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.
— In Memory of Carina Ulbrich (1987-2026). —
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.
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.
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.
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?”.
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.”
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.
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.
