What a Usability Conference Taught Me About Being Human in the Age of AI.
To WUC
I came here expecting to learn about usability. I’m leaving with something much bigger: new ideas, unexpected friendships, and a renewed hope in what it means to be human in the age of AI.
Thank you for reminding me that the future is still about people.
____
One of the first things you see when you walk into the World Usability Congress is a life-size Pegasus.
It stands near the entrance, unexpected and slightly magical, welcoming hundreds of people from around the world. Just beyond it, the practical part of the experience begins. Alphabetized registration stations quietly direct people. Find the first letter of your first name, find your line, pick up your badge. No complicated instructions. No one directing traffic. The environment has already done most of the explaining.
As a designer, I can't help but notice things like that.
Before anyone has stepped onto a stage to talk about usability, you are already experiencing it.
Beside registration is a huge photo backdrop where people pause for their first pictures. Some arrive alone, pulling suitcases behind them. Others walk in together. Every so often, someone spots a familiar face across the room, and suddenly there is a hug, a laugh, or the kind of greeting that says these two people haven't seen each other in a long time.
Beyond that, the long escalators carry everyone upstairs, where the talks, workshops, and masterclasses are waiting.
On the other side of the escalator is a table covered with ribbons for attendees to attach to their badges. There are so many of them, with words and phrases like BOLD, 100% HUMAN, and THE POWER OF THE PEOPLE, BADASS…. Some are funny, some are clever, and some almost feel like little messages about who you are or what you believe.
I thought they were so cool, and some of them were so funny.
But what I loved even more was watching which ones people chose.
It seems like such a small thing, picking a ribbon and attaching it to the bottom of a conference badge, but you can actually learn a little about someone from the ribbon they pick. Some people go straight for something funny. Others choose something bold. Some choose words that feel almost like a statement.
You can tell a little about someone's mindset before you've even spoken with them.
In a room filled with hundreds of people wearing essentially the same conference badge, those little ribbons let everyone add a tiny piece of themselves.
But standing behind the check-in desk, I noticed something else.
The names.
Many people were coming through, and some names were long enough that I would look at them and quietly hope I could pronounce them correctly. People came from Australia, India, Thailand, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, and places I'm certainly forgetting.
And I loved that.
Because every unfamiliar name was a tiny reminder that the person standing in front of me had a story that began somewhere completely different from mine. They had traveled from another city, another country, sometimes another continent. They spoke different languages, worked in different disciplines, and carried experiences and perspectives I knew nothing about.
Yet somehow, for these few days, all of our paths had led to this one building.
I think that's when WUC started to feel different to me. The people standing beside me
While I was watching all of those people arrive, I was also spending hours beside a small group of people checking them in with me.
Some of us hadn't known one another before WUC. We came from different places, different backgrounds and different experiences, and at first we were simply people standing beside one another trying to learn the rhythm of check-in: finding names, handing over badges, answering questions and making sure the next person knew where to go. Then you spend hours together.
And something happens.
Between waves of people arriving, you start talking. Someone tells a story. Someone makes everyone laugh. When the lines suddenly get busy, everyone jumps in. When things slow down again, the conversations pick up almost exactly where they left off.
Slowly, you learn where someone is from, what they do, what brought them here, and little pieces of their lives that have absolutely nothing to do with usability.
You learn the person, not just the name on their badge.
And somewhere along the way, you stop feeling like strangers. That became one of WUC's most unexpected gifts for me. We talk so much about networking at conferences. Who should you meet? Who should you introduce yourself to? Which connections might be valuable?
But this didn't feel like networking.
It felt like getting to know people.
There was no carefully planned introduction and no reason any of us needed to connect. We simply happened to be standing beside one another for long enough to become curious about each other.
There were jokes, tired moments, and small acts of kindness that probably wouldn't mean much to anyone watching from the outside. But those are often the things that stay with you.
I came to WUC expecting to learn from the people standing on stages. I didn't expect to learn so much from the people standing beside me.
Once I started noticing how much was happening between people at check-in, I began seeing it everywhere else, too. Because some of the most meaningful parts of WUC weren't happening when someone was speaking.
They were happening in the spaces between.
What happens between the talks
Of course, incredible speakers are here. There are workshops, masterclasses, research, new ideas, and plenty of moments when you reach for your phone or notebook because someone has said something you don't want to forget.
But the learning doesn't stay inside those rooms. It follows people out.
A question that begins during a session continues in the hallway. Two people who have never met start talking over coffee. Someone describes a problem they're trying to solve, and another person from another part of the world says, “We're dealing with exactly the same thing.”
Sometimes someone tells you how they approached a problem, and suddenly you see your own work differently. Those conversations made me think about something I have believed for a long time.
If I share enough of what I know, maybe something I have learned can help someone else move forward.
It doesn't have to be profound.
Sometimes the most useful thing you can give someone is a mistake you've already made. Or something you tried that worked. Or something that absolutely didn't. Maybe it's simply a different way of looking at a problem that helps another person see their own problem differently.
Then they take that little piece, combine it with everything they already know and everything they've experienced, and make something new from it. Maybe someday they pass that along to someone else.
That's the beautiful thing about knowledge.
It moves.
And when we're generous with it, it grows.
Standing in the middle of this international community made that feel much less theoretical to me. Someone here has spent years thinking about a problem I've barely begun to understand. Someone else has lived through an experience I never will. Someone sees the world through a cultural perspective completely different from mine.
None of us arrived knowing everything. But together, there is an extraordinary amount we can teach one another. And as I watched people share so openly, I began wondering about something else. What creates a place where people actually want to do that?
Because communities like this don't simply appear. Someone has to believe they are worth creating.
The things people don't have to say
Before WUC drew hundreds of attendees from around the world, before the international speakers, workshops, and masterclasses, someone had to believe it was worth bringing these people together.
That person is Johannes Robier, the founder of the World Usability Congress.
Over these few days, I had the chance to see a little of the person behind the conference. What struck me most wasn't something he said on a stage or something written in the program.
It was the people around him. You begin noticing the relationships. There are people who have known him for years, including some who supported him in the early days, when WUC was much closer to an idea than the international event it is today.
And years later, they're still here.
You can see their history without anyone explaining it. There is an ease in the way they talk to one another, tease one another, and step in for one another. There is loyalty there. Friendship. The kind of familiarity that only comes from having gone through things together.
I found myself watching those relationships because they told me something no introduction ever could. We spend a lot of time telling people what we value. Companies put values on walls. Designers create principles. Leaders talk about culture. We all have words for the things we want people to believe about us. But eventually, people learn what we value by watching what we do. I saw that in such a simple way one evening.
After a long day at WUC, we went to dinner at a restaurant tucked into the mountains. Outside, the view stretched across the landscape. Inside, everything felt warm and cozy. After a full day, people finally slowed down, sitting at tables, eating, talking, and laughing.
At some point, I noticed Hannes moving around the room.
He went from table to table, greeting people and checking in with them. When he stopped beside someone seated, he didn't stand over them. He bent down until he was at their eye level. Then he stayed there. He talked. He listened. He joked with them. They laughed together. After a while, he moved to another table and did it again.
There was nothing dramatic about it. That's probably why I couldn't stop watching. No one was asking him to do it. There wasn't a camera waiting. It wasn't part of the program.
It was simply how he was treating people.
And sitting there in a restaurant in the Austrian mountains, at a conference dedicated to usability and human-centered design, I realized that one of the clearest examples of human-centeredness I had seen all week wasn't on a presentation slide.
It was right there in front of me. One person making another person feel seen. Maybe that's the part we sometimes make too complicated.
We have methodologies and frameworks for human-centered design. We conduct research. We create personas, journey maps, principles, and processes to help us understand people.
All of those things matter. But perhaps human-centeredness begins somewhere much simpler.
With noticing someone.
With listening.
With being curious about another person's experience.
With meeting people where they are, sometimes quite literally.
And with understanding that what we say we value matters far less than how people experience us.
The more I thought about it, the more the entire conference began to look different to me. The registration system helping someone find their way was usability.
Trying to pronounce someone's name correctly was respect.
The people beside me at check-in, strangers only days before, laughing and getting to know one another, were connection.
A conversation between two people from different parts of the world was learning.
And someone bending down beside a table to look another person in the eye was human-centeredness.
Different moments.
Same underlying idea.
People matter.
Strangely, that realization began to connect to something else I was hearing everywhere at WUC.
AI. The more we talked about AI, the more I thought about people
Of course AI was everywhere.
How could it not be?
It is changing the tools we use, the way we work, the speed at which we can create, and increasingly the way people experience the products and services we design.
I expected to hear a lot about what AI can do. What I didn't expect was how often those conversations would bring me back to what humans still need to do.
AI can make us incredibly efficient. It can analyze enormous amounts of information, automate tasks that used to take hours, generate ideas, and move us from a blank page to something tangible faster than many of us imagined just a few years ago.
That's extraordinary.
But throughout different talks and conversations, one thought kept following me:
Efficiency doesn't automatically mean effectiveness. And effectiveness doesn't automatically mean value.
We can create something faster than ever and still create the wrong thing. We can receive an answer in seconds and still need to ask whether it is correct. We can automate a process beautifully and still need someone to question whether it was a process worth automating in the first place.
AI can give us information. But someone still has to understand the context.
Someone has to cross-check it, question it, recognize when something doesn't make sense, and bring experience to the decision. Someone has to understand the person on the other side of what we're creating. And someone still has to ask one of the most important questions in usability:
Does this actually help someone? That someone is still us.
The more I listened, the more I started wondering whether we have been asking the wrong question about AI. Maybe the question isn't simply, What will AI be able to do? Maybe another question is becoming equally important:
Who do we need to become as humans when it can?
And then, during one of the talks, Everton Lewis said something that stopped me.
“The future doesn't need you to become something less. It needs you to become more fully what you already are.”
That line stayed with me.
Maybe because it put words around something I had already been experiencing throughout WUC.
I thought about the people beside me at check-in who had been strangers only a few days earlier. I thought about conversations that continued in hallways long after the talks ended. I thought about people openly sharing what they had learned because maybe it could help someone else move forward. I thought about Hannes's longtime friends still standing beside him years after they had supported an idea that was only beginning.
And I thought about that dinner in the mountains, watching him bend down beside a table so he could look someone in the eye.
None of those moments had anything to do with being faster than a machine.
They were about connection. Curiosity. Loyalty. Generosity. Judgment. Empathy. Care.
And suddenly Everton's words meant something more to me.
So much of the conversation about AI focuses on what we might lose. What will be automated? Which skills will become less important? Which jobs will change? How are we supposed to keep up with technology that can accomplish in seconds what once took us hours?
Those are real questions.
But sitting at WUC, surrounded by people who had traveled from all over the world to learn from one another, I found myself asking a different one.
What if AI doesn't make our humanity less valuable? What if it makes it more valuable?
And for all the uncertainty surrounding AI, that thought gave me something I hadn't expected to find here.
Hope.
Users are people
There is something almost perfect about having that realization at the World Usability Congress.
Our profession spends an enormous amount of time talking about “users.” We study user needs and behaviors. We create personas and journey maps. We identify pain points, analyze data, and build frameworks designed to help us understand the people who will eventually experience what we create.
All of that work matters enormously.
But after watching hundreds of people arrive from around the world, the word user started feeling strangely small.
Because users are people.
They are the person standing in front of you whose name you want to pronounce correctly.
They grew up somewhere completely different from you and see the same problem through a lens you may never have considered. They are someone trying to find where they need to go.
Someone asking a question after a talk.
Someone sharing something they learned because they think it might help another person.
Someone sitting at a table while another person bends down to meet them at eye level.
They have histories, fears, ambitions, abilities, limitations, and experiences we will never completely capture in a persona, a data set, or an AI model.
And perhaps that's why bringing people together still matters so much.
We learn from one another things that don't fit neatly into frameworks or prompts.
Sometimes understanding begins with simply being curious enough to listen.
What I will remember
When I think back on WUC, I’ll remember the talks and the ideas that will find their way into my work. But I think I’ll remember the people more.
I’ll remember walking past the Pegasus as people arrived from around the world. The strangers beside me at check-in who didn’t feel like strangers by the time we said goodbye. The conversations that continued after sessions ended, and people sharing what they knew simply because it might help someone else.
And I’ll remember a restaurant in the mountains, filled with laughter, watching Hannes bend down beside a table just so he could look someone in the eye.
These weren’t big moments. But together, they became WUC's story for me. I came here thinking about usability. I left thinking about humanity.
At a time when we’re asking what AI might take away from us, WUC reminded me of what only people can bring: curiosity, empathy, generosity, friendship, and the desire to understand one another.
Everton said it beautifully:
“The future doesn't need you to become something less. It needs you to become more fully what you already are.”
Maybe the AI era doesn’t need us to become less human.
Maybe it’s our opportunity to become more human than ever.
Comments