Description

This carousel captures Abi’s key takeaways from Conversion Hotel 2025, framed around the uncomfortable truth that many of the most important lessons in UX, CRO and experimentation are things the industry already knows but still manages to ignore.

Across talks from Oliver Schöndorfer, Marcella Sullivan, André Vieira, Camila Dutzig, Iqbal Ali, Sani Manić, Natasha Senior, Jelena Nadj, Melanie Mueller and Kees Mulder, the carousel pulls out ten deceptively basic lessons: typography affects trust, A/B tests are not clinical trials, journeys are not linear funnels, emotion matters, smaller AI models can be smarter and more sustainable, websites need to be machine-readable, silos destroy coherent journeys, AI experiments need different methods, velocity is useless without quality, and metrics need far more care than they usually get.

The central argument is that the basics are not basic at all. They are the foundations teams keep tripping over: readability, coherence, pragmatism, structure, quality, collaboration and evidence. The carousel works as both an event summary and a polite professional slap around the face with a rolled-up conference lanyard.

Topics

• Typography, readability, hierarchy and trust

• Why experimentation needs pragmatism, not statistics cosplay

• Journey optimisation over page optimisation

• Emotion and human reality in UX

• Small models, structured workflows and sustainable AI use

• Machine-readable websites and AI agent readiness

• Siloed teams and fragmented customer journeys

• Why AI experiments are not conventional A/B tests

• Experiment quality, validation and tooling

• Metrics, detectability and decision quality

Best for

CRO practitioners, experimentation leads, UX researchers, product teams, digital strategists, AI product teams, content designers, and anyone responsible for making digital experiences less chaotic, less performative, and more useful.

Background

This piece sits alongside Abi’s wider work on UX, experimentation and upstream optimisation because it returns to a theme that runs through much of her thinking: weak performance is often caused by neglected fundamentals, not a lack of shiny new tactics.

It also connects closely to Corpus because many of the lessons are about coherence across systems. Readability, journey continuity, semantic structure, collaboration, metric quality and machine-readability all shape whether humans and machines can understand what is happening. The interface is not just a place to convert. It is where structure, evidence and organisational reality either hold together or fall apart in public.