Title
Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever?
Speaker(s)
Scott Jenson
Date and time
2025-10-24T13:10:00Z
Session type
Talk (45 minutes)
Abstract
This talk focuses on that evil little term “UX/UI,” which is responsible for so much confusion and tension in open-source projects. Not only does it unnecessarily pit programmers against designers, but it also limits our vision of what we could be doing. I’ll give examples of how focusing on UX, instead of UI, frees us to think bigger. This is especially true for the desktop, where the user experience has so much potential to grow well beyond its current interaction models. The desktop UX is certainly not dead, and this talk will suggest some future directions we could take.
Speaker(s) bio
Scott has been a leader in UX design and strategic planning for over 35 years. He was the first member of Apple’s Human Interface group in the late '80s and has since held key roles at major tech companies. He served as director of product design for Symbian in London, managed Mobile UX design at Google, and was creative director at frog design in San Francisco. He returned to Google to do UX research for Android and is now a UX strategist in the open-source community for Mastodon and Home Assistant.
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