Rotterdam Schedule
17 - 18 September 2026
Inspirational talks from leaders in healthcare, user experience, design & technology. Our international speakers will cover a variety of topics in healthcare technology and services. We expect to see a range of other disciplines including product managers looking to improve the experience of their applications and existing designers interested in progressing their careers.
Dian Wessels
Content Design Principles for Patient-Centric UX
Designing for patients navigating pre-approval treatment options—such as clinical trials and expanded access—requires more than good UX writing. It demands content that is consistent, accessible, emotionally sensitive, and capable of guiding people through some of the most complex decisions of their lives. n this session, I’ll share practical content design principles drawn directly from our own patient journey mapping and onboarding flows. You’ll see how we improved consistency, improved reading level, and increased accessibility across touchpoints — from first-contact forms to communications with our patient navigators. We’ll unpack real examples of before-and-after copy, revealing the small but critical shifts that meaningfully improve comprehension and trust.
Atike Pekel
Elevating healthcare quality through design reviews
Effective design reviews are critical to delivering safe, high quality healthcare solutions. This session explores how purposeful, well-structured reviews strengthen design decisions, reduce risk, and improve outcomes. Gain insights to make your design reviews more focused, efficient, and impactful.
Tea Break
Sara Bianchini
Giorgia Sassi
Dungeons & Diagnostics: Navigating the maze of healthcare User Research while avoiding the traps
User research in healthcare isn’t like any other industry. It is a distinct realm filled with strict regulations, impenetrable jargon, and unique physical constraints, a veritable “dungeon” for the unprepared designer. Drawing on years of experience partnering with diverse clients across the Healthcare and Medtech sectors, we have mapped out the hidden traps of this landscape.Through a series of real-world case studies, we will walk you through the specific challenges we faced and the practical strategies we developed to overcome them. You will leave with a survival guide for conducting effective research in complex clinical environments, turning obstacles into opportunities for better design.
Marta Dziabiola
Where Care Meets Complexity Designing with Empathy for End-Users and Stakeholders
Lunch Break
Karin Bogdanova
When Precision Meets Person-Centered Care: Designing AI for Mental Health
Soheum Hwang
The design paradox: how to use regulation and compliance to drive innovation
Explore how UX design can thrive within the limitations of regulatory environments. Learn how Scarlet, a UK notified body, overcame UX and research limitations using AI, creative feedback loops, and micro-innovations – delivering user values without compromising regulations.
Tea Break
Panel Discussion
TBC
TBC
Closing
Dr. Michaela Kauer-Franz
Crossing the border by accident – How your User Interface Design decides whether you are medical or general wellness device
Developing a medical device is a lengthy and expensive endeavour. To reduce risk, many companies – especially startups and smaller teams – follow a general wellness to medical device strategy. They start with a reduced product that does not provide treatment, launch it as a general wellness device, and later build the clinical evidence needed for a regulated medical device.
On paper, this strategy is highly supported by the FDA. In practice, it comes with a quiet but real risk – especially for UI designers. A single UI decision can be enough to accidentally push a product over the regulatory edge. A graph that looks diagnostic. A threshold that feels like a clinical limit. A button that suggests action instead of awareness. Many teams only discover the problem when regulatory or legal steps in – often late, and often expensively.
Alex Barker
The Forgotten Art of Field-Based User Research
User Research; Observational Research; Contextual Enquiry; Field Study.
Tea Break & Networking
Natalie Fitak
Designing Trust When AI Becomes the First Mental-Health Touchpoint
When ChatGPT Becomes the Therapist: UX Responsibilities in AI-Mediated Mental Health. AI tools like ChatGPT have become where many people first turn when they’re struggling psychologically. These tools can reduce anxiety and offer immediate reassurance, but they’re also changing help-seeking behavior in ways we’re only beginning to understand, often keeping people from professional care longer than they should wait.
This talk looks at the UX and system-design responsibilities that come with AI acting as a first mental-health touchpoint. I’ll draw on my experience designing and scaling digital mental-health flows within a large healthcare ecosystem in the Middle East, a context where stigma runs high and bring together psychological theory, behavioral data, and the design decisions we’ve had to make in practice.
Sponsor Session
TBC
TBC
Lunch Break
Joanna Żaboklicka
Redesigning a Legacy Medical App with UX at the Core
How do you redesign a 20-year-old desktop app for hearing care professionals? We’ll share how we gained buy-in for a major redesign, highlight pro tips that worked, laugh at the mistakes we made along the way, and reflect on how focusing on UX transformed both the product and our organization.
Sponsor Session
Closing