A UX Superhero Meets Her Kryptonite…and Lives to Tell the Tale

Tamara Adlin's keynote at World Usability Day 2018 in Seattle, WA. Tamara thought nothing could throw her when it comes to UX. She was wrong. And…that’s ok. This is a story about a seasoned, confident user experience practitioner acing unforeseen challenges that made her want to rip her hair out (and use that hair to smack her client). It’s a story about how Blockchain, in all its obscenely technical and ridiculously disruptive glory, flew into Tamara's airspace and hit her like a flock of geese hits a majestic airplane. It’s about how confidence reaches new peaks only to discover new valleys. Why bother telling a story about a run-in with horrible difficulty? Because Tamara is a super-confident industry badass and she got flattened, which left her with some insights that can help you. Successful people don’t always want to talk about the trauma that created the battle scars they wear proudly. It’s also a story about Blockchain, a technology that some think will be as big, far-reaching, and impactful as the internet. And why that may actually be true, and what that would mean for the UX'ers.