Our learnings and recap from the UXcamp Europe 22

tl;dr: We loved UXcamp Europe 22 and are thankful for the amazing crew that organized it and all the participants who made this weekend unforgettable! We are proud of sponsoring such an amazing event! Looking forward to #uxce23 ??

UXcamp Europe is the largest unconference for UX professionals in Europe and this year it took place for the 13th time since inception. After two years of remote camping, the unconference finally returned to being in person. Almost 400 participants from all over the world came together for a weekend of inspiration, networking and lots of fun.

What is a barcamp and why do we love this format??

A barcamp, also known as “open space” or “unconference” , is a conference with a participant-driven format. That means that the entire event depends on the contributions of the participants. Everyone gets the chance to pitch their ideas within 30 seconds. All the participants can vote on the ideas with raised hands and, depending on the participants’ interest, a room size is allocated to accommodate the discussion.? We love the inclusive way where anybody can give a talk, moderate a discussion or organize a workshop. On top of that, the content of the sessions often goes deeper than in standard conferences. Have we already mentioned that the UXcamp Europe is free for the participants?

All in all: UXcamp Europe 22

• “Let's do UX Camp aaa-gai-haiiin” - The weekend definitely left us with a new earworm! Thank you Holger Egger for all your musical skills. The UXcamp actually started like a real camp with music and with a dedicated song that broke the ice from the very beginning.
• UX Professionals from 15 countries: Participants from as far as South Korea, Argentina, Brazil, USA, etc … a truly humbling feeling to have all these folks coming to Berlin for UXcamp Europe.
• Awesome atmosphere: The UXcamp team made sure from the very beginning that the event was an entire experience itself. Especially after 2 years of remote barcamp, it felt great to have this big reunion in Berlin again. We loved the discussions, the people, how simple everything was. Everyone respected one another, wearing masks the whole time despite the warm weather.

Topics & key takeaways

Alongside the usual, more or less self ironic, navel gazing – “ah we’re just a bunch of cake decorators” (Eric Reiss), wait no, we’re “post-it pushers” (Benno L?wenberg) –, there were a lot of talks and discussions around things that go explicitly beyond UX practice in the narrow sense, really bringing out human-centeredness in the wholesome sense. Also on a very positive note, mental health on the job and beyond, and the topic of inclusion were present in a lot of sessions.?

In that spirit, here are a couple of focus topics we picked during the 2 days:

Next level empathy

Learning to speak ?clientish“ better

• General feeling: a lot of discussion points went in the direction of how we should apply our core capability of empathy, not only to users (of products) but also to the stakeholders & managers (of products). Meaning: to understand better their way of seeing things as a systemic necessity; embracing that and helping them with their ways of decision making.?
• Although stakeholder mapping and management is far from new, we felt there was a sense of urgency to it, in terms of depth and just how many talks addressed the topic.
• In effect: ideas, principles, frameworks and criteria of working in smaller steps, as well as being more stakeholder oriented, practically and mindset-wise, were everywhere at UXcamp Europe (Nikolaus Stemmer) (Slides).
• The term "strategy" often intimidates clients and teams - wrongly! Strategy is not a "supreme discipline". Seen in the right light, strategy work is surprisingly simple and plausible: it helps us to take actions and decisions more quickly and purposefully. And it shows its value in how we deal with the gaps between plan and implementation. (Hias Wrba) (Slides)

Stop whining, start shining

What we’re capable of doing beyond the navel gazing and self deprecation?

• How can we better deal with, and get beyond, the typical roles of the persecutor (“They don't get UX!”), victim (“UX is not valued here”) and rescuers (“UX/We’re gonna solve all problems for everyone”) in ux-driven organizations (Hias Wrba)?
• “Sh*t we should stop saying” Rupert Platz shared his thoughts on how UX designers can avoid intense swings between hubris / overconfidence and frustration / imposter syndrome.?His claim: Designer overconfidence leads to designer depression. (Rupert Platz) (Slides)
• The energetic and entertaining UX Charlatans talk by Martina Mitz shone a light on the unfortunate lack of true skills and expertise in our young and emerging field, and introduced some patterns which help to spot people faking it.?

Self respect

Mental Health, burnout, depression - how to tell and avoid?

• Not surprisingly, there were many talks on what Corona has done to us these past 2,5 years: How do we recognize signs of exhaustion, burn out and depression in other people and ourselves?
• There was more than one personal account of senior UX professionals looking back on their path, what they have learned, advice they can give … in some cases these were surprisingly open - Clive Lavery gave a really great, open and bold talk on his own experiences.
• We learned that it is important to be aware of yourself, your colleagues and the people in your organizations. Learn to identify warning signs and look out for each other.

“Same same but different”?

Intercultural communications, inclusion, sustainability?

• The topics of equality, fairness and global concern are definitely here to stay and have established themselves as common topics in UX/product conferences over the past few years.?
• A very special person in this respect: 14 year old activist Krish Ghosh from Berlin with the issue of soil depletion – a brave move for such a young guy to come on center stage and tell us, as possible industry influencers and multiplicators, about the phenomenon of the planet’s soil turning into sand on a massive scale and what that means for the world’s need for food in the future.

“How do we want to work?”?

New Work, Reinventing Organizations, What really matters

• The overflow in job offers leads to people thinking more and more about things that actually matter to them before taking a job.
• Organizational models like Holacracy and Sociocracy are becoming more and more important compared to traditional incentives, like salaries and flexible working hours.
• There were case studies of Bitgrip (Henning Grote) and UX&I (Manuel Stieglitz-Hartmann & Christian Korff) about their circle organizations and human-centered way of working, as well as workshops about how we actually want our UX jobs to be (Birgit Maier, Ellen Sigloch). There was also a workshop for a (remote) work manifesto encouraging people to think about new hybrid work models by IxDA Berlin (Audrey Liehn, Andre Jay Meissner).

?… plus tons of practical stuff

• From design ops to handing over large-scale projects to other teams, from Kitsch to Figma, Progressive Web Apps to voice AI, UX quizzes/ trivia to the usability heuristics of Pokemon go and a great new ice breaker game for creative workshops “Don’t/Do This” - where else do you find such an array of things to talk & think about? These are also the other reasons that we love these UX unconferences …
• Fewer project/client case studies - which we personally don’t miss too much

UXcamp Europe 22 was a blast! Thank you everyone for making it happen. We am sure we are all singing the UXcamp song that is still in our heads ??

Will we see you next year as well??

PS: You can find more pictures form UXcamp Europe 22 on our website ??https://www.uxi.de/events/uxcamp-europe-22