Speaker
Paul van de Woestijne
UX Lead, Bikkelhart
Paul van de Woestijne is an experienced UX design leader with a strong background in interaction design, behavioural design and digital innovation. As Design Lead at Bikkelhart, he combines creative thinking with a deep understanding of user behaviour to create intuitive and impactful digital experiences.
Who is Paul van de Woestijne?
For eighteen years, Paul van de Woestijne has designed for the person who's actually there: distracted, half-rational, in a hurry, and surprisingly predictable once you know where to look, rather than the patient, rational one most briefs assume. Telling people why they should act rarely works on its own. Designing the right context often works better.
That mission now runs on two tracks: applying it directly in the experiences he designs, and coaching the designers around him to see the same thing he does.
What is your vision on our creative industry?
Behavioural design was never about telling people what to do, it was about understanding why they do what they do, and designing for that. The hard part was always doing it properly: going through enough research, for enough different people, to actually know what's driving their behaviour.
AI doesn't replace that for me, it helps me get there faster: making sense of research in minutes instead of days, and applying what it tells me at a depth I never had time for before. That shift changes where the value sits. Tools take over production. Judgement moves to the centre. That means knowing which insight is right, for whom, and why.
This doesn't make design smaller. It makes deciding what's worth making the real job. So what you build serves the person in front of you. Not an idealised one.
What are you bringing to UX Rotterdam?
People Are Weird. Design Accordingly.
There's a number in behavioural science most designers have never heard. Once you hear it, you can't unsee it in your own work.
People aren't rational. They're not consistent. Often, they don't know why they do what they do. That's not a bug. Daniel Kahneman gave us a useful way to think about this: System 1, the fast and automatic mode of thinking that shapes many of our everyday decisions. But the research behind concepts like System 1 studied a much narrower slice of humanity than you'd think.
AI can already find behavioural patterns faster than most design teams can analyse them. Your judgement isn't overhead anymore. It's the job.
April 22 & 23, 2027
2 DAYS CONFERENCE TICKET
€649,-
+21% VAT
REGULAR PRICE TICKET
Regular price of tickets ends 1st of March 2027
Your ticket gives you access to:
All keynote talks on the main stage big theater and in the small theater
Any workshop (first come, first seated) across both days
Evening events: To be announced
Daily lunch, coffee, and snacks
Networking lounges (including the exclusive recruitment lounge)
Selected video & keynote slides archive after the event
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