a single red and green LED,
because you never know. Is it now fully charged or not? If you rely only on color, good luck with that. If you want to buy matching clothes, it can become an issue.
If you have climbing, if you like climbing and you have color-coded holes, that’s a problem.(...) It’s very difficult sometimes to know when the food is cooked.
It’s also hard to judge the ripeness of a fruit.(...) Whenever you have transport routes that are only color-coded without any letters, that becomes an issue, of course, as well.(...) And even little things, finding dropped peas on a carpet, this is what I’m struggling my entire life with, right? Finding dropped peas on a carpet is impossible if you have, let’s say, red and green or the other way around, right? And also, sometimes people who have color blindness do not remember colors of things, because they don’t have this perception that many of us maybe have. At the same time, they still can identify colors through prior knowledge, right? So what does it mean for us? Well, of course we know that there is color weakness and there is color blindness. Now, color weakness on its own affects... You know, red weakness affects 1% of male population, 0.02% female population, but also have green weakness, which is widely more popular, spread out, and then we also have blue weakness, which is quite rare, right? But on the other hand, we also have color blindness, right? Red blindness, green blindness and bloom blindness. And I want to show you just to get kind of a perception
how different these colors can be perceived, right? So if you have, let’s say, red weakness, and if you look specifically at some areas here and here and here, it’s still a different color. So you would not necessarily perceive this or kind of be able to say that this is indeed red. If it comes to green weakness, right, again,
it can look different, at least from the perspective of the situation as well. And then you have blue weakness, which again is a different color here and here and here. But in the case of color blindness, it’s different story altogether.(...) Because if you have red blindness, well, then it can literally... You’ll probably have some difficulty distinguishing between these parts,
right, the same here for green minus, and same here for blue blindness.(...) And again, those examples really helped me to make a case for accessibility in the first place, because this is something that everybody can relate to, right? But then the question then becomes, so what do we do with that?(...) Avoid red and green, that’s it? No, that’s not good enough. Because as we grow older, and we’ll start to talk about it in a moment, the perception of color changes as well. For example, as we grow older, dark purple and dark blue look closer and closer to each other. So if you’re designing for an aging population or for older adults, then you’ll probably get into some troubles if you have distinct buttons,(...) primary button, secondary button, one being blue, dark blue, and the other being purple. That will become a problem as well with age, right? And of course, what you also find, a lot of different color palettes that are supposed to kind of be helpful and reliable, but again, this is very difficult to be kind of reliable there. The best thing that you can do really is to do something along the lines of... Let me see...
Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. Something along the lines of this, where we’re kind of creating shapes. And this is what you will find in a lot of data visualization software as well, especially like... This is coming from a carbon design system, where they try to make lines and shapes distinct, to maybe add some patterns, and maybe also make some distinguished shapes added on the lines. But of course, whenever you have so many, this becomes more difficult to decipher yet again, right? And so one way, if you really want to go this direction, that seems to be most reliable and most predictable is the so-called Viridis color scheme, right? We can also seal your shapes if you want to, and there is kind of a family of different color families there as well, right? But... Oh, the camera, you know, disappeared. Sorry, everyone. Should be coming back, I hope.
That’s a bit disappointing.
Just a second.
You see? I told you.
Well, just like 12 years ago, this brings back memories. This brings back memories, yes? No? Hold on.
Maybe something will happen.
Hold on.
So I’m going to just switch.
No worries.
And...
Oh, OK. I didn’t do anything, so... But I appreciate the effort, yes.(...) So Viridis being one of them. So this is probably the only most reliable color scheme, and there is a family of those color schemes actually, which will be perceived exactly the same, but almost everybody on the planet, right? But again, not many brands can probably fit into that, right? So, but what most teams try to do is to either add shapes or never rely on color alone. Sometimes you find the button saying change to shapes or add shapes or something similar, so you can actually distinguish between the colors and by adding augmenting shapes onto them, right? So that can become quite useful quite quickly. The other thing that’s actually quite interesting that has been not really on radar for a long time is the problem with motion sickness.
Parallax.
Parallax. Well, around... There are different researches that we could discover, right? And different papers on that as well, but approximately 25% to 30% of people have some sort of motion sickness, or which is also called, of course, vestibular disorder, which often also causes migraine, right? And that usually happens when you have a sensory conflict between what the person sees and what they experience.(...) Let me give you an example.
Now, this is a website.
I mean, I’m just stating a fact. This is a website. And on that website, you have a slider on the left. Can you see that?
Yes, it seems like it’s a slider.(...) So let’s imagine you in a situation where you would like to move from, I mean, it says one on the top, and it says six at the bottom. That’s what?
Yes, thank you for your participation. It’s a carousel. It’s a wonderful carousel, right? And so if you want to change from whatever position it is right now to the next one, how would you do that?
There are options.
Drag. So you can click on that black dot and start dragging it. Who would do that?
Some people decided not to raise their hand after all. So any other options? What can we do? Click on the numbers. Anybody who’s clicking numbers?
Scroll, all right, who would scroll?
You like scrolling, don’t you?(...) You say, "Yeah, you really do like scrolling." Anything else?(...) Ignore it.
I mean, it wants to be dragged or moved or paraded somehow. No, we cannot ignore it. Well, most of you are wrong.
That’s not how it’s supposed to be. So if you look at this here, so obviously you can try to do as much as you like with it and play with it and click on it. Is it playing? It’s playing, right? And what you’re supposed to do though is not drag.
You cannot click on numbers either. You cannot click on the entire vertical line either. What you’re supposed to do here, of course, is to swipe.
(Audience Laughing)
(...) How could you not see that? I just, I have no idea. And you might wonder, well, this is like, you know, some fancy designers do some fancy things. Well, frankly, it’s all over the place. This is the Van Gogh Museum.(...) And the Van Gogh Museum, and I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m all in for bold expression of design. That’s all fine. But whenever you get situations like this, when you’re scrolling down,
but then the scrolling is happening horizontally,
that’s a problem. That’s the same problem that we saw in the previous example as well, right? So whenever we have a conflict between the people expecting, what they’re experiencing, that becomes an issue. I am going to show you one more.(...) This will not be nice.
(Audience Laughing)
So I want you to maybe close your eyes if you, it will really be probably the worst thing you’ll see in your life, right? But I want you to be prepared, right? Are you ready? Oh, now everybody is watching.
Okay, well, and I don’t know why we do this to people.
There is a parallax in it. Get ready, or not.
(Audience Laughing)
Why? I mean, why would we do that? Anyway, I really don’t know, right? But how do we fix it? So if you wanted to make it, let’s say, better in some way. Well, there are simple ways of fixing it. If you really want to have, let’s say, some parallax effect, well, I can maybe do something like this, right? As somebody is scrolling, you could still show and pop up kind of the storytelling, or squally telling, if you like. We kind of highlight some areas and some boxes, some information. Sometimes it might be sticky for a while, and then it kind of keeps going. That’s fine. This is not as severe, let’s say, as previous examples would be.(...) On the other hand,
just saying, right, if you start scrolling down here, you kind of get in a situation where something gets stuck, right, and then you can still tell the story without having the sensory conflict that I was speaking about earlier. This is just really not necessary, right? But I think there are also some really interesting innovation happening around that. This is one that came from Apple a while back. If you don’t use it yet, please do. This is great. So whenever you’re moving in a vehicle, it indicates to you what the direction of movement is. So that creates kind of resets almost, or clears this misconception, misalignment between what the mind thinks and what the mind perceives. That’s extremely effective. If you take a look, if you ever have to be, have to reply in emails, in a taxi, or in the bus, or in a moving vehicle, that’s a very, very useful feature for accessible motion. And of course, in general, when it comes to accessible motion, it’s not difficult. We want to respect the physics,(...) want to avoid flashes, want to also provide some sort of a feature to allow people to maybe navigate that thing that we’re providing with a slightly less severe motion.
And also providing people an option to skip to the end, which is often missing. This is number five, which is often missing. So if you have some sort of scrolly telling, just let people go to the end to explore and get a summary of everything. And if you can, please do avoid parallax scroll.(...) Please do.
But then of course, as we keep going into this direction,(...) what I also want to focus on is just two more areas which I believe are really forgotten or overlooked.(...) And of course, when we’re thinking about them, sometimes it’s very difficult to have a meaningful conversation, but I think we should. And one of them is what it means designing for specific audiences.
And of course, there are a lot of articles around, and there are also talks also about how to design for Gen Z. But Gen Z is a generation which was born between 1995 and 2010, but it spans around between 20 to 25 to 30 years, depending on if different people treated differently. You cannot just design for an audience that can vary in age of 30 years. These are very different audiences. But there are some things that we need to keep in mind when we’re designing, in general, for people who happen to be in Gen Z.(...) Now, first of all, it’s most diverse generation in terms of race, ethnicity and identity.
And often, when I have conversations with different teams about Gen Z,
I don’t know how to put it, Gen Z is being perceived as this weird generation.(...) Sorry, everyone. I didn’t mean to break it. The point being that it’s often perceived as being slow, as being passive and as being mindless. And I’m not quite sure where exactly it’s coming from, but this is something that I hear all the time.
And this is totally wrong.
I mean, actually, I’m very hopeful for Gen Z,(...) and I think that this is one of the best generations we’ve ever had. But I need to explain why. So, but Gen Z, born between 1995 and 2010, and very often you will find a lot of pieces which we’ll be writing about bold, striking,(...) vibrant, strong contrast and things like that, right? Which is, of course, perfectly reasonable. But what I like about it, and this is, by the way, also what Weisbank, the ex-transfer of Weis, decided to go for as well, bold, striking, vibrant, friendly colours, and of course, not only colours, but also imagery and visuals, and not just on the level of bold,(...) but AAA compliant, everything.
Good luck with that. This is very difficult to achieve. And this was the very main goal from the very beginning, not because they wanted specifically target Gen Z in some way or the other, but this is a really, really kind of big commitment to accessibility from the very beginning, which I was really, really impressed by. And of course, the result was quite striking.(...) Friendly, bold, accessible in many ways, from typography to visuals to everything, and it was actually really, really impressive to see.
And it kind of reminds me, and really reminds me of something that I’ve seen many, many, many years ago, I think 15 or 20 years ago, which is this notion of authenticity, which goes way beyond just looking authentic, but being authentic, like really speaking what they’re thinking and not trying to hide behind anything. To the point that they’re branding and the way they’re speaking, it represents whatever these design decisions are that they were making back then, going for AAA accessibility.(...) But it also kind of makes a full circle because it brings me back to Hans Brinker Hotel.
I heard some reaction to that. So Hans Brinker Hotel, anybody been to Hans Brinker Hotel?
OK, so people are like, "What the hell is this?" Hans Brinker is supposed to be the worst hotel in the world.
They want to be the worst hotel in the world. They want to be the hotel that people will want to go to to experience the worst hotel experience in the world. And they’re so successful, they’re fully booked all the time.(...) People really want this experience. Now, sure enough, this website has represented that experience as well.(...) This is the website,
the hostel that couldn’t care less, but we will try.
Look at this beautiful, elegant navigation.
It is also responsive in a way. The image is broken on the left, but that’s OK.
They have big, big, big stuff, a lot of stuff happening here. They also chat with Hans Brinker, of course. Then they keep going.(...) I thought, "Look at this area."
I mean,(...) why not? But you get... I mean, there’s a point that sometimes they would actually sprinkle and bring in some insects into the rooms just to create that experience that people are craving for. And the typography is all over the place, but I guess they kind of represent what they want to be. They are authentic.
And in many ways, you would say, "This is horrible. Why would you do that?" But they’re just genuinely authentic in the way of how they present themselves. In the same way like Reiner does.(...) Anybody loves...
I’m not... No. Anybody hates Reiner,
like deeply,
from those of you who raised your hand.
When was the last time you flew Reiner?
Did you?
Well, from those people who dislike Reiner, right, this is that level of authenticity that brands in the past could not do. Right? So, Voris has written, "We didn’t pay and ended up sitting together. Thanks, Reiner. Reiner, from the official account, replying, "We’ll find you."
Right? They say, "What the hell is this? Why would brands do that? This is just so weird." But this is what really strikes a chord with Gen Z.(...) Right? Because this is what connects it. Like, in a way, even if you dislike Reiner and hate it, it doesn’t... You know, they probably have NPS score of minus 100 all the way. They want to be consistent about this, right? And they probably are. But in many ways, this is like, you know what to expect from them. They own being cheap and horrible.(...) Nobody else does, right? So they’re really, really great at that. And so when we look at Gen Z, then, right,
large parts of Gen Z, which was a big kind of revelation for me, they’re not mobile first, but mobile only, especially the younger ones. They have way more emphasis on fairness, authenticity and purpose. Of course, they value inclusivity, sustainability and work-life balance.(...) And just like, you know, everybody here in the room, I think, the vast majority of something between 85 to 95%(...) will always turn on closed captioning on videos by default. Who does that?
OK, so you’re not Gen Z enough, I think, maybe, right? So this is kind of almost expected.
But on the other hand, what you also find,
that they have a very kind of different perception of trust.
They do not trust people necessarily, like in general, but they trust verified reviews, and it’s very important. They also follow and trust influencers. They follow friends and they trust them. But also they have expectations which are different from different generations in the past, because they used to follow events live as they unfold.
And that means that very often, oh, it’s not connected anymore, have very little patience.
I was very surprised to learn that, for example, for Gen Z, an expected method of authentication for login is social media or social login. Email is perceived as being weird or strange. Why would you do that? Mostly because they also have a lot of different emails and they’re really good at knowing what temporary email addresses are. Is anybody using tempmail.org or ish something similar?(...) Look at you.(...) All these databases filled with all this fake, imaginative email addresses, creating huge bounce rates. That’s on you.(...) That’s on you. But in fact, this is actually very common. A lot of people, especially in Gen Z, will have six to seven email addresses. And good luck getting the good one.
And also think about how many email addresses do you have. Typically, it will be around four or more than four.
Also, it’s interesting that in Germany, in Austria, and in Switzerland, people just tend to ignore cookie banners.(...) People don’t act on cookie banners. They don’t do DDPR cookie banners, but just ignore. Sometimes you see this half of the screen covered with cookie pop up. I can scroll. Well, you know how to scroll.(...) It’s OK. I can scroll. But when you go to Spain, 90%, I think 91%, just always close, always close. And we’re like,
I can scroll. It’s OK. I can scroll.(...) And also just in general, very direct and open-minded. The best people to get if you want to get a proper usability testing place. So how do companies try to attract them? By doing something like this? Being as authentic as you can be.
Well, now that you’ve got the attention of people who work in marketing, please buy our cereal.
That’s unusual. Or why even go to that extra mile? This is a very successful advertising campaign targeted specifically on people who are working in marketing. And this banner is not the best performing one. Do you want to see the best performing one?
Free people really want to. The others are like, ah, this one.
I mean,
and we invent worlds and photography and athletes. Just right. Please buy our cereal. That’s just as good or even better.(...) That was also the third place. You want to see the third place?
More people now.
So here we go.
(Laughter)
Marketing for marketers campaign brief. Can you write a cereal advert that will only appeal to people who work in marketing? Use marketing in jokes and subversive anti-marketing style to make sure people who don’t work in marketing won’t get it. Like a screenshot of an internal email or something. Make sure to include high protein and zero sugar.(...) And take some out on the end about now we are in sales briefs. OK. This is another one that didn’t perform too well.(...) But it’s kind of weird that it’s coming out. And also, what I find is actually quite surreal is that sometimes it goes to extremes.
Sometimes I mean, I’m not sure about this.
But this is actually something that really resonates really, really well with G&Z, for example. But please never go this route.
This brings back really bad memories in the past.
But there is that.
But then also, I still have two minutes.
Two minutes, Marc.(...) Five.
You know?
We can kind of try to-- so I just want to show maybe one more thing that’s actually quite important. And then I can wrap up. And that’s how to also design for aging population. This is something that we really forget a lot of the time. There is around 1 billion people, age 60 plus, who live today. And we have stereotypes and stigma about them, which are just wrong most of the time. They’re often healthy, active, and with a solid income and capital to spend. I’m really so surprised that when I look at all the big fancy banks out there all around the world, they always try to attract younger audience. They try to be bold and modern and striking and vibrant. But in many ways,(...) these are the people who actually have the money to put in the bank account. And usually, we don’t even think about designing for aging population. This is a very important audience that is often ignored. Now, there is a big research done by Michael Halperin,
which is called Log In, on all the generation, all the audiences. But I just want to summarize a few important things that’s really surprising to me.(...) Now, first of all, I think-- let me just show this here. This is basically what I wanted to show, just one slide. Namely, that as-- again, as we grow older, get older, it’s more difficult to focus on close objects.
Shades of blue and purple, but also yellow and green look very similar.
Visuals with a similar contrast are becoming harder to tell apart.
And very often, I can’t even count. Look at me.(...) Very often, you also end up with reduced dexterity, which causes errors with precise movements, which is why things like drag and drop are always very challenging. And this is why I really applaud the effort with the European Accessibility Act and Google Act 2.2 in general, that we want to create controls for people to be able to move things around, not relying on drag and drop.
But also, these are some things that are just worth knowing. At 60, you will need three times more light to perceive the same brightness of a color.
So this is why, of course, large body copy and double A will be just a resilient, reliable thing to have. But also, I would suggest that it’s probably a good timing to start or stop thinking, rather, about having error messages appearing below text boxes.
The reason for that is I don’t have an example here.
But I think it’s really something that’s very, very underestimated. I do have an example here.
A second. Here we go.(...) Now, this is something that we tried and we tested another project that was running in 2020.(...) And this sort of error message display performs much better in terms of accuracy and also performs better in terms of recovery.
So when you put the error message underneath the text box, you will have four problems.(...) Problem number one is whenever we have a dropdown, this will be blocking the error message. Problem number two, whenever you have order complete, it will be blocking the error message. Problem number three, whenever you actually have a mobile device, on a mobile device, typically it will be covered by a keyboard. And there was a fourth one, but I think that Marc is coming. Marc is not coming.
So this is usually performing better if you actually put it above. Also, because most of the time, a lot of the time, when people try to fix an error, they need to be able to consult the label, the hint, the error message, and the input that they already provided. And all these four things must be visible at all times. And God forbid,(...) error messages appearing as toast. They have a very special place in hell.
I’ve seen people looking at the screen and just clicking.
And I see these messages in the right upper corner on the other side of the universe, because they have such a big screen, appearing right there, right there. And I see them right here. Like, refresh.
And then off you go. And so this is how it really often becomes a problem. So I probably want to avoid that. I start rambling. This is usually a bad sign. So just to wrap up, by the way, I have put together all these slides.(...) And it’s 1,539 of them.
So Marc told me I will never be able to go through all of them. He was right, I think.
But I do want to finish on something positive still.
Oops, come back here.
Just to wrap up.
So I’ve been doing this thing with a little bit of web and a bit of UX and stuff like that for, what, 20, 25 years. And I think it’s really surprising that whenever you look at what people want from experiences, it’s always been the same.
It’s always been the same. People want things to be fast and accessible. People want to have large and legible text. They want to have check boxes that look like check boxes and not radio buttons. And they want to see radio buttons that look like radio buttons and not check boxes. They also want to have text boxes that look like text boxes. They also want to have focused state and active state when they’re interacting with a menu or when they’re interacting with a form.
Simple password requirements, predictable tabbing, helpful error messages,(...) and a few simple things like simple, smart, auto complete, Marc is coming, I think. User-persisted, input-persisted on refresh, and a few other things. Like all of that has been the same(...) for many, many, many, many years now. So I’m just really hopeful that this time around, maybe this year or maybe next year, we’ll finally get there. I’m very hopeful for European accessibility are coming in as well.
So where does it leave us? Well, I still think we can experiment and play.
This is one of my favorite websites ever.
Look at this pop-up.(...) What a wonderful little pop-up it is. It’s so difficult to ignore.(...) I love it. I absolutely love it. It should be everywhere, everywhere. And then sometimes you of course get things like that, right? This wonderful pop-up. Hey, what is the date of birth? And the Scoshmold Whisker Society, they don’t care. Like 32, 32nd day of 43rd month of 1,547 works for me. All right, that’s okay. You can enter it, but that’s an opportunity, right? That’s an opportunity for us to really create a memorable experience and really accessible, beautiful, wonderful, delightful experience, because you can do this.
Are you 21?(...) Can I answer yes or no?(...) If you answer no, well,(...) let’s have a conversation, shall we?(...) All right, are you at least 18? Hmm, 17?
Hmm,(...) hmm, that’s really worrying at this point,(...) right? And then it keeps going and going at some point, you’re like, "Well, you don’t want to click yes anymore, "do you?" No, no, you wouldn’t do that.
And this is where it’s getting a bit worrying, I have to say, right? And then of course you click through and then you basically get a stare, right? And so we have this opportunity to do things like that still. Sometimes it can go to extremes. This is Borden, Borden sells stuff, e-commerce site, and they have a title selector. What could be more boring than title? I mean, boring, right? Not on Borden.
(Audience Laughing)
Right, if you wanted to save that princess, you want to send something to that princess back, this is the chance, this is the only chance of the universe that you can get, and it’s a lot of options there. You can be whoever you want whenever you want it, right?(...) Impressive, impressive. And then sometimes, of course, you could just, you know, make it a little bit more difficult for people to actually click on the checkbox, or click on that radio button, but not too difficult.
(Audience Laughing)
Right?(...) So whenever somebody wants to subscribe to your newsletter so just maybe make it a bit more difficult so they have a chance to connect with you, it doesn’t have to be so mean, right?(...) But you could do something in that regard as well, right? So there is a lot of opportunities for us to be accessible, inclusive, friendly, and create a wonderful design as well. With this, well, just two more things. I created this course, I’m supposed to plug it in, so you get the coupon code 20% off inclusive if you look at smart interface design patterns, there’s like 10, 15 hours of content and stuff about a lot of different design patterns. And most recently,(...) I launched this, which is how to measure UX and design impact based on a lot of work that I was doing before. And you can also get 20% off with the code inclusive just in case you are interested.
All right?
Almost.
One minute to finish up to tell the story of my life.(...) I do need to share it. This is the life that we all have, and I think we should get just used to it. In some way, this is the world that I’ve been living, and I just want to share this, this last one minute with you. And for those of you who are experiencing difficulties in 2025, and because this is a weird year and bad year and stuff like that, you’ve got this. I will get through this, it will be okay. Eventually, it will be okay. So welcome to my world with audio.
(Dramatic Music)(...) (Soft Music)
For designers.
(Soft Music)
Sometimes things don’t go unexpected, I guess. Thank you so much to Pearl’s story for the wonderful video. This is the end, and cats and more cats, and thank you so much for being here, everyone.
(Audience Applauding)
Thank you.
