DevConf.US 2025

Vince Conzola

Vince is a Principal Interaction Designer on Red Hat’s user experience design team. He started his professional life as an electrical engineer and worked for six years before making the enlightened decision to attend graduate school to study what was then called human factors. He earned a Masters and Ph.D. in psychology from North Carolina State University. His thirty year career has spanned both hardware and software UX design along with some research and consulting. He is currently a UX designer on Red Hat’s OpenShift AI product, a platform for managing the lifecycle of predictive and generative AI models.


Job title

Principal Interaction Designer

Company or affiliation

Red Hat


Sessions

09-19
10:00
35min
Upstream Communities - Key Partners in UX Research
Vince Conzola, Jenn Giardino

As a developer or user experience (UX) practitioner, you know that early and frequent feedback from users is a necessary part of ensuring your project’s success. However, finding users with relevant experience to participate in UX research activities is often a barrier - especially for highly technical enterprise applications. That gives UXers working in open source a big advantage. By their very nature, open source projects include communities of users who are experienced with and passionate about the projects they contribute to. Community members and contributors have a vested interest in improving their project’s ease of use, making them ideal and enthusiastic user research participants.

We’ll talk about:
- How our UX team engaged with the upstream Kubeflow community for an AI-related research project
- Challenges we encountered while conducting research with community members
- Lessons we learned from our experience

UX and Design
106 (Capacity 45)
09-20
14:30
80min
How Might We Create Purpose-Built Gen AI Applications?
Beau Morley, Vince Conzola, celtan, Andy Braren

New tools for AI model customization, RAG, agentic AI, MCP, and inferencing allow for new and better workflows. Smaller models can work well with these tools to create purpose-built AI applications that are smarter, faster and less costly. What is the best approach for developers of AI applications to work with these tools? In this Design Thinking workshop, we'll leverage recent user research conducted by Red Hat’s User Experience Design Team to help understand user outcomes around creating AI applications. Participants will be asked to share their experiences and contribute solution ideas in a fun game-like format.

Artificial Intelligence and Data Science
107 (Capacity 20)