Interaction Design Day 25: Adaptation

We're back after our epic Battersea Power Station event in October to celebrate Interaction Design Day with a loose theme of adaptation.

Adaptation of interfaces. Adaptation of our processes. Adaptation of ourselves.

Tickets are refundable if you request at the end in line with our policy.

Designing the invisible: Lessons from building an AI Assistant
When we set out to build a financial analyst assistant, Checkout.com quickly learned that designing for AI isn’t about clever chatbots or sparkly UI, but about building trust in uncertainty.

They will share the journey from two distinct but deeply collaborative perspectives: Product Design and Content Design. You'll hear about:

• Invisible design decisions shaping user trust.
• Content and Product Design roles blurring and evolving.
• AI principles developing at Checkout.com.

This session will unpack the messy collaboration between design and engineering, the micro-decisions that make an AI feel effortless, and the critical lesson that in a conversational product, the words are the UI.

Is it still true that you can’t prototype an inbox?
Henry Morset, a designer who worked on clustering in Gmail recognised at the time that “you cannot prototype an inbox”.

Without real use, message and algorithms, an inbox is a meaningless interface. Historically, the challenge has been that to evaluate these kinds of interactions, you need to build the thing first.

That might be fine in a scrappy little start-up where complexity is typically low, but in large organisations the overheads can make this process painfully slow.

Algorithms increasingly determine what users interact with. However, they are largely invisible, even to the people who make them.

So how do we make these algorithms a visible, material part of the design process?
How do we make it quick to iterate with them?
And how do we make the sure aspects of interfaces that we still design, support the user?

In this talk, Jac de Matos, Senior Product Designer at Waitrose Online, will share how his team at have been shifting from traditional Figma prototypes to individually personalised, highly-interactive data prototypes that give them sight of how users experience algorithms, and how they improve them at pace.

Speaker bios:

Chrisi Webster
Chrisi is a Senior Content Designer at Checkout.com, where she helps shape merchant-facing experiences across data and financial products. Most recently, she co-designed the Authorization analytics dashboard, which helps merchants understand why authorizations decline, and has led initiatives like string externalisation to build scalable content systems.
Before joining Checkout.com, Chrisi worked across fintech and public-sector organisations, from improving CMS experiences at Metro Bank to designing accessible e-learning and SEO strategies at the Social Care Institute for Excellence. That mix of storytelling, structure, and systems thinking now fuels her focus on the intersection of language, trust, and emerging technology.

Gbemi Abijo
Gbemi is a Senior Product Designer at Checkout.com, where she designs tools that make payment experiences simpler and smarter for merchants. Her work spans from simplifying complex payment flows to creating dashboards that empower businesses to make better, data-driven decisions. She is also exploring how AI can help merchants uncover insights faster.

Prior to Checkout.com, she worked on a variety of products, mostly in the financial services space, delivering solutions that serve both businesses and consumers. Her work has impacted how people relate to money and has supported financial inclusion across different regions. The diversity of these experiences has strengthened her empathy and deepened her understanding of how design can bridge the gap between technology and human needs.

Jacinto de Matos
Jacinto (Jac) is designer with a strong analytical and technical mindset, driven by creativity and a passion for meaningful user experiences. He loves turning complex problems into simple, elegant interfaces that feel intuitive and engaging. His approach combines data-driven insights with a clean, balanced design aesthetic — always aiming to create experiences that connect with people and perform beautifully.