263rd UX Vienna Evening Meetup: Subtle UX & PEDRO

Tuesday, 10th of November 2026, 7:00 pm (FREQUENTIS AG)
Please register at meetup.com/UXvienna.

We’re excited to invite you to the next UX Vienna Evening Meetup – an evening of inspiring talks, interesting perspectives and community exchange.

UX Vienna Evening Meetups take place on the second Tuesday of every month. Join us in November at FREQUENTIS for two talks exploring different sides of User Experience: designing for safety-critical environments and making User-Centered Design accessible through play.

From interfaces where people need to make critical decisions with confidence to a board game that helps interdisciplinary teams understand UCD, this evening is all about putting people at the center of what we design.

Talk 1
UX in Places Where Nobody Notices It
Volker Grantz | User Experience Consultant, FREQUENTIS AG

Not all UX is visible, and not all UX is about making things look good.
In safety-critical environments, the focus shifts to helping people feel safe, stay in control, and make the right decisions when it matters most.
Through real incidents and practical examples, Volker Grantz explores what happens when things don’t go as expected. The talk will uncover lessons from situations where user experience can have serious consequences and share practical takeaways — including things you should never do when designing for safety-critical environments.

Talk 2
PEDRO — A Playful Approach to Promote User-Centered Design in Interdisciplinary Project Teams
Lena Baumgartner | Junior Researcher
Gernot Rottermanner | Researcher
Peter Judmaier | Senior Researcher
USTP – University of Applied Sciences St. Pölten

How can we make User-Centered Design easier to understand, apply, and embrace across interdisciplinary teams? What if we could learn about it by playing a game?
PEDRO is an analogue board game currently in development that introduces the principles and challenges of the User-Centered Design process in a playful and accessible way.
The goal is to build a shared understanding of UCD, encourage its acceptance in interdisciplinary project teams, and strengthen collaboration — all while having fun.
In this session, the team will introduce PEDRO and invite participants to try it out for themselves.

Location
FREQUENTIS AG Innovationsstraße 1, 1100 Vienna
Please enter through the main entrance. You can’t miss it.

UX Vienna Evening Meetups are on the 2nd tuesday of every month — 12 times a year.

Collaboratively we document each UX Vienna Evening Meetup at https://UXvienna.at/ongoing/ – Check out to see what kept us busy and what you might have missed so far.

UX Vienna announcements are available at https://meetup.com/UXvienna. In addition you can follow us on LinkedIn.

We are looking forward to seeing you!

262nd UX Vienna Evening Meetup: UX/UI Design is B#llsht & Beyond Prompt Engineering

Tuesday, 13th of October 2026, 7:00 pm (EBCONT)
Please register at meetup.com/UXvienna.

We’re excited to invite you to the next UX Vienna Evening Meetup – an evening of inspiring talks, interesting perspectives and community exchange.

The talks

UX/UI Design is B#llsht
Why AI doesn’t solve the UX/UI problem but finally makes it visible
Mitch Loewenherz | Freelance Digital Experience Designer

Despite years of experience, many UI designers receive rejections because they supposedly don’t quite fit the profile. At the same time, job postings often ask for everything at once: research, wireframes, UI, accessibility, product thinking, technical skills, and AI.
What is actually expected of designers today? Is it enough to know how to use the right tools, or is it more about understanding problems, making good decisions, and knowing how to make sense of new technologies?
This talk is a plea for clearly defined job titles, understandable requirements, and more differentiation between UX, UI, and the additional changes AI is bringing into the field.

Beyond Prompt Engineering:
Designing for Understanding in Government Communication
Elke Beck | EBCONT

Legal publications can be hard to access for readers — that’s the challenge on evi.gv.at, Austria’s official digital gazette.

Our first approach to solve this was straightforward: develop a good prompt and let AI generate a more readable version of the text. It turned out to be only the first step. Better readability scores didn’t always mean better texts.

This talk walks through our (ongoing) UX design journey — from an AI proof of concept, through information architecture decisions, to research on reading literacy — and what we learned about the difference between readable, usable, and truly understandable content in a government context.

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In Memory of Carina Ulbrich (1987-2026).
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UX Vienna Evening Meetups are on the 2nd tuesday of every month — 12 times a year.

Collaboratively we document each UX Vienna Evening Meetup at https://UXvienna.at/ongoing/ – Check out to see what kept us busy and what you might have missed so far.

UX Vienna announcements are available at https://meetup.com/UXvienna. In addition you can follow us on LinkedIn.

We are looking forward to seeing you!

Only you. Not AI? A cardboard tower at uxcon26

What can I do that AI can’t? You don’t get as far alone on this question as you do together. On the cardboard tower at uxcon26, in the Arkadenhof of the University of Vienna, people posted personal perspectives.

🤝 Built together with Martin Kastler, Thomas Grill, Emanuel Jochum-Zehetner. Thank you Christiane Moser, Johannes Lehner, Kornelia Müller (Hoffmann), Jakob Schnurrer, Max Scheugl for your support!
And thanks to the uxcon organizers Nicole Swoboda and Andreas Ablaßer, and to everyone who left a note.

From the big question to a small one

One question occupied us, as it did many in the UX community in Vienna, Salzburg, Linz and Graz: What is happening to our profession? Will UX be dissolved, taken over, transformed? The UX Community Austria booth at uxcon26 was meant to be the space where this question gets asked. Nobody had to answer it there.

Overview of a Miro board titled “2026 – UX Community Stand – uxcon26”, split by black bars into four columns labeled “Phase 01: Exploration…”, “Phase 02: Define”, “Phase 03: Develop” and “Phase 04: Gemma, gemma”. The first two columns hold numbered idea clusters (“Idee 0” to “Idee 6”) with sketches, sticky notes and green “Fokus” markers. The third column is a text document, and the fourth shows photos.

We turned it into a smaller question that can be answered in one sentence: What can you do that AI can’t?

The concept

Instead of flyers, we built a cardboard tower. Cardboard costs next to nothing and brings its own mock-up aesthetic. At the very top it said “Only you. Not AI?”, and further down came the actual question: “What can you do — that AI can’t?”.

Close-up of “Phase 04: Gemma, gemma” on the Miro board. On the left, a grey sheet marked “DRAFT” shows a sketched cardboard tower topped by the sign “ONLY YOU. NOT AI?”, a stick figure beside it, speech bubbles and red German notes on logo, fire safety, height and stability. On the right, under “Making off”, photos show white cardboard being cut and stencilled letters spelling “ONLY YOU”; a further photo is partly cropped.
How the booth was planned: the Miro board followed the classic design steps – explore, define, develop – and ended with “Gemma, gemma”, Viennese for “let’s go, now!”

Whoever wrote a Post-it and stuck it on the tower got a stamp on their conference badge, just like at a summit, where in Austria you often find a stamp. The tower said so itself: “Reach a summit, get stamped — that’s just how it’s done. Right on your badge.”

A tower of stacked white cardboard boxes, taller than the two people standing behind it, in a historic stone arcade with peach-colored walls.

For me as a UX designer, it was exciting: a manageable project where you first plan the user experience, imagine how it could be, and then experience up close how it plays out.

How it went

People from Vienna, Salzburg, Graz and other parts of Austria strolled by between sessions. They looked, and laughed at some of the Post-its. We chatted and offered: if you have a perspective in mind, write it down.

The notes were serious, funny and sometimes surprisingly personal. Some read “AI can’t pet cats…”, “BE HUMAN. EAT ASS.” and “be a great big sister”. It was an experience to watch people think and then read something private.

Hanging right next to each other: “I HAVE TASTE! AI NOT!” and “MAKE KÄSSPÄTZLE” (a cheesy noodle dish). “KNOWING WHAT WE DON’T KNOW” and “OR SHOULD NOT DO!” read together like a single sentence. And “Enjoy Calligraphy” was, of course, written in calligraphy.

The notes turned into conversations. About “Feel the pain”, someone remarked with a wink that it’s probably not the dream job – feeling pain is no pleasant thing. But that connects to the note “FAILED AND LEARNED FROM IT”: we often learn the hard way – through pain.

One visitor actually liked AI and suggested a second tower: what AI does especially well. I found that right and interesting. There was no second tower, because what AI can do was very present at the conference anyway. Our tower brought in the other perspective.

Where to next?

About 90 notes from people who happened to pass by are not a survey. Asked what only they can do, many wrote about the body, taste, care and responsibility.

Where does all this lead? For me, it’s an exciting time. We enjoy many advantages of AI, and at the same time we have to find out what it can do, what it can’t, and what we can do. Somebody has to set the limits, and somebody has to decide. Design is an important junction for that. It is also where we check how different AI components work together. That takes grounding again and again: checking against reality before building on it.

At uxcon, Meaghan Choi, Design Lead for Claude Code at Anthropic, urged designers in her session to step forward and be active. “Take the lead” was on one of her slides. To me, this is a big challenge, and it lies with all of us. Each of us has to contribute in a fitting way in times of AI so that quality is preserved. Organizations have to give people the space to do so. Sitting back is not an option, neither for individuals nor for organizations. Otherwise products and services get hollowed out by seemingly quick solutions.

Photo of the slide “Take the lead” with Meaghan Choi
Meaghan Choi, Design Lead for Claude Code at Anthropic, in her session on 17 September

What quick solutions lack is written on one of the notes: “Feel the pain”. A language model is trained to fulfill tasks pleasingly and feels no pain from future maintenance. Design is where a brief gets questioned and where it is decided what not to build.

What stays

The humor often lay in the combination of the notes. And it takes many perspectives to find out what we can do and what this new medium can do. That is what I liked most about it.

Gallery

A tower of stacked white cardboard boxes, taller than the two people standing behind it, in a historic stone arcade with peach-colored walls.
The cardboard tower with a sign on top in the same arcade; behind it, two people stand at a high table next to chairs.
A pink conference badge on a table with a round stamp imprint on it, next to a wooden hand stamp and a blue lanyard.
The top of a cardboard box with pens and colorful sticky notes; printed instructions on its side: add your answer or reply to one, then get your badge stamped.
: Looking up at a white sign reading “ONLY YOU. NOT AI?” under a round UX Austria mountain logo, against an arched, painted ceiling.
An arcaded university courtyard with a statue at its center and small groups of people walking, their faces covered by yellow smiley icons; a bronze portrait plaque at the right edge. Fare away: the cardboard tower
A round black table seen from above with a wooden stamp, small booklets and rows of blue notes arranged in an arc.
A long stone arcade with the sticky-note-covered tower in the middle distance, standing tables around it and a few people, their faces covered by smiley icons.
A panel of the tower covered with colorful sticky notes, including “UNDERSTAND AMBIGUITY!”, “TAKE CARE OF LIFE” and “Tell bad jokes on stage”.
A panel with a line drawing of a building and sticky notes such as “get bored”, “LOVE”, “Emotions!” and “BEING THERE FOR FRIENDS & FAMILY”.
A panel with sticky notes reading “Feel the pain”, “BE RESPONSIBLE”, “HUG”, “FEEL PAIN”, “BE A PARENT :)” and “It's FRICTION baby!”.
Close-up from below of a yellow sticky note with “LESS BULLSH#T” handwritten in red marker, against a white ceiling.
The side of a cardboard box covered with sticky notes, including “live a fulfilled life”, “WORK WITH SENSITIVE DATA”, “Understand what's really needed” and “Make a Baby”.
A box side with sticky notes such as “enjoy listening to the rain”, “EARN MONEY”, “BE AWESOME BY ACCIDENT” and “Borshch”.
The tower's main sign “WHAT CAN YOU DO — THAT AI CAN'T?” beside a printed note “Reach a summit, get stamped”, with notes “IRON MY CLOTHES (YET)”, “BREATHE” and “Self doubt”.
Looking up along the tower from its base: printed instructions on a box in the foreground and note-covered boxes rising toward the vaulted ceiling.
A hand holds up a round black stamp; its face shows mirrored lettering (“Summit”, “Renewed”, “Shared”) around a UX Austria logo, with the tower blurred behind.
Looking up at the top of the tower: the sign “ONLY YOU. NOT AI?” above stacked boxes and a board covered with sticky notes, including “HUG”.
A blue sticky note with a round black stamp imprint reading “Shared · Summit · Renewed” and “You (not AI)” around a UX Austria logo.
Close-up of the “ONLY YOU. NOT AI?” sign with the round UX Austria mountain logo above it, against an ornate ceiling.
Taking down the tower: a man in a red hoodie looks toward the table, next to flattened cardboard and stencilled cardboard signs reading “ONLY YOU. NOT AI?”, between two bronze busts in the arcade.
Photos: Wieland Kloimstein

261th UX Vienna Meetup: AI vs. UX/UI & Agentic Ecosystems

Tuesday, 8th of September 2026, 7:00 pm (MAI Digitalberatung)
Please register at meetup.com/UXvienna.

We’re excited to invite you to the next UX Vienna Evening Meetup – an evening of inspiring talks, interesting perspectives and community exchange.

The talks

UX/UI Design is B#llsht
Why AI doesn’t solve the UX/UI problem but finally makes it visible
Mitch Loewenherz | Freelance Digital Experience Designer

Despite years of experience, many UI designers receive rejections because they supposedly don’t quite fit the profile. At the same time, job postings often ask for everything at once: research, wireframes, UI, accessibility, product thinking, technical skills, and AI.
What is actually expected of designers today? Is it enough to know how to use the right tools, or is it more about understanding problems, making good decisions, and knowing how to make sense of new technologies?
This talk is a plea for clearly defined job titles, understandable requirements, and more differentiation between UX, UI, and the additional changes AI is bringing into the field.

From Interfaces to Agentic Ecosystems
How UX changes when AI starts coordinating people, agents and services
Jasmin Dawes | Senior UX designer, AI & Service Design

AI is moving from answering questions to acting across connected services, changing what UX designers need to design. Using a digital identity transition as a practical example, this talk explores how an agent can coordinate multiple independently owned services while keeping users informed and in control. We will connect this simulated multi-agent experience to the emerging A2A ecosystem and the broader transformation of enterprise silos. Finally, using Bridges’ Transition Model, we will explore how UX can help people and organizations move from today’s fragmented systems toward a more human-centered agentic future.

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UX Vienna Evening Meetups are on the 2nd tuesday of every month — 12 times a year.

Collaboratively we document each UX Vienna Evening Meetup at https://UXvienna.at/ongoing/ – Check out to see what kept us busy and what you might have missed so far.

UX Vienna announcements are available at https://meetup.com/UXvienna. In addition you can follow us on LinkedIn.

We are looking forward to seeing you!

260th UX Vienna Meetup: Service Design in the Age of Agentic AI & Interaction Principles for AI Language Systems

Tuesday, 11th of August 2026, 7:00 pm (sclable)
Please register at meetup.com/UXvienna.

We’re excited to invite you to the next UX Vienna Evening Meetup – an evening of inspiring talks, interesting perspectives and community exchange.

The talks

From Journeys to Agency – The New Reality of Service Design in the Age of Agentic AI
Jessica Blank (Service Designer @ sclable)

For decades, Service Design has focused on creating seamless interactions between people and services. But what happens when AI no longer just supports users—but acts on their behalf?
As agentic AI moves from chatbots to autonomous systems, the design challenge fundamentally changes. We are no longer designing interfaces and journeys alone—we are designing intent, agency, and governance. In this talk, we’ll explore how AI agents, multi-agent systems, and autonomous workflows are reshaping organisations, why autonomy without governance creates new risks, and what this means for the future role of Service Design.

Interaction Principles for AI Language Systems
Wieland Kloimstein (UX Designer @ ImmoScout24)

“AI can make mistakes” is a euphemism — a system with no access to the category of truth doesn’t make mistakes, it produces probable output. Three principles that make this behavior addressable, and one killer method to counter it.

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UX Vienna Evening Meetups are on the 2nd tuesday of every month — 12 times a year.

Collaboratively we document each UX Vienna Evening Meetup at https://UXvienna.at/ongoing/ – Check out to see what kept us busy and what you might have missed so far.

UX Vienna announcements are available at https://meetup.com/UXvienna. In addition you can follow us on LinkedIn.

We are looking forward to seeing you!

259th UX Vienna Meetup: Travelling as a Designer & Prototyping with Real Data

Tuesday, 14th of July 2026, 7:00 pm (Journi)
Please register at meetup.com/UXvienna.

We’re excited to invite you to the next UX Vienna Evening Meetup – an evening of inspiring talks, interesting perspectives and community exchange.

The talks

Travelling as a Designer
Nicolas “Niq” Bernadowitsch (UX Designer, Looking for Work)
A collection of design choices that make up different realities in countries around the world.

Prototyping with real data at Journi
Sascha Riemer (Lead Product Designer, Journi)
Rapid prototyping shines when users follow a predefined path through a controlled scenario. But at Journi, we found that when it comes to personal memories and photo books, using someone else’s photos and rigid flows only leads to shallow insights. This talk will cover how we built a pipeline for high-fidelity prototypes with real user data and what we learned coding with AI as a design team.

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UX Vienna Evening Meetups are on the 2nd tuesday of every month — 12 times a year.

Collaboratively we document each UX Vienna Evening Meetup at https://UXvienna.at/ongoing/ – Check out to see what kept us busy and what you might have missed so far.

UX Vienna announcements are available at https://meetup.com/UXvienna. In addition you can follow us on LinkedIn.

We are looking forward to seeing you!

258th UX Vienna Meetup: Academic Insights

Tuesday, 9th of June 2026, 7:00 pm (FH Technikum Wien)
Please register at meetup.com/UXvienna.

UX Vienna Evening Meetups are on the 2nd tuesday of every month — 12 times a year. Prepare for a concentrated dose of academic insight: four students from the User Experience Management Master’s programme will present the core findings of their latest thesis research in the style of lightning talks. A lightning talk is limited to a maximum of 10 minutes.

Lightning Talks:

Collaboration between key roles in agile software projects
by Thomas Theiner, Product Manager Network Security, Barracuda
Role perceptions and communication influence collaboration between product management, software development, and user experience teams in agile environments. Based on interviews and survey insights, this talk highlights actionable best practices for improving alignment and enabling more effective cross-functional collaboration.

Co-creation with AI: The impact of AI-supported prototyping and live testing on co-creation within solution delivery teams
by Raluca Chisalita, Technology Consultant (User Experience & Power Platform), Avanade
This research investigates how AI-supported prototyping and live testing using Figma Make affect design co-creation within solution delivery teams compared with traditional, non-AI design workflows. The study was conducted within Avanade’s corporate context, involving cross-functional teams of designers and developers. Retrospective experiences of participants in non-AI workshops, together with live workshops, are used to assess how AI affects clarity and confidence in design concepts, collaboration dynamics, and the speed or frequency of design iterations.

More Relevant Search Results: How Ad-Scoring and Relevance-Sorting can Increase User Satisfaction
by Sina Benjamin Jonas, UX-Designer & Projektmanager
On willhaben’s second-hand fashion marketplace, this thesis examines how clearer, better-described product ads can rank higher in search results. It builds a simple scoring model for ad quality and plugs it into a new way of sorting the results. First tests show that the new model can increase overall satisfaction of potential buyers with minor UI and programmatic changes to the search results.

Navigating Compatibility with Confidence: Turning Technical Complexity into Usable Product Guidance
by Angelika Loidolt, Projektmanager Website, Rascom
A compatibility rating should help users decide — but when PC hardware becomes more complex, the rating itself can become a source of confusion.
Through the case of Noctua, we take a look at how a CPU-specific cooler rating system can be revised to communicate performance and compatibility more clearly for modern CPUs. We explore how UX can turn technical complexity into guidance that helps users move from uncertainty to a confident product decision.

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Collaboratively we document each UX Vienna Evening Meetup at [https://UXvienna.at/ongoing/](https://uxvienna.at/ongoing/) – Check out to see what kept us busy and what you might have missed so far.

UX Vienna announcements are available at https://meetup.com/UXvienna. In addition you can follow us on LinkedIn.

We are looking forward to seeing you!

257th UX Vienna Meetup: Spring Edition

Tuesday, 12th of May 2026, 7:00 pm (ÖGB)
Please register at meetup.com/UXvienna.

Cover of the UX Vienna Meetup May 2026 Spring Edition

Update 10.5. / 22:00:
Due to the weather forecast with rain, cold temperatures, and wind, we’ve decided to move the meetup to an indoor location instead of the park. The good news: we’re still keeping the same relaxed and casual get-together format — just a little warmer and drier ☔🌿

📍 New Location
Delegationsraum
Österreichischer Gewerkschaftsbund
Johann-Böhm-Platz 1
A-1020 Wien

The easiest way to get there is via U2 Donaumarina.
The Delegationsraum is located on the ground floor at the end of the entrance hall, on the left side, near the stairs leading upstairs.
Looking forward to seeing everyone there!

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Spring is here — let’s take UX outside. Join us for a relaxed UX Vienna get-together in the park, where we’ll trade meeting rooms for fresh air and good company. Connect with fellow UX professionals, share ideas, and enjoy a laid-back evening together.

Bring a blanket and something to drink, and meet us on the lawn below the Palmenhaus in the Burggarten. Whether you stay for a quick chat or settle in for the whole evening, you’re very welcome — we’re looking forward to seeing you there.

Meeting point – below the Palmenhaus on the lawn (on the left side looking at Palmenhause): https://osm.org/go/0JrIXnPJY–?m=

(If the weather is bad, we will come up with an alternative location 24hrs in advance.)

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UX Vienna Evening Meetups are on the 2nd tuesday of every month — 12 times a year.

Collaboratively we document each UX Vienna Evening Meetup at https://UXvienna.at/ongoing/ – Check out to see what kept us busy and what you might have missed so far.

UX Vienna announcements are available at https://meetup.com/UXvienna. In addition you can follow us on LinkedIn.

We are looking forward to seeing you!

256th UX Vienna Meetup: Healthcare & Vibecoding

Tuesday, 14th of April 2026, 7:00 pm (mySugr)
Please register at meetup.com/UXvienna.

UX Vienna Meetup April 2026 Line-up

UX Vienna Evening Meetups are on the 2nd tuesday of every month — 12 times a year. We’re excited to invite you to the next UX Vienna Evening Meetup – an evening of inspiring talks, interesting perspectives and community exchange.

Talks:

UX in Healthcare
by Leandro Albino De Oliveira, UX Chapter Lead at Roche
Leandro will be diving into the unique challenges and trends shaping the current landscape of UX within the healthcare sector.

GoGoGolor – a bloody Vibecode project
by Wieland Kloimstein, UX Designer, ImmoScout24
In 2014 I had an idea for a better color picker. Then it sat in a drawer for 10 years.
Two things changed that: OKLCH — a new perceptual color standard — and LLMs that could actually help build it.
A UX designer with no coding background ended up building something he had no business building.

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UX Vienna Evening Meetups are on the 2nd tuesday of every month — 12 times a year.

Collaboratively we document each UX Vienna Evening Meetup at https://UXvienna.at/ongoing/ – Check out to see what kept us busy and what you might have missed so far.

UX Vienna announcements are available at https://meetup.com/UXvienna. In addition you can follow us on LinkedIn.

We are looking forward to seeing you!

255th UX Vienna Meetup: Lovable Product Discovery Machine

Tuesday, 10th of March 2026, 7:00 pm (BarnVentures)
Please register at meetup.com/UXvienna.

Title image of the UX Vienna Meetup March 2026 listing the talks

UX Vienna Evening Meetups are on the 2nd tuesday of every month — 12 times a year. This time we meet at BarnVentures with one talk (and more time for socialising!)

Talk:

Lovable Product Discovery Machine: How to effectively kickstart Product Discovery
The Lovable Prompting Machine built with Lovable and Claude transforms product thinking into ready-to-use prototypes—instantly.
The core idea: People can think and act like a designer or product creator – the AI handles the prompting quality. Kickstarting the discovery phase for a new product can be done instantly. Perfect for: Product creators and designers who want to validate ideas quickly without the setup overhead.
Bernhard Ferro | Senior Product Designer, Raiffeisen Bank International AG

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UX Vienna Evening Meetups are on the 2nd tuesday of every month — 12 times a year.

Collaboratively we document each UX Vienna Evening Meetup at https://UXvienna.at/ongoing/ – Check out to see what kept us busy and what you might have missed so far.

UX Vienna announcements are available at https://meetup.com/UXvienna. In addition you can follow us on LinkedIn.

We are looking forward to seeing you!