Amanda Gelb said something recently that we haven't been able to stop thinking about
“What defines your work isn’t just what you build - it’s the perspective you bring to every decision behind it.”
That one landed differently.
Because if you’re honest with yourself, the gap between the designer you are and the designer you want to be isn’t a skills gap. It’s not a tools gap. It’s not even an experience gap.
It’s a clarity gap.
Clarity about what you actually stand for. Clarity about why you make the calls you make. Clarity that holds up under pressure - when the deadline moves, when the stakeholder pushes back, when the team is exhausted and someone has to be the person who says this isn’t right for the user.
Amanda calls it aligning your principles with your practice. And she’s right that most of us were never taught how to do that. We were taught Figma. We were taught research methods. We were taught how to present to a room.
Nobody taught us how to stay human when everything around us is asking us not to be.
That’s what Amanda is bringing to UXCON26. And she’s one of nine speakers doing exactly that.
October 8th. Silver Spring Civic Center, MD. One day.
Here is who else is in the room with you:
Don Norman the man who literally invented the term “user experience” - is delivering the keynote and taking live questions from the room. Alongside him, designers and leaders from Netflix, The New York Times, Target, and more. People doing serious work at the organizations whose products you use every single day.
Here’s the thing nobody says out loud about conferences.
The talk you remember isn’t always the keynote. Sometimes it’s the conversation at the coffee station where someone says exactly the thing you needed to hear. Sometimes it’s realising the person next to you has been wrestling with the same problem for six months.
That only happens when the right people are in the room.
Fun Fact: 80% of roles are filled before they are ever posted. Not through job boards. Through conversations exactly like the ones that happen at UXCON - between practitioners, leaders, and decision-makers from organizations like Harvard, IBM, Adobe, Johns Hopkins, Lockheed Martin, The Met, NIH, and Vanguard.
One day in that room compounds for years.
Amanda said it better than we ever could.
Your work is defined by the perspective you bring to every decision behind it.
October 8th is a decision.
Need more info?
Questions? info@uxconference.org
