Designing in the middle - UX between institutions, bureaucracy, and real users

What happens when eleven universities decide to build their digital tools together? It's ambitious, complex, and full of UX lessons you won't find in any textbook. Drawing on real cross-institutional projects across Austrian universities, this talk explores the side of UX work that rarely gets a conference slot: aligning diverse stakeholders, navigating shared decision-making, and designing something modular enough to work for everyone, without losing sight of the actual user.

This session is for you if, you work in UX, product, service design, or digital transformation and have ever struggled to move user-centered ideas forward in complex organizations.  Whether you're an early-career designer or an experienced practitioner, this session will resonate with anyone working across multiple stakeholders, navigating institutional structures, or balancing user needs with organizational constraints. 

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