Speaking
I don’t give abstract keynotes. Everything I speak about, I’ve shipped – or got wrong and learned from – across 35 years of designing real products, from national heritage to enterprise systems used by hundreds of thousands of people.
Past platforms include a keynote at the HMRC LGBT conference in Whitehall. My heritage wiki has reached around 40 million visitors and a Prime Minister’s award, and I founded a 1,500-member UX professional community.
A clear point of view, specifics over platitudes, and slides that could pass their own accessibility audit. I speak as a practitioner who still ships – not a consultant describing it from the outside.
Talks
Each of these can be a keynote, a conference session or a workshop, and I’ll happily shape one to your audience and theme rather than deliver it off the shelf.
The most neglected software is the software nobody chooses – the timesheets, the booking tools, the service desks. This talk argues that user-centred design matters most exactly where it’s most often skipped, and names the three things large organisations get wrong: cutting usability testing, never setting UX KPIs, and assuming SaaS means you don’t need design.
Keynote · conference talk
At 1,000 applications and hundreds of thousands of users, accessibility can’t run on heroics – individual champions fixing things by hand never keeps pace. This talk is about the unglamorous thing that actually works: putting governance in place – standards, sign-off gates, audit and remediation frameworks – so accessibility becomes sustainable and built-in, not a perpetual rescue mission.
Keynote · talk · workshop
Built from my three-part Medium series, this talk is a proper journey in three acts: what consciousness actually is, whether an AI could ever develop it, and what would follow if it did. Not a scare story and not hype – a clear, grounded walk through the hardest question in AI, from someone who’s written the thinking down.
Keynote · fireside
Over three decades I’ve founded clubs, networks and archives – from one of the world’s largest softball clubs to a heritage wiki with 40 million visitors. This talk is about why community-building, not code, is the real moat, and how the same instincts translate directly into building product.
Keynote · conference talk
Formats: Keynote · Conference talk · Workshop · Panel · Fireside · In person across the UK and Europe, or remote.
Track record
Speaker bio
Jonathan Harbourne is a UX and accessibility leader with over 35 years designing and building digital products – from enterprise systems used by hundreds of thousands of people to his own consumer apps. He founded a national LGBT heritage wiki that has reached around 40 million visitors, recognised with a Prime Minister’s Points of Light Award, and writes on AI, consciousness and ethics. He speaks on accessibility, AI, and software that’s genuinely on the user’s side.
Ready to lift straight into your programme.