5 takeaways from UX Brighton 2022

Now in it’s 10th year, UX Brighton conference was held at the Brighton Dome on Friday 4th November 2022. The theme this year was UX and Product Management. For more information and tickets for next years conference, check them out at https://uxbri.org/

I always enjoy UX Brighton. I can’t remember exactly how many years I’ve attended now, but its probably about five (and this is still only half the total time the conference has been running).

The talks will be available to watch post the event (keep an eye on the landing page) so it doesn’t make sense for me to recap the event as a whole here. Rather, this felt like a good opportunity for a listicle.

These are my five main takeaways from the conference. Several of our team attended this year and from the short conversations we’ve had since, I know already that we each experienced the talks slightly differently, so I’ll happily flag these as personal to me and not necessarily universal (or even the most poignant). Your milage may differ.

1. There is a tension between Product and Everything Else

The theme of this years conference was the intersection between Product and UX. Several of the talks revealed how product-thinking is creating tension in many organisations.

• “The agency trap” as Janna Bastow described it, rallying product companies to avoid being sucked into agency work which Janna considered to be inherently lower value (yikes!)

Agencies don’t change the world, product companies do
— Janna Bastow

• The tensions between Product and sales— what you can sell to the market vs what we would rather build
• Tensions between Product Owners/Managers and other disciplines: delivery, UX, design, sales, development… the implication that some of these are less important to the overal direction of a company than others (Kate Flood argued delivery is purely a support function, for example). Some deserve a seat at ‘the table’ and others less so

I was pleased to hear Matt LeMay argue from the headline slot that we should all worry a bit less about job titles and focus on what unites us:

Most questions of role clarity are actually questions of goal clarity
– Matt LeMay (my emphasis)

2. I felt confidence in our cross-functional team approach

Louise Bloom argued passionately for developing T-shaped skills over creating our own tiny little specialist empires.

Side note: I greatly regret not attempting a round of applause for Louise when she revealed she had answered the call and returned to her role as a physiotherapist in the NHS during the worst waves of covid. I hesitated and the moment passed, which made me sad. We all need a reminder that sometimes there are more important things in our society than pixels.

Matt LeMay made a similar point:

High performing cross functional teams will self organise around goals
– Matt LeMay

For me this is a repudiation of the stool metaphor for a product team as presented by Kate Flood:

Cross-functional, yes, but fundamentally separate.

At WAS we put together teams that mix skillsets (or ‘fighting styles’ as I like to think of them) and have everyone work in a common framework cycling Problems, Goals, Ideas and Tests.

This works (and of course I would argue, works better) provided the teams are small enough to be self-organising.

I recall a slide (though I can’t recall from-which talk to my annoyance) depicting a team of about 20 gathering around a post-it note wall. This team would obviously not be able to self-organise. Physical space, if nothing else, being the limiting factor!

Update: It was a later slide from Kate Flood’s deck, following the stool above.

3. Cranes, not skyhooks

Jonty Sharples spoke about the difference between confidence and arrogance in product design.

He argued against the ‘move fast and break things’ approach popularised by Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook and called for a more considered approach, valuing experience over self-belief.

Confidence is the long way round, arrogance is easy, the short route to done.
– Jonty Sharples

I am fully on board with this: in all aspects we need our ideas to be cranes, not skyhooks: Cranes have a foundation — we can see they are connected to the earth. Skyhooks just appear from the heavens.

Where I might differ is the idea we are completely hostage to time, or the Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours. There are tricks, or hueristics we can use to build our confidence, balancing the trade-offs (another conference theme) between risk and discovery.

Triangulation of evidence is one of these. The ProductSweet confidence score is another. Or the axiom ‘Good enough is good enough.’

It’s also ok to ‘steal’ tools, parts, existing ideas and build on them. Not everything needs to be wholly bespoke or brand new. We can stand on the shoulders of giants.

Because as Jonty argued, people aren’t really interested in parts. They’re interested in the whole, the context, the value.

4. The concept of strategy is not well understood

Alison Rawlings of Bunnyfoot focussed her talk on the big question of ‘What is strategy anyway?’

Maybe it was the difficult post-lunch slot, but I felt the framework offered was unfortunately overcomplicated.

I would simplify as: start with the outcome you want to achieve. Your strategy is how you get from here to there.

There are caveats: your strategy has to be one option among others. And the other options can’t be stupid.

In other words, you have to make an active choice of what you will do and what you don’t do between potentially good options, accepting and managing the trade-offs (that theme again, with thanks to Lucy Spense’s excellent talk).

(To make things political and take a recent example: Rishi Sunak should get no ‘strategy points’ for the UK furlough scheme if nobody would realistically consider the alternative as a viable option.)

Tactics, are the steps you take to achieve the strategy. The toolkit. They can change and adapt to the situation but should always be in service of the strategy and nearing you to your desired outcome.

5. It baffles me where the idea that Amazon are a customer focussed company has come from

I first came across this view in The Everything Store by Brad Stone and was a major subject of Jonathan Smare’s talk.

Where has this idea that Amazon are a customer-first company come from? It must be PR. Because I don’t see it reflected in their UX.

Yes, they obsess over customers, but it’s not for the benefit of customers. It’s purely in service of Amazon’s bottom line.

Amazon’s ecommerce UX is dreadful, a mess of terrible IA and dark patterns.

As far as Amazon are a customer-first company, it is recognising that if something is cheap, people will forgive a bad experience. (An experience can be bad as long as it is at least equivalently cheap. I’m also looking at you, GoDaddy.)

Jonathan went on to focus on Amazon’s “fail fast and at low cost” strategy. This, we do see. But, is fundamentally in tension with the previous point.

Take the Firephone. It failed fast, because it was a bad phone.

Later, Jonathan quoted Bezos on the birth of AWS:

We need to have our IT keep up with our businesses

Again, the customer is not mentioned. Odd for a supposedly customer obsessed company.

I can’t be alone in this view, or in spotting the inherent contradictions.

One of the reasons I like UX Brighton is it always forces me to have an opinion. The talks don’t just wash over us: we can agree or disagree with any one talk or point and still come out learning.

I look forward to next year.