2026 Agenda

Meet & Great: Connect. Explore. Discover

Meet at SCAD Story for a pre-conference mixer including networking, guided tours and student portfolio reviews.

• Why it's crucial to rewire strategic leadership alignment in the product/UX process and how it can amplify long-term impact on teams
• A framework for GM partnership and alignment; focusing on top-impact areas to effectively drive business outcomes
• Case study on Yahoo's way to building trusted product experiences featuring successful cross-BU partnerships

Meet, eat and mingle. Get that caffeine boost and expand your network. There is also plenty to explore on our exhibition floor, from new tools and technologies to fun games and activities.  

Between rounds of layoffs, the rise of AI, and the ever-present push to democratize research, there is a general sense of unease and insecurity in our field. At the same time, change also brings opportunities. Let’s hear it from those managing change on a daily basis.

• Reality check: Analyzing the current state of the industry
• The upside: Identifying opportunities in a dynamic business environment
• Personal development & well-being: Coping with change and uncertainty for yourself and your team

Take five minutes to reflect on the previous sessions with the peers around you. This is a completely open and unstructured time for you to engage, network and share.

Meet, eat and mingle. Get that caffeine boost and expand your network. There is also plenty to explore on our exhibition floor, from new tools and technologies to fun games and activities. 

• Why rigorous user research fails to influence sales teams in fast-paced, revenue-driven B2B environments
• Consequences of the gap: Inconsistent customer narratives, lost deal opportunities, and under-leveraged research ROI
• Building the Research-to-Revenue framework: A four-quadrant structure (Before/After/Capabilities/Evidence) that translates research into sales-ready, decision-oriented formats
• Methodology & development: Insights from stakeholder ethnography, research artifact analysis, and 18 months of cross-functional testing
• Impact results: 340% increase in research usage by GTM teams, higher product adoption, improved win rates, and shorter sales cycles
• Establishing the rise of business literacy, multi-format research, and strategic sales enablement as core UX research competencies

• Connecting designers, researchers and strategists in one enterprise-wide team
• Implementing core service design, experience measurement and customer journey tracking from the ground up
• Eliminating friction across all customer touch points
• Demonstrating value and driving design-led innovation

Take five minutes to reflect on the previous sessions with the peers around you. This is a completely open and unstructured time for you to engage, network and share.

Meet, eat and mingle. Get that caffeine boost and expand your network. There is also plenty to explore on our exhibition floor, from new tools and technologies to fun games and activities.  

• Revealing how survey results are manipulated without ever touching the raw data
• Deconstruct the subtle, deliberate design choices in survey architecture that exploit cognitive biases to steer respondents toward a predetermined conclusion
• Establishing a framework for constructing surveys that mitigate cognitive biases
• Sharpening the ability to spot the subtle red flags that manipulate outcomes before the data is even collected

• Defining measurable hypotheses (KPIs + UX metrics + statistical tests) before project kick-off
• Creating experiments to tie UX changes directly to engagement, retention, or error reduction
• Running A/B or multivariate testing to assess behavior, safety, and user satisfaction at scale
• Building dashboards and communication frameworks that bridge qualitative themes with quantitative results, helping leaders see how UX research drives business success

There has not been such a dramatic change in how we work in decades. There are simply too many new tools and the state-of-the-art changes so rapidly that we can't take a top-down approach for AI adoption. Instead, Meta encourages individual contributors to take the lead in exploring how to adapt to AI-native research. And it's the ICs that are shaping how the field evolves. This session demonstrates Meta’s process of encouraging open sharing and collaboration among researchers to help bring others along and to create opportunities for more co-evolution of the field. 

• Introduction: Creating sharing opportunities to help advancing successful AI applications internally
• • • Showcasing three successful use cases from:
    1. Harini Chandrasekar, Meta
    2. SCAD student
    3. TBC
    • Project evaluation, feedback and group discussion

• Final reflections and closing

• Outlining why learning from user behavior and outcome is critical for continuous AI development
• Turning everyday explicit and implicit feedback into meaningful learning for the system
• Moving beyond one-time usability testing towards continuous, live UX data streams
• Co-designing feedback systems between UX researchers, designers and ML engineers to align system behavior with human values and context

Refresh old connections and make new ones while we celebrate UXR and the end of day one with a drink and a laugh. Poster presentations will also continue!

• Speaking the language of the business: Connecting findings to KPIs
• Positioning research as a strategy partner: Engaging early and often
• Empowering decision-making: Understanding influences across the organization

• Transforming research from a one-time phase into an embedded, continuous driver of design decisions
• Integrating research mindsets, methods, and systems directly into product design through continuous discovery, co-synthesis, and insight-sharing
• Empowering designers as co-researchers, making insight creation and interpretation a shared, cross-functional responsibility
• Using repositories, rituals, and storytelling to keep research findings visible, actionable, and connected to ongoing design work
• Embedding research leads to clearer design decisions, faster iteration, stronger alignment, improved usability, and measurable business outcomes.

• Defining clear processes, templates, and toolkits to enable consistent, high-quality insights as the teams grow
• Integrating UX researchers across the organization while maintaining centralized standards and mentorship
• Creating regular touchpoints with design, product, engineering, and marketing to ensure research drives strategic and tactical decisions
• Developing metrics, storytelling practices, and internal communication strategies that showcase how research influences outcomes and business goals

Take five minutes to reflect on the previous sessions with the peers around you. This is a completely open and unstructured time for you to engage, network and share.

Meet, eat and mingle. Get that caffeine boost and expand your network. There is also plenty to explore on our exhibition floor, from new tools and technologies to fun games and activities.  

• Shifting from theory driven to practical, fast paced work
• Balancing academic depth, rigor and timelines with the business need for speed and impact
• Shifting communication from formal (and exhaustive?) to short, clear storytelling
• Prioritizing business goals over research curiosity
• Managing the great divide: Balancing a tough entry environment for fresh graduates with seven-figure salaries for top AI researchers

Meet, eat and mingle. Get that caffeine boost and expand your network. There is also plenty to explore on our exhibition floor, from new tools and technologies to fun games and activities.  

In an era of economic scrutiny and AI hype fatigue, UX Research teams face growing pressure to demonstrate tangible business impact. This session explores how to build a culture of measurable UX outcomes—linking user experience improvements to real performance metrics like revenue, retention, safety, and trust.

• Defining measurable hypotheses (KPIs + UX metrics + statistical tests) before project kick-off
• Creating experiments to tie UX changes directly to engagement, retention, or error reduction
• Running A/B or multivariate testing to assess behavior, safety, and user satisfaction at scale
• Building dashboards and communication frameworks that bridge qualitative themes with quantitative results, helping leaders see how UX research drives business success

• Using synthetic data to prototype, test flows, and simulate edge cases before real users are available
• Generating large, diverse datasets for accessibility testing, localization, and AI-driven experiences without compromising privacy
• Avoiding bias and maintaining representativeness while ensuring realism and fidelity of synthetic data
• Integrating synthetic insights with traditional qualitative and observational research
• Practical guidance for incorporating synthetic data into UX research workflows, highlighting value and risks

Take five minutes to reflect on the previous sessions with the peers around you. This is a completely open and unstructured time for you to engage, network and share.

Meet, eat and mingle. Get that caffeine boost and expand your network. There is also plenty to explore on our exhibition floor, from new tools and technologies to fun games and activities. 

• Inside a level-4 research team: What it really takes to build systematic, cross-functional, business-strategic UX ResOps structure
• Understanding how our AI toolkit helped to reshape different stages of the research lifecycle, from repository design to synthesis
• Revealing the key gaps identified where AI cannot replace human expertise and judgment, emphasizing the importance of researcher-owned roadmaps
• Using these insights to achieve Level 5 maturity

As digital experiences move beyond screens into spatial, embodied, and ambient environments, UX research becomes a strategic necessity. This session shows how investing in research helps organizations avoid costly mistakes, drive user adoption, and build trust in emerging technologies.

• Exploring how traditional usability methods evolve (or break) when studying embodied, spatial, and multimodal interactions
• Designing research that captures environmental, sensory, and situational factors influencing experience in AR/VR and IoT
• Exploring new tools and metrics for immersion, trust, and cognitive load across virtual and voice-based experiences
• Leveraging biometrics, telemetry, and behavioral data ethically to understand complex interaction patterns

• Maintaining momentum: How can we continue to move from tactical function to strategic partner
• Emerging technologies and modalities: What’s coming next and how do we prepare
• Ethics and responsibility: Anticipating emerging needs and ethical responsibilities
• Future ready: Preparing teams and developing skillsets to deliver high impact results

Explore Atlanta ‘s restaurant and bar scene with our local heroes. This informal conference closing gives you the opportunity to end the conference in style and deepen your newly made connections. Our hosts will take you to their favorite hang-outs.