UX Camp Europe 2021 | Switching Sides

Events

This year’s UXcamp Europe was a special experience. Instead of standing in a Berlin yard with like-minded people during the session breaks, I found myself doing a remote joint session with my dear colleague Kai Frederik Dellinger.

The idea for this talk emerged from a stream of messages exchanged between Kai and me for over a year (including a fair amount of vinyl nerdism). We both had taken the plunge moving from an agency to a large corporation. We thought it might be fun sharing our experience with the UX community. So after some virtual mindmapping sessions between Hanover and Hong Kong, we were ready to go.

We came up with six observations we made along our way. Some of them might seem obvious at first glance, but we realized quickly that our job changes brought a whole new perspective on these topics.

During our preparation, we stumbled upon some nicely fitting tweets by fellow UXers who said it better than we could have done. So we took them as a starting point for our discussion.

Scott Berkun on design-centricity:

Kim Goodwin on the influencers of design decisions:

Pavel Samsonov on design ownership:

The essence of our discussion: experiencing both sides first hand made us better UX professionals. Being immersed in so many different perspectives — from IT, marketing, sales and legal – makes you humble and lets you better connect the dots to create great experiences. That does not mean the outside look is less important, but the combination of internal and external realities is key.

All in all, this event was a great opportunity to catch up with Kai and to share our experience with the UX community. Really looking forward to standing in a Berlin yard again with some like-minded people — in 2022 hopefully.

UX Camp Europe 2021

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