Speaker: Matthew Ovington, Head Of User Experience at Travelport.

'The right stuff' - a term coined by Tom Wolfe - is a multifaceted quality possessed by the pilots and astronauts in the early days of the Mercury space programme, a blend of piloting skill, courage, experience, nerve and reflexes. Project Mercury was a challenge of tremendous complexity and scale - any team of designers facing a similar design challenge draws upon a mixture of experience, skill and personal qualities to face that challenge.

Why do some projects overwhelm designers, while others perform far beyond our initial expectations? What qualities and behaviours equip individuals to cope in difficult circumstances? I've been fortunate to work with some tremendously skilled designers over the past 15 years. In this talk I identify some of the skills and behaviours they exhibited, and the positive difference it made to projects I've worked on. It's not a list of hard technical skills - in fact it's the opposite. The soft skills and behaviours echos themes of 'The Right Stuff', and they're things everyone can work on. I will illustrate my talk with examples from real projects and explain why certain skills are so valuable and the positive difference they can make to project outcomes.

The talk is aimed at all designers and managers, with the goal of communicating some of the soft skills, qualities and attributes I've found to be leading indicators of individual and team performance.

Speaker Bio: Matthew is Director of User Experience at Travelport Digital. He was formerly Director of Product Design at Paddy Power. Before that he founded Open Interface, an agency specialising in usability and accessibility in 2002. Matthew started his career as a usability engineer in 2000 at Nua, a digital consultancy. He has worked in many different areas in the UX field for a variety of public and private sector organisations - primarily in user research and information architecture. He has over 15 years' experience leading design teams.