Edinburgh User Experience Meetup

For our May meetup, we’re excited to return to FanDuel, and to welcome not one, but TWO fantastic speakers!

Continuing the AI theme from the last meetup, Ben Zhu (UI/UX Designer, Service Geeni) and Val Miranda (Senior UX Designer, Royal London) will bring complementary perspectives on how UX principles and practices can be applied to AI products, illustrating how UX designers are well positioned to adapt to our AI-enabled future.

Proceedings

• 6pm: Doors
• 6.30pm: UX in AI Design & UX Designers as AI Builders (Ben Zhu)
• 7.15pm: Break
• 7.30pm: Beyond the linear flow: How AI flips the UX process (Val Miranda)
• 8.30pm: Close

UX in AI Design & UX Designers as AI Builders (Ben Zhu)
In the first part of this talk, we’ll explore why UX plays a key role in AI design, and how principles like clarity, feedback and user-centred thinking can improve AI products.

In the second part, we’ll discuss why UX designers are well placed to become AI builders. Skills like understanding users, mapping flows and shaping journeys are highly valuable in building AI tools and products.

I’ll also share practical examples and real experiences of using AI to build ideas faster and better.

About Ben
Ben Zhu is a B2B UX designer focused on data-driven products across startups and SMEs, with experience in EV, sports, and analytics platforms. He explores the intersection of AI and UX, and experiments with vibe coding for rapid, creative prototyping.

Outside work, he collects Tamagotchis and speaks about their design evolution.

Beyond the linear flow: How AI flips the UX process (Val Miranda)
What happens to the UX process when the core product is built before the journey exists? In a traditional workflow, we identify a user intent, map a journey, and tell a developer exactly what happens at each step. But when you’re designing for Generative AI in a high-stakes, restricted environment like Financial Services, that script gets flipped. You aren’t just designing a flow that ends in an interface: you are building a container for an output that is probabilistic, unpredictable, and potentially wrong.

Join me for a deep dive into the nuts and bolts of designing for a new, untested technology. This isn’t a polished success-story pitch. It’s a tactical look at the messy new design process that emerges when bringing human-centred design to an output-first development project.

What we’ll cover:

• The "Inside-Out" problem: How to design a workspace for an ever-changing output that exists before the user journey starts.
• Designing in the dark: Navigating the constraints of sandboxes and redacted medical data, in a restricted regulatory environment.
• UX & Data Science: Why collaborating with Data Scientists is fundamentally different from working with Developers.
• The trust gap: How to bring the user back into the equation when model accuracy alone isn’t enough to guarantee business value.
• Why static designs fail: In the face of LLM-produced content, coded prototypes allow us to validate if the front-end design holds when the data is incorporated in real-time.

Why attend?
If you are a designer, researcher, or PM wondering how your toolkit should evolve for an AI-powered future, this talk will give you a grounded, real-world perspective of how that looks in practice.

About Val
Val is a Strategic Designer and AI Specialist who thrives at the intersection of technical complexity, human trust, and business goals. Currently leading the UX strategy for Generative AI initiatives at Royal London, she specialises in architecting Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) systems for high-stakes, regulated environments.

Val brings a unique profile to the design world: a 15-year background in Risk Management and Business Consulting, including a previous role as a Chief Risk Officer at a joint venture between Zurich and Santander. This systemic mindset allows her to speak the language of stakeholders and decision-makers fluently while building scalable design frameworks.

When she isn't solving the puzzles of emerging technology, Val is an award-winning fine-art photographer and a former Council Member for the Edinburgh Photographic Society, where she advises on brand and UX strategy.