All references

Ask 'why' repeatedly to move from a symptom to a root cause worth designing for. Use when: Framing the problem before jumping to solutions.

Coach designers to make the case, not just the screens.

What leaders should be asking of AI in design workflows.

The reference for interaction patterns when a flow gets complicated.

Where AI genuinely speeds up research, and where it fabricates.

New EAA regulations in force across Europe.

Design a date picker that a keyboard-only user and a screen-reader user can both use as fast as a mouse user.

Analyse, Design, Develop, Implement, Evaluate — the classical ID lifecycle. Use when: Structuring a full curriculum project end to end.

UI craft, design-to-code workflows and portfolio work worth studying.

Rolling — check your city — Worldwide — community meetups

March 2027 — New York, NY, USA

Activities, Environments, Interactions, Objects, Users — a lens for structured field observation. Use when: Running contextual inquiry or ethnographic visits.

From chatbots to autonomous workflows.

Introduced goal-directed design and personas to software product teams.

Built one of Europe's landmark UX consultancies; now coaches design leaders.

HCI research and Indic-language interaction design; shaped HCI education in India.

Apple's guidance on setting expectations, handling mistakes and communicating model behaviour. Use when: Shipping on-device or generative features on Apple platforms.

The calmest place to collect visual references and build a board over time.

Getting design through review, handoff and rollout intact.

Plot assumptions by importance and evidence to decide what to test first. Use when: Choosing what to research before building anything.

Free online: the mental model most design systems still borrow from.

Atoms, molecules, organisms, templates, pages — a mental model for design systems that scale. Use when: Structuring a component library or documentation.

Component hierarchy that survives implementation.

Break findings into experiments, facts, insights and conclusions to make research reusable. Use when: Building a research repository the team actually queries.

April 2027 — Amsterdam, Netherlands

Start from desired results, then evidence of learning, then learning experiences. Use when: Designing a new module or reworking one that isn't landing.

Remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate, create — leveled learning objectives. Use when: Writing course outcomes and assignment rubrics.

The mental model most design systems are still built on.

Six-phase reflexive method for coding qualitative data into defensible themes. Use when: Synthesising interviews for a rigorous, sharable report.

NN/g — 5 min

Evidence and framing for the investment conversation.

Design a cancellation flow that honours the user's decision in under 30 seconds — no dark patterns, no guilt.

The practical reference for ethics and responsible design decisions.

April 2027 — Asia-Pacific host city (ACM SIGCHI)

Reduce intrinsic, extraneous and germane load so users can focus on the task, not the interface. Use when: Simplifying dense enterprise or data-heavy screens.

Meaning, temperature and harmony — the vocabulary behind a palette choice.

The Futur — 12 min

May 2027 — San Francisco, CA, USA

Align outcomes, teaching activities and assessment so what you test is what you teach. Use when: Reviewing an existing syllabus for coherence.

Consolidating into product design roles.

Opportunity solution trees — the sharpest tool for framing the problem.

Sketch 8 ideas in 8 minutes to break out of the first-idea trap. Use when: Warming up before a concept sketch or workshop.

What engineering actually needs from you, and when.

IDEO on unblocking teams that think they aren't creative.

Sort situations into clear, complicated, complex, chaotic — pick the right decision style. Use when: Deciding how to lead a decision with unclear cause and effect.

Teaches teams how to build and adopt systems that people actually use.

Two decades of UX practice across Asia; writes on making meaningful work.

Turn crits from opinion parades into a learning ritual.

February 2027 — Cape Town, South Africa

Understand, sketch, decide, prototype, test — a compressed project template. Use when: Running a mini project in a week.

How systems survive contact with real delivery teams.

Consolidating around tokens & W3C spec.

Figma — 20 min

Fastest-growing design role.

The diverge/converge loop, and where concepting actually belongs.

W3C spec nearing v1.0.

The shared vocabulary that keeps design and code in sync at rollout.

A short checklist to run before any usability session.

What DesignOps covers and the first things worth operationalising.

How, what and who of DesignOps — orchestrate people, process and craft at scale. Use when: Building or restructuring a design ops function.

Stages from ad-hoc to embedded — assess where your ops sit and what to invest in next. Use when: Planning DesignOps hires and tooling.

September 22–24, 2026 — Online (Rosenfeld Media)

November 20–21, 2026 — Bengaluru, India

Critique as a skill you can teach and schedule.

Coined the term “user experience”. Cognitive scientist, founding director of the Design Lab at UC San Diego.

NN/g — 2 min

The shortest route to spotting usability problems yourself.

Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver — a shared vocabulary for divergent and convergent design. Use when: Planning a project phase or explaining process to stakeholders.

Sort work by urgency vs importance so the important-not-urgent gets protected time. Use when: Weekly planning when the backlog is bigger than the calendar.

Says, thinks, does, feels — a canvas to consolidate what you learn about users. Use when: Turning interview notes into a shareable artefact.

Turn scattered interview notes into a shared picture of the user.

Cagan's model for autonomy, coaching and clarity that lets teams solve problems, not ship features. Use when: Diagnosing why a team is executing but not moving the metric.

Design the empty state for a first-time email user. It must teach, delight, and never feel patronising.

B2B budgets prioritise usability.

The clearest voice on pragmatic, jargon-free research inside product teams.

Unacceptable, high, limited, minimal — the risk classification driving EU AI compliance. Use when: Scoping AI features against European regulation.

Curates the most-read UX publication on Medium with Caio Braga.

Rolling — monthly — Worldwide — local chapters

Behaviour happens when motivation, ability and a prompt converge at the same moment. Use when: Designing nudges, onboarding, or habit-forming flows.

Proximity, similarity, closure and continuity — how the eye groups elements into meaning. Use when: Fixing visual hierarchy or grouping in a dense screen.

Argues for screenless, process-first design — a useful corrective to UI-first work.

How to tell a real strategy from a list of aspirations.

Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, Task success — connect UX to metrics. Use when: Defining product-level UX KPIs with PMs and data.

Patterns for mental models, explainability, feedback, errors and trust in AI-powered UI. Use when: Designing an LLM feature, agent, or AI-assisted flow.

Structure for boards and layouts that feel composed, not collaged.

How to describe growth so feedback has somewhere to point.

Everything operational about planning and moderating a study.

Trigger, action, variable reward, investment — the loop behind habit-forming products. Use when: Auditing whether your engagement loop is ethical and complete.

YouTube — watch

NN/g — 5 min

How to run ideation so you leave with real options, not sticky notes.

Inspiration, Ideation, Implementation — a field guide for designing with people, not for them. Use when: Kicking off a discovery with real user immersion.

Accessible patterns to copy before you invent a bespoke component.

November 5–8, 2026 — Delhi NCR, India

How strong product teams decide what's worth building.

The classic on how colour behaves in context — the foundation of any palette.

How to ask questions that surface what people actually do.

Author of the 10 usability heuristics that most teams still evaluate against.

Four decades of usability practice, teaching and famously sharp talks.

Frame every feature as a job a user hires the product to do in a specific situation. Use when: Prioritising features against real user progress, not personas.

Bridges computation, design and business — long-running Design in Tech reports.

What journey maps are, when they help, and how to build one that gets used.

Reconstruct the timeline of a customer switching to your product to surface real forces of progress. Use when: Understanding acquisition, churn or category switching.

Author of The Making of a Manager — design leadership and craft at scale.

Compact, opinionated, and the fastest way to start doing research well.

Classify features as must-be, performance, attractive, indifferent or reverse based on satisfaction. Use when: Prioritising a feature list against user delight vs. table stakes.

Content modelling, adaptive content and design for the long tail of devices.

Writes and teaches widely-used research, content and IA guidance at NN/g.

Scenario-driven design, personas done properly, and org design for UX.

Concrete experience, reflection, conceptualisation, experimentation — a loop for studio work. Use when: Designing studio, lab or project-based learning.

A browsable set of psychology principles to sanity-check a concept.

A compact reference of cognitive and behavioural laws (Fitts, Hick, Miller, Jakob) applied to UI. Use when: Justifying a layout, spacing or interaction decision.

October 14–16, 2026 — London, UK

Turning assumptions into testable problem statements.

June 2027 — New York, NY, USA

Made research a democratic, org-wide habit rather than a specialist gate.

Defined what a good service looks like — required reading for service designers.

Form design, mobile-first patterns and product thinking, backed by data.

Research on aesthetic usability and user experience measurement.

Practical patterns for colour, touch targets, focus and motion that meet WCAG in real UI. Use when: Turning WCAG into concrete component decisions.

Reshapes how tools plug into AI products.

OKRs done properly — useful when design goals need business framing.

The reference for choosing and reporting UX metrics.

Aligning what you build with how people already think.

18 validated guidelines for human-AI interaction across initial, during, when-wrong and over-time. Use when: Reviewing an AI feature for trust and recovery.

Recognise exclusion, learn from diversity, solve for one and extend to many. Use when: Expanding scope beyond a narrow 'average user'.

Practical requirements for fairness, reliability, safety, privacy, inclusion and accountability. Use when: Turning AI principles into shippable engineering practice.

October 15–16, 2026 — London, UK

Age-appropriate AI concepts, ethics and hands-on activities across levels. Use when: Bringing AI into a design curriculum responsibly.

Why mood boards de-risk the visual conversation, and how to run one with stakeholders.

Must, Should, Could, Won't — a simple way to scope a project realistically. Use when: Scoping a bootcamp or capstone project.

Ten general principles for interaction design — the most-cited critique lens in the field. Use when: Reviewing a flow or auditing an interface for quick wins.

Govern, Map, Measure, Manage — the reference to make AI programs trustworthy at scale. Use when: Standing up AI governance in a regulated org.

Small-sample moderated testing — five users find ~85% of issues if the tasks are right. Use when: Validating a specific flow before or after release.

Six stages from absent to user-driven — a language to diagnose and level up an org. Use when: Making the case for investment or a 12-month UX roadmap.

What hiring managers actually look for — process, impact, honest trade-offs. Use when: Building or refreshing your portfolio.

Pick one leading metric that captures value delivered and connect inputs that move it. Use when: Aligning research on the metric that matters most.

Redesign a notification centre so users leave calmer than they arrived. Ranking, grouping, and dismissal all matter.

A full method toolbox for planning and running studies.

Human-centred values, transparency, robustness and accountability for trustworthy AI. Use when: Framing a company-wide responsible AI policy.

Objectives and key results applied to design outcomes rather than output. Use when: Setting quarterly goals that connect design to business.

Writing-first interface design; essays on typography, clarity and focus.

Sketch the first 3 screens of an app your parent has never used. Success = they reach the core action unaided.

Turn a 6-field expense form into a single screen a road warrior can complete on a phone in under 20 seconds.

Link outcomes to opportunities, solutions and assumption tests for continuous discovery. Use when: Structuring discovery and connecting research to shipped work.

Teresa Torres on connecting outcomes, opportunities and ideas.

Product Talk — Teresa Torres — 12 min

Roles, ratios and structures for an in-house design team.

The cheapest way to find out an idea doesn't work.

Helps organisations become user-centred, not just ship user-centred artefacts.

A curated path through building and pressure-testing personas.

Using models on the plan, not on the participants.

Listening deeply enough to hear reasoning, not just preferences.

Built a UX consultancy practice with a strong research-led design framework.

Turn a long list of problems into a defensible order of work.

PM + Design + Engineering discover and deliver together — the modern operating unit. Use when: Setting up an empowered team that owns outcomes end-to-end.

Choosing the right fidelity for the question you're asking.

June 2027 — Online

Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed — make decision rights explicit across PM/Design/Eng. Use when: Untangling ownership on a cross-functional initiative.

Care personally, challenge directly — the manager's default setting.

One tab, participants as columns, observations as rows — spot patterns as they emerge. Use when: Synthesising qualitative interviews across a small sample.

You have 300px of vertical space and one dominant piece of information. Show only what a traveller needs in the 90 seconds before boarding — nothing more.

Practical moves that make a rough prototype look intentional.

Governance, tools, recruitment, admin, comms, knowledge, competency and advocacy for scaled research. Use when: Standing up or maturing a research practice.

A tired guest arrives at 1am. Design a 3-tap flow that gets them to their room key without reading a single instruction.

Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort — a transparent score for portfolio-level trade-offs. Use when: Comparing very different initiatives in a roadmap review.

Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation — fix issues between sessions, not after the study. Use when: Shipping a fast-moving prototype with a tight loop.

DIY usability testing you can actually run every month.

NN/g — 5 min

Successive Approximation Model — iterative, prototype-driven course design. Use when: Building a course like you'd build a product.

Research practice, portfolios and how UX people tell their career story.

Participatory and equity-centred research across public and social sectors.

Big questions, small groups, shared screens — students drive the inquiry. Use when: Facilitating exploratory studio sessions.

Highest demand in fintech & AI startups.

October 2026 — Global host city + online (SDN)

One column of criteria with space either side for evidence of concerns and strengths. Use when: Grading design work where narrative feedback matters more than levels.

September 14–16, 2026 — Freiburg, Germany

A five-day recipe for going from idea to tested concept.

Situation, Task, Action, Result — a clear narrative shape for portfolios and interviews. Use when: Writing a project case study that hiring managers can skim.

A short, honest guide to collecting references without copying.

Made usability testing something any team can do on a Tuesday morning.

Frame the problem in the terms the business already tracks.

Set intent, describe, interpret, judge — turn crits from opinion parades into learning. Use when: Running a studio critique that students actually learn from.

A 10-item survey producing a single comparable usability score from 0-100. Use when: Benchmarking usability across releases or against industry.

A short field guide to getting out of the building.

Team shapes and interaction modes that reduce hand-off pain.

Stream-aligned, platform, enabling and complicated-subsystem teams with clear interaction modes. Use when: Redesigning how design, research and product teams cooperate.

A shared ladder to hire against and promote from.

Diagnose where the org sits before you design the team.

Seven questions that make one-to-ones actually useful.

Affordances, signifiers and mapping — the concept designer's grammar.

Google Ventures — 2 min

TED — Tony Fadell — 16 min

What changes at each rung, from mentoring to running an org.

Camille Fournier's ladder-by-ladder guide to what changes as you grow from lead to VP. Use when: Coaching yourself or a new lead into their next level.

How to talk to people about their problems without leading them.

Framing design work in the language leadership already uses.

Stories behind 75 shades — great vocabulary for defending a palette.

See the structure behind the symptom before you scope a fix.

Type as tone: how a typeface sets mood before a word is read.

Rank a long list of user tasks by vote to focus design on what actually matters most. Use when: Prioritising content or IA on a large site.

“Thick data” — why qualitative insight beats dashboards for big decisions.

Butterick on why type choices carry mood long before the copy is read.

Multiple means of engagement, representation and action to include every learner. Use when: Making a class accessible and inclusive by design.

100+ methods with a clear note on when each one fits.

125 principles to raid when a concept needs a sharper idea.

The canonical primer: tasks, sample size, and reading behaviour honestly.

NN/g — 4 min

A visual model of the steps a user takes to complete a task — decisions, screens, errors. Use when: Explaining a feature to peers or reviewers.

Ops teams formalise standards.

October 2026 — Lagos, Nigeria

March 2027 — Online (User Interviews)

B2B SaaS hiring more research leads.

Bring stakeholders close to users instead of reporting at them.

October 6–8, 2026 — Dublin, Ireland

Fit customer jobs, pains and gains to the products, pain relievers and gain creators you ship. Use when: Aligning a portfolio around real customer value.

Runs the workshops and articles most front-end and UX teams learn patterns from.

Losing ground to multi-modal chat.

Map user needs to components on an evolution axis to spot strategy and platform bets. Use when: Deciding where to build, buy or partner.

The web accessibility baseline — perceivable, operable, understandable, robust — with 9 new SC. Use when: Committing to a concrete accessibility target for a release.

The accessibility bar every test plan should include.

A filterable checklist of success criteria — the standard reference for accessible design. Use when: Making sure a class project meets baseline accessibility.

Cost of delay divided by job size — a lean prioritisation for flow-based delivery. Use when: Ordering a backlog against economic impact.

NN/g — 6 min

The landscape map: attitudinal vs behavioural, qual vs quant.

Combining wireframes and flows when screens alone don't explain the idea.

February 2027 — Worldwide — local city chapters

November 12, 2026 — Worldwide — free local events