They say hindsight is 20/20, but at An Event Apart, we’ll be bringing you foresight in 2020—just as we have every year since 2005—hand in glove with the immediate takeaways AEA is famous for. And we’ll be doing it all with 17 industry-leading speakers over three brilliant days of design, code and content.

Want to know the latest on all the trends affecting your work? Get a handle on teamwork, design thinking, user experience, and the latest technologies? As we do every year, we’ll bring all that to six cities next year.

As for what’s changed: for the first time in almost a decade, we’ll be back in Minneapolis! And, after years of looking for the right venue in Washington, DC, we’ve found it… and in the Spring, when DC is at the height of its beauty. Gain foresight, insight, and inspiration at An Event Apart in these cities:

• Washington, DC, April 13–15
• Seattle, May 11–13
• Boston, June 29–July 1
• Minneapolis, August 17–19
• Orlando, October 5–7
• San Francisco, December 14–16

We hope you’ll join us for three focused days of user experience, digital design, peer interaction, a host of immediately actionable insights, and sneak peeks at the future of our industry. All six events are now open for registration, so get ready to grab a seat and be part of our biggest year yet!

Jeffrey Zeldman, “Slow Design for an Anxious World”

Margot Bloomstein, “Designing for Trust in an Uncertain World”

Sarah Parmenter, “Designing for Personalities”

Eric Meyer, “Generation Style”

Rachel Andrew, “Making Things Better: Redefining the Technical Possibilities of CSS”

Jen Simmons, “Designing Intrinsic Layouts”

Val Head, “Making Motion Inclusive”

Sara Soueidan, “SVG Filters: The Crash Course”

Kevin M. Hoffman, “What is Design Ops, and Why Do I Care?”

Laura Martini, “Data Basics”

Dave Rupert, “What Has Changed and Where’s it Going?”

Aarron Walter, “Leveling Up Your Design Communication”

Cyd Harrell, “Making Research Count”

Aaron Gustafson, “Progressive Web Apps: Where Do I Begin?”

Gerry McGovern, “The Customer-Obsessed Professional”

Tell us a little about yourself and what you’ve been doing recently.

I’m a UX designer at Google, working on the Google Analytics product that helps people understand how users are interacting with their website or mobile app. Recently, I’ve been learning more about how UX can use data insights to improve the products we build, and also to make a business case for the projects we’re working on. I’ve been working closely with my Product Manager partner, and learning how to create product vision that can get our leadership invested in our ideas and make them into a reality in a large, complex organization.

What are some tools you find indispensable to your work? These can be any sort of tool, or really even things that aren’t tools but are still super helpful.

As simple as it is, I couldn’t be productive without a Post-it (or two or three…) with a running to-do list. I’ve recently taken on more people management, so a lot of my work involves talking with people and looking at data to understand what’s going on, creating design briefs to articulate the problems we should be working on, and building slide decks to or creating storyboards to help people understand the team’s vision.

Finally, what’s current with/next for you and how does it relate to your talk?

I’ve recently been exploring how Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning can help people find important insights in their complex data, and can even predict future trends. It’s an interesting design challenge, as you’re often dealing with information that’s statistical, so you can’t give people a definite yes-or-no answer. And anytime you involve a machine in the system, it makes things more complicated.

Computers are funny, in that they are so powerful, and yet struggle at tasks that seem basic to humans, like identifying whether a photo is of a dog or a blueberry muffin. The sweet spot is when you can design a system that allows machines to do what they’re good at – like doing the same thing thousands or millions of times, and monitoring data 24/7 – and combine that with the human ability to know what data is important, and what action they should take. I touch on some of these types of features, like data insights and predictions, in my Data Basics talk.

See Laura present “Data Basics” at An Event Apart DC (July 29-31). Don’t miss this chance to hear Laura and sixteen other top-notch speakers share their insights!

Tell us a little about yourself and what you’ve been doing recently.

I’ve been working in content strategy about 20 years. My roots are in communication design, so the engagement and community at An Event Apart really feels like a way to bring it all together. Though our technical toolsets may differ, so many of us confront similar challenges in helping our organizations, supporting our users, and elevating valuable services.

Over the past two decades, I’ve had the opportunity to partner with clients on some slippery challenges—like how they can better convince skeptical audiences to buy into services or information to better help themselves. That problem is a fair summary of work I’ve done with tourist bureaus, financial institutions, and municipal transit offices—and that’s just in the past few years. I work with many of my clients to clarify messaging as well, typically to build trust and empower their customers or constituents. BrandSort, the process and tool I developed, is a centerpiece of my workshops.

In the past few years, trust has been an increasing focus of my work and research. We talk a lot about trust, empathy, empowerment, and vulnerability, but do we do enough in our work to operationalize those things? Or are they just buzzwords and confetti from the marketing department? I believe to regain trust, organizations must empower their users. As designers, content strategists, creative directors, and others who make the web, we can empower our users through our choices in content and design—and that’s the story I’ve been researching and writing over the past year.

That’s not a topic we hear a lot about. What do designers commonly misunderstand about the role of trust in design?

When users lose trust in brands, services, government, or media, they stop engaging. Skepticism feeds skepticism, and suddenly everyone’s a liar. No amount of reskinning or PR spin can fix cynicism, but we can take steps to rebuild confidence. Design can empower users—and with empowerment comes openness, and gets us back on the path to trust.

We think of trust in vague terms. It’s like empathy: everyone likes it, no one opposes it, but few practitioners know how to do it from an operational perspective. How do you consistently integrate empathy into your work? Jonathon Colman, senior content design manager at Intercom, notes, “Empathetic content design requires deeper cultural support.” In other words, we can’t just firehose empathy over the front end by punctuating support pages with “did you find the information you’re looking for?”

Start earlier. Designers can advocate for making sure empathy drives our priorities, budgets, and staffing. Marchaé Grair, director of public relations and outreach at the Unitarian Universalist Association, speaks about designers’ responsibility to both users and clients by empathizing with marginalized people. That might mean offering easy, accessible tools for flagging hate speech—or easy, accessible tools for controlling your own experience to bypass disturbing topics through content warnings. It also means understanding your audience by accurately reflecting your audience—without pandering—in inclusive imagery and phrasing. “If you don’t have marginalized people creating content and making decisions about content, you can’t create authentic content for marginalized people,” she said in a talk at Confab 2019. That means good design requires a shift in culture, money, and hiring practices.

Those challenges and opportunities inform the conversation about building trust through design as well. Trust sounds great in theory—everyone likes it, no one opposes it, but how do you operationalize it? To go beyond the buzzword bingo, like empathy it requires deeper cultural support. In many organizations, that means cultural change. Do you trust your clients, teammates, and users, or do hallway conversations encourage disdain? Do you hear people at every level of your organization scoff “they don’t get it!” after meetings, or do they lead with respect? Listen to the internal language, then be a force for change. We can’t design to convey trust in our audiences if we don’t respect them, their ability to self-educate, and their wisdom to make good choices for themselves. Start there. Then you can explore tools that allow users to control the pace of product education, engage in a community of other consumers, or hide supplemental guidance that repeats what they already know. You can design to rebuild the trust of your users—but trust always starts with respect.

What are some tools you find indispensable to your work?

My toddler recently asked me why I had stopped to sketch a view out our window. Kids ask such arresting, affirming questions! I wanted to understand it better, I explained. I wanted to figure out the details in the distance. For me, sketching, writing about a topic, and exploring with my camera all serve the same purpose: I slow down to look, listen, and learn. And hopefully, figure out my own perspective on the world around me.

The other key ingredient for my work? A museum membership. We hone our unique perspectives, insight, and vision by examining how other people bring a critical eye to the world. I love seeing how a curator or exhibit designer explores a topic and assembles artwork or objects to illuminate a theme—their perspective always influences my own, even on the completely different subjects that I encounter with my clients. And if you can swing it, a museum membership means you never have to feel like you have to see as much as possible in a single visit. You’re free to pop in, fill your eyes with the perspective of a single gallery, and then get back to work.

See Margot present “Designing for Trust in an Uncertain World” at An Event Apart DC (July 29-31) and San Francisco (December 9-11). Don’t miss your chance to hear Margot and sixteen other top-notch speakers share their insights!

Where should web design go next?

In a passionate 60-minute presentation captured live at An Event Apart Orlando 2018, designer Jon Tan makes a radical argument for recidivism in our design thinking: a return to durable, aesthetic, and inclusive web design.

Through evidence and examples, you’ll learn to design for serendipity, for speed, and for economy of time, resources, and attention. Durable design is responsive design for the next decade, and it starts now.

Jon Tan is a designer and typographer who co-founded the web fonts service, Fontdeck. He is a partner in Fictive Kin, where he worked with friends making things like Brooklyn Beta and Mapalong. Jon’s addiction to web typography led him to start co-writing a book on the subject, and share snippets of type news via @t8y. He also writes for publications like 8 Faces and Typographica, speaks at international events, and works with such organizations as the BBC. Jon is based in Mild Bunch HQ, the co-working studio he started in Bristol, UK. He can often be found wrestling with his two sons, losing, then celebrating the fact as @jontangerine on Twitter.

Enjoy all the videos in An Event Apart’s library! There are over 40 hours of them—all absolutely free! For more insightful presentations by the industry’s best and brightest, come to An Event Apart—three days of design, code, and content for web, UX, and interaction designers. And for your free monthly guide to all things web, design, and developer-y, subscribe to The AEA Digest.