Tara Bosenick · Speaker
Talks that stick
Because they provoke without being hurtful. And they are right without acting like it.
🏆
Speaker Award 2025
World Usability Congress, Graz
🏆
Speaker Award 2025
Mensch und Computer
📍
25 years of UX expertise
7 companies · 2,500+ projects · Hamburg
🌍
All talks
available in German & English
Tara Bosenick
ABOUT TARA
AI & UX from Hamburg. With the scars to show for it.
I have been in the UX industry since 1999. I have founded companies, developed methods, attended more conferences than I care to admit—and won two speaker awards in 2025, at the World Usability Congress and at Mensch und Computer.
What sets me apart from most others on stage: I come directly from the field. In a typical week, I spend two to three days conducting AI workshops for UX teams. I research actively. I test things myself. I am wrong sometimes—and I say so. I take uncomfortable positions. I ask questions that keep the audience busy a day later. And I have zero interest in telling anyone what they want to hear.
"Rooted in Hamburg. At the heart of the AI revolution for UX research. And still skeptical enough to ask the right questions."
Speaker
since
'99
Photo by Marleen Hoftizer
14 KEYNOTE TOPICS
What I bring to the table
All talks are available in German and English—for conferences as well as internal events and team days. Each talk stands on its own, but together they tell a story.
1
🏛️
UX: Hype, Craft, or Holy Grail?
What is UX really—and what is just a claim? This talk is an honest introduction for everyone who has managed well without UX so far. Or thinks they have. No jargon, no personas, no journey maps. Only what actually counts—and why it matters, even if you haven't paid much attention to products and interfaces until now.
Target group
Management and executives without a UX background, board members, decision-makers responsible for UX budgets.
2
🤖
How does AI work?
No tech-bingo, no dystopian scenarios. This is an honest explanation of how language models actually work—what they can do, what they can't do, and why that is relevant for everyone working with them professionally today. It is designed for teams using AI tools daily and for leaders who need to make decisions about them. Sometimes even those in the room realize they know less than they thought.
Target group
Everyone working with AI or deciding on it—from beginners to pros who want to put their partial knowledge to the test.
🏆 Best Workshop & Best Session, Mensch und Computer 2025
3
🎭
Hallucinating like Loriot – what LLMs and the breakfast egg have in common
Language models invent facts. With conviction. With perfect grammar. And without any sense of guilt. This talk explains why that is—technically accurate, yet told in an understandable way. With a little dramatic help from the house of Loriot: Just as Loriot characters insist on misunderstandings as if they were truths, so do LLMs.
Target group
Mixed audiences, specialists and managers, everyone who wants to understand AI basics without a computer science degree—and who brings a sense of humor.
I. Fundamentals & Orientation
4
🚨
UX as a Risk Management Tool: Wake up or Fade out?
Bad UX is not a design problem. It is a business risk. And those who cannot communicate this in the language of management will be cut in the medium term. This talk shows how UX teams can make the leap from creative budget to board-level relevance—with concrete methods, real KPIs, and the question: Why should a board even listen?
Target group
UX leads, product owners, decision-makers, everyone who wants to position UX strategically internally.
🏆 Speaker Award, World Usability Congress 2025
5
⚖️
What can UX learn from feminism?
Both movements fight to be taken seriously. Both have methods, arguments, and data. And both regularly fail to reach the right people. What UX can learn from this history is surprisingly concrete—and surprisingly political. A talk that doesn't flatter. But one that changes something.
Target group
UX professionals, design teams, everyone interested in the strategic positioning of UX in organizations.
II. Thinking UX strategically
6
🔬
5 users, 3 hallucinations, 0 significance – a wake-up call for more quality
Our industry distills "well-founded recommendations" from five test subjects, three AI-generated patterns, and zero statistical validation. That is not an agile approach; that is a loss of quality hidden behind methodological terms. This talk is a wake-up call—and a concrete path back to research that can actually be trusted.
Target group
UX researchers, ResearchOps, design teams, everyone who uses research results to justify decisions.
7
💥
How to drive UX research into a wall in record time
A talk disguised as a how-to—which is actually a diagnosis. Five users. No screening. Self-moderated. Results the next day. And of course, everything is "statistically representative." Anyone who recognizes these patterns knows why so many research results remain without consequence. And how to do it better.
Target group
UX researchers, research clients, product owners, everyone who orders or evaluates research.
III. What Goes Wrong in Research Practice
8
🧪
Synthetic users – curse or blessing?
AI can simulate a thousand "users" in seconds. That sounds like efficiency. But what do we lose in the process? The quiver in the voice. The pause before the "But...". The moment when someone uses the app completely "wrong"—and invents something brilliant in the process. This talk honestly shows when synthetic methods help—and when they systematically lead us astray.
Target group
UX researchers, product managers, AI strategists, everyone who must decide where synthetic methods are justifiable.
9
🔍
Researching with AI – and still finding the truth
AI promises faster analysis, scalable insights, and automated reporting. And in the process, it sometimes delivers convincingly false patterns, sentiment analyses that don't recognize irony, and clusters that nobody asked for. This talk shows where AI really helps in research—and where it produces results that sound well-founded but aren't.
Target group
UX researchers, ResearchOps, everyone who uses or wants to use AI tools in their daily research routine.
10
⚡
AI use is supposed to be risky? Seriously?
Some companies treat AI tools like highly toxic waste: forms, approval processes, complete bans. Others carelessly send sensitive data into every available chatbot. Both are wrong. This talk shows what a sensible approach to AI risk looks like—without paranoia, but also without naivety.
Target group
Executives, compliance teams, IT managers, UX teams in regulated industries.
IV. AI meets Research
11
☣️
-ification: Five ways AI is currently ruining UX
Shittification. Bottification. Sycophancy. Vulnerification. Agentification. Five trends that sound invented—and unfortunately are not. An "apocalypse talk" with a wink: What AI does to products, users, and the entire industry if no one pays attention. Entertaining. Disturbing. Both at the same time.
Target group
UX professionals, product teams, everyone at the intersection of AI development and user-centricity.
12
🔭
What will we be doing in 2 years? Scenarios for the future of UX researchers
How is our role changing—not eventually, but concretely in the next two years? What stays? What goes? What new things will emerge that don't exist today? Instead of forecasts, there are scenarios: several possible futures, detailed and honestly evaluated. The audience doesn't leave with an answer. They leave with the right question.
Target group
UX professionals, team leads, everyone who wants to align their career or team strategically.
V. What Comes Next
SPECIAL FORMAT · 45 MIN · SATIRE & SUBSTANCE
📺
We interrupt your regularly scheduled programming
AI Today · Talk No. 13
Good evening. Tonight we report on a technology that is simultaneously saving the world and destroying it—depending on who you ask and what time it is.
In this special broadcast, we analyze live: the hype cycle, the hallucinations, the buzzwords, the cold-sweat posts on LinkedIn, and the question of why your company absolutely needs an AI strategy right now, even though you don't even know what a token is.
"AI Today" is not a talk. It's a show. With a news block, correspondent reports from daily office life, an expert interview with oneself—and the inevitable breaking news ticker that leads the audience through 45 minutes of AI reality: from "AI will make us all unemployed" to "AI invented three fake sources for me today, but the summary was good."
What sticks is a clear picture of what AI can actually do, what it claims it can do—and why the difference between the two is larger than news coverage suggests. And all this without the audience realizing how much they've just learned.
Target group
Everyone working with AI, deciding on AI, or tired of AI—ideal for conference openings, evening programs, and everyone who can't stand the tenth AI keynote of the year.
Special Format
14
🌸
52 years half-happy – who was Tim again?
A talk about being trans, late self-discovery—and the life that begins afterward.
I lived for 52 years without really understanding why something was always a little bit wrong. Not unhappy. Not unfulfilled. But never fully arrived. This is called, as I know today, being "half-happy"—and it's surprisingly easy to endure as long as you don't know it can be different.
This talk tells how the coming out happened and how things went afterward. What changed—and what surprisingly stayed the same. And what it means to feel for the first time at over 50: this is me. In addition to my personal story, this talk provides an honest insight into what being trans means: what it is, what it isn't, and why so many people know so little about it—even though they likely know trans people without realizing it. This won't be an easy talk. Nor a distant one. But one after which the audience will see the world a little differently.
Target group
Companies and teams seeking understanding and sensitivity for the topic of being trans—HR teams, executives, everyone who wants to think and act more inclusively without relying on clichés and brochures.
VI. Experience & Attitude
Optionally bookable
The overture
Talks you won't forget start before the first argument.
Upon request, I begin each talk with an overture—a 5- to 10-minute performance in which I embody a character that fits the talk's theme but turns everything that follows upside down.
The overture is not a gimmick. It is dramaturgy. The talk stays in the mind because it begins where conference presentations usually end: with a real experience. The audience thinks they see a character—and only notices during the talk how much truth is within them.
The overture can be booked individually—or as a fixed introduction to a talk. We can clarify what fits best during our conversation.
Characters & Roles – a selection:
👮♀️
The Police Officer
Hands out AI tickets for methodological offenses. Very consistent.
🙏
The Nun
Delivers a fiery sermon. Against what? We won't reveal that here.
🔨
Harley Quinn
Has a hammer. And a use for it.
👱♀️
Barbie
Has more to say than you expect. Significantly more.
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The Esoteric UX Researcher
Likely co-won the Speaker Award in Graz in 2025. No comment.
1
I come from the field.
My talks do not contain theories I developed at a desk. They contain observations from hundreds of workshops, thousands of projects, and 25 years in an industry that is currently reinventing itself.
2
I take the audience seriously.
No "top-down" entertainment where everyone nods and does nothing afterward. My talks are built to raise questions that still occupy the mind the next morning.
3
I deliver what I promise.
No overpromising, no buzzword-bingo. Instead: clear theses, real examples—and sometimes the statement that someone in the room didn't want to hear, but needed to.
Why book Tara
Three things that go beyond "won speaker awards."
