2023 wrap-up – the professional part

A new year starts, it’s time for a 2023 wrap. This part will be about my professional year: my work, speaking and workshop content, the blog, the UX template shop and more. If you want to see nice things, don’t also forget to check the creative part.

I launched an improved my UX template shop

In January 2022, I launched my UX templates and resources shop. That shop grew all year long, I added new resources around UX design, but also accessibility and cognitive biases.

Among other things, I’m super happy to have found the time to update and improve the following:

• Web Accessibility for Designers Kit: checklist Figma/Sketch/Penpot annotation templates: this took hours to build (like maybe 5 to 8?), and I’ve iterated quite a lot. I keep adding new things to that resource, it now also includes some extra resources on top of the checklist. For 2024, I plan on creating a A4 poster with the main things designers need to do (people who bought the resource will get that update)
• User Interview Question Cards (43 printable cards) and User Interview – Digital Workshop Cards (Miro and Figjam): I love cards, and templates to make people’s lives easier. I’m using those in different workshops, and they work super well. Also, I found time to translate them to French too.
• I’ve updated, reworked our biases cards. We now have 60 cards, and they are available as Ready to Print Cards & Workshop Instructions  and Ready to Use Digital Workshop (Miro and Figjam). I’ve also taken time to translate those to French: the cards and the Miro/ Figjam boards. And again, just like the interview cards, those work super well for workshops I facilitate!

I wanted again to thank you all for your amazing support in that adventure. Stay tuned, for even more new resources in 2024! I’m currently working on some resources for usability testing, for example.

Speaking and workshops

2023 was the year I went back to in person speaking, and I developed my workshops offer a little more. I used to have my speaking talks and workshops in one single page, it was all mixed up. I’ve decided to split those last year to make it more clear.

So, now, I have a Speaking page that features my talks and a Workshop and Training page, dedicated to those.  I really enjoy the workshop format. And, I want to keep doing that for 2024. So, if you are interested in me, coming to your conference to do a workshop, please reach out! I’m also quite open to remote workshops if we are too many kilometers apart. I also did a couple of private talks and facilitated a couple of private workshops for different companies I won’t name, because, privacy. If you want me to come to talk for a private event, that could be arranged.

Speaking and meetups

Strangely, most of my speaking was done at the end of 2023

• In April, I talked remotely at Women Who Code Salt Lake City about accessibility
• In August, I was invited to talk at Front Conference Zurich about Pushing accessibility with design documentation. The video isn’t online yet.
• In September, I will was remotely talking about “Designing beyond the happy path” at Smashing Meet. The video of the replay is available on YouTube.
• In October, I was invited to Antwerp at Smashing Design & UX and I spoke about enterprise UX.  Krisztina even drew a nice sketchnote from my talk and gabi_gabi posted another nice one on Twitter (photo via Chiara Aliotta)
• In October I also spoke remotely at Athens UX meetup about enterprise UX.
• In November, I spoke in Malaga at Wey Wey Web about Adaptive Designs, Beyond Pixel Perfection. I might do a transcript of that one on my blog eventually.

Workshop

2023 was a lot of fun with more workshops, both remote and in person

• In April, I’ve partnered up with Condens to facilitate, remotely, my  “Introduction to User Interviews” workshop. It was a lot of fun. Participants got to create their own guide (using my Miro board) and practice asking questions.
• In June, I was in the lovely city of Lisbon, at UXLx, to facilitate a 3h version of my “Accessibility for Designers” workshop. Great audience, incredible conference. I also loved the city, just be careful with the cobblestones!
• In October and November, I facilitated 2 sessions of my “Accessibility for Designers” workshop. One was in person, in Antwerp during Design & UX smashing conference. The other session was remotely, over 4 days in November. Both were quite nice, people were super engaged. It’s nice to see more and more designers interested in accessibility!
• In October (actually, the day of my birthday,) I co-facilitate a workshop at ParisWeb : Entretiens utilisateurs : identifiez les améliorations clés pour votre site ou service
• In November, at Wey Wey Web  I facilitated my Designing adaptive reusable components & pages workshop.

And for 2024? Well, I’ve already scheduled a workshop for January. Want to explore potential missuses of your product in order to mitigate the risks? I’m facilitating my “What could go wrong with your product” workshop, on January 16, 2024, online, at 6:30 PM CET. This workshop will teach you a method, that you can then re-use with your teams and colleagues, to anticipate, and hopefully prevent misuse of your products. And, you will get my Miro board framework, to reuse for your own projects.

Video and online panels

I’ve explored a little bit the video format, recorded my own, and did a couple of panels:

• In February, I participated in Scaling accessibility through design systems. It’s an online panel where experts, including accessibility advocate and design leader Geri Reid, renowned engineer Lauren Beatty, and UX and me, shared their insights and experiences on effectively incorporating and scaling a11y with design systems.
• In May, I was invited to talk about new cool things coming to CSS at the Google I/O Tech Discussion with Google Developer Advocates and Experts
• In September, I collaborated with Penpot to bring you a 1h introduction on how and where designers can have the biggest impact on Accessibility within a product. I also created a template that you can find in the library, to help you document accessibility, with ready to use documentation components.

New articles and updates on the blog

This blog also grew a little this year. Here’s what happened, in case you missed it:

• My Expert Guide to User Interviews: I wrote a whole guide full of tips and technique to help you get better at user interviews, from creating the question guide to facilitating those.
• Accessibility for designer: where do I start? I share a lot of content around accessibility on social media, and get often asked, by designers “where do we start”. So, I put together a giant list of links (yeah, if you know me, you know I love those). Behold, articles, resources, checklists, tools, plugins, and books to design accessible products!
• Designing for Accessibility: Creating Inclusive and User-Centric Products. Panel Notes with Léonie Watson and Rakesh Paladugula
• Discover Cognitive Biases: 60+ Cards and a Workshop an article that explains why and how we built our cognitive bias cards, where to find them and how to use them
• I’ve made a huge update of my article A Designer’s Guide to Documenting Accessibility & User Interactions that reflects all the modifications I brought to this talk in 2023
• I’ve updated my article on color accessibility tools to include a selection of 3 Figma plugins that could help you
• 10+ Resources to Find UX Methods, Tools and Activities was updated with more resources (twice actually)

And, I wrote a 2 parts article for Condens on biases in user research in areas that don’t get enough attention (the biases, not the articles): Part 1 focuses on biases with note-taking and data analysis. Part 2 is coming soon.

For the French blog

• I’ve translated my cognitive biases cards to French and the article that goes with it: Découvrir les biais cognitifs : 60+ cartes et un atelier
• I’ve also translated my article on user interviews to French: Le guide expert pour réussir ses entretiens utilisateurs.

Last but not least, I’ve changed my newsletter tool from Sendfox to Emailoctopus. To make my life easier (and also because a lot of people subscribed to both languages), everyone will get the English newsletter. And, if you’ve subscribed to the French blog, you also get the French news. But, I’ll be honest: I have no time, or energy to write French content or translate to French those days.

Podcasts

I still very much enjoy the podcast format. It’s a nice way to chat about different topics I’m interested in. So, here are the ones I recorded in 2023 (again, if you want to invite me to your podcast, reach out!):

• In May, I was invited on UX Career with Kirill V. I talked about the pros and cons of designing for enterprise, experimenting with AI tools and their shortcomings and how to tap into the hidden job market.
• In June, I talk in French about cognitive biases: Design et préjugés : concevoir avec ses biais cognitifs
• In June, I was invited to The Product Design Insights by Sarah Dabin to talk, in French, about my job: episode 1, episode 2, episode 3 et episode 4.  You can also find them on Apple Podcast
• In October, Myriam Jack and I did another episode of our now traditional 2023 Halloween Spooktacular. This time, we tackle the topic of spooky FAQs
• In December, I was invited by Laurent NAUDIER to talk, in French, about creativity in his podcast Réserve Créative.
• In December I was also invited by Joe Welinske, to the Digital Accessibility podcast, and I talked about being attentive to accessibility throughout design.

Collaborative articles

I also participated in a couple of collaborative articles. Meaning, I either helped writing them, or I was interviewed, and they kept my words and included those in the article.

• Accessibility and Design Systems: The Deep-Dive Q&A. Following-up on our live panel, our experts are back to answer the top questions on accessibility and design systems in this deep-dive Q&A.
• September 2023 I was interviewed to talk about AI in a series of articles: Episode 1: Is the rise of AI use a benefit or a detriment to UX research? , Episode 2: What would be the one aspect of UX research that is best compatible with using AI?,  Episode 3: Can UX researchers remain market viable if they don’t choose to adopt AI?, Episode 4: Thoughts on AI generated responses / AI based users  and Episode 5: Results of the AI in UX research survey

And for the French fun:

• I’ve been reading and wrote the preface of Geoffrey Crofte’s new book “Formulaire Web – Les erreurs à éviter qui vous coûtent cher“. It’s a very nice book that will help you design better forms, from the HTML part to the whole user experience, including how to treat the data in your company. There should be an English version available at some point.
• Les bonnes pratiques des développeurs rejaillissent sur l’accessibilité: I was interviewed by Digital Accessibility Luxembourg to talk about the importance of building accessible products from the start, the need for more training, and the snake oil I start to see more and more around that topic on social media.:

My work

So, that was all about my content creator activity, blog and author. Let’s talk about my work. I’m still an employee, working 4 days a week as a UX research and designer for Maltem consulting.
In 2023, I was in a long time missing for the European Investment Bank. My current project finished end of the year. It’s been quite nice. I was UX team of one, and I had full autonomy on user research. I worked with a team of backend and React developers, and we built our own design system, to migrate an old interface to a brand new one. We also did a lot of work on the accessibility of the components that I’m very proud of.
In 2024, I’ll still be there, but, I’m starting to work on a new big project. I will work within the constraint of a corporate package they bought. This will be, quite a change. I’m curious to see how it will impact user experience, and my work. It won’t impact user research much, if anything, I will do more of it to define exactly what people need in this new tool. But, the UI part will be constraints within that framework. I also expect more strategic work, and to be involved in some change management, maybe. I’m very curious to see where this will bring me.