Turns out everyone has opinions about auto-play video
This Tuesday we held our second Total Onion networking evening, this time at The Alice in London.
If you missed the first one in April, here’s the short version: we planned a talk about Figma-to-code handoff, the pub was too loud for a formal presentation, and we ended up having much better conversations than any slide deck would have produced. Designers, developers, brand people all in the same room, talking honestly. We decided that was the format.
So we did it again. This time the topic was the UX of everyday frustrations, and it needed even less warming up.
It’s one of those subjects that sounds niche until you realise everyone has a story. The person who rage-quit a checkout because the form was broken. The designer who spent three days fighting a client over a font. The developer who shipped something they knew was wrong because the deadline said so. At Total Onion we think about this a lot. Good UX isn’t about aesthetics or best practice checklists. It’s about respecting the person on the other side of the screen.
To get conversations started we made a set of icebreaker cards. Simple questions: have you ever cried over a font choice? Auto-play video, crime or misdemeanour? How many tabs do you have open right now? Small prompts, but they opened up genuinely good discussions.
The evening was noisy, warm, and a little chaotic in the best way.
We’re doing it again in September. Follow Total Onion on LinkedIn and Instagram if you want to join us.