2026 Agenda

• The importance of embedding strategic leadership alignment in the UX process to amplify the UX team's long-term impact
• Case study on partnering with senior leaders for business-UX collaboration, focusing on top-impact areas to drive revenue effectively
• How can the workflow and collaboration model be redesigned, featuring successful cross-departmental partnerships in transforming UX processes and demonstrating measurable business impact

As AI transforms legacy organizations, UX Research must evolve from a support function to a strategic advisor. This talk shares how UXR at JPMorgan Chase positions itself as a business-critical asset, driving risk reduction and product success in a complex, internal-facing environment.

Key themes include:

• Speaking the language of business: framing UX insights in terms of risk, value, and business outcomes
• Mapping workflows, not just tasks: using user interviews and visual value flows to align cross-functional teams and inspire action
• Reducing product risk: connecting user needs and pain points to business objectives to avoid low adoption, wasted effort, and poor performance
• Thriving in the AI era: ensuring products are designed to scale for new capabilities and opportunities
  
  

Attendees will learn practical strategies for elevating UXR as a risk management function, driving business impact, and leading in the era of AI transformation.

• Exploring methods and best practices for assessing and advancing organizational UX maturity
• Transforming your UXR team into organizational coaches to enhance user-centricity
• Advocating user centric approaches rather than simply producing metrics
• How to continuously educate stakeholders and manage internal politics without becoming frustrated

• Integrating strategic cognitive friction points that apply psychological principles to preserve critical thinking while mitigating the over-reliance of AI in UX research workflows
• Developing verification frameworks that counterbalance our innate tendency to trust technology with the necessity for diverse research perspectives
• Placing human experience at the core of design research to restore balance between imagination and technology-driven insights when creating meaningful experiences for users

• Overcoming isolation as the first UX voice in a traditional, engineering-driven enterprise
• Scaling teams through a satellite model that coordinates researchers and designers across multiple divisions and geographies
• Three global pillars within a strategy of UX growth that ensure consistency, maturity, and resilience
• Proving UX value in B2B: demonstrating research impact, navigating friction points, and overcoming organizational resistance

• Examining how AI tools improve efficiency across repositories, analysis, feedback, and moderation with cautious attitude in implementation for  quality insights and proper context
• The importance and necessity of human control over planning, interpretation to prevent oversimplification, inaccuracies, and missed insights, especially for high-impact research
• Leveraging the strength and limitations of AI tools analysed in this study to look into how UX researchers could co-exist with the technology in the years beyond

• Nobody is perfect: Sharing your most memorable hiccups
• Exploring how mistakes can create opportunities for innovation and unexpected discoveries in product development
• Transforming project setbacks into valuable insights  and learnings

• Exploring how traditional UX evaluation methods yielded subjective results for financial services digital products, necessitating a dependable, quantitative benchmarking process tailored to products with unique regulatory and lifecycle constraints
• Developing a specialized 2-part scoring system combining behavioral, systemic, and attitudinal metrics to provide a solution with innovation and also objectively measure digital experience effectiveness
• Implementing through testing, with results aggregated in an Airtable dashboard that revealed critical pain points across different interaction flows
• Delivering actionable results: Objectively quantifying usability issues, prioritizing changes for MVP development, and establishing a foundation for building a comprehensive archive of product benchmarks across the full suite

• Exploring how AI tools are automating traditional entry-level tasks, creating barriers for newcomers, and identifying practical strategies to overcome these challenges
• Analyzing the structural transformation of the UXR/D industry amid this fundamental shift in required skillsets
• Highlighting new growth pathways and experience-building opportunities for emerging talent in an AI-augmented research landscape

This innovative networking session will assign you at random to other conference participants for a short (5 minute) conversation, then you move on to the next! Join this fun activity to discover new and surprising connections!

• Exploring how people actually think, see, and remember information by bridging psychology and design principles to create more intuitive user experiences.
• Five key psychological principles you can use to capture attention, improve clarity, and create experiences that truly resonate.
• Tailored for designers, researchers, content strategists, and marketers seeking to understand human behavior to create more emotionally resonant, effective, and user-friendly experiences with cross-disciplinary appeal.

• An overview of diverse design disciplines at AIRBUS and our origin story of community
• Learnings in managing an internal community
• Evolution & challenges & future opportunities

• Building an inclusive research ecosystem that empowers designers to run both qualitative and quantitative studies independently
• Equipping teams with practical frameworks and accessible resources to collect feedback faster, test ideas continuously, and make confident, insight-driven design decisions.
• Exploring H&M's journey toward democratized research, including the benefits, challenges, and strategic considerations around structure, governance, and quality assurance.

• Why understanding advanced career paths matters in today's rapidly evolving UX landscape
• Exploring how senior UX practitioners can leverage their unique skillsets to transition into high-impact roles beyond traditional design positions—including product leadership, entrepreneurship, and executive positions.
• Identifying optimal career paths and comparing growth trajectories for UX leaders, from specialized individual contributors to cross-functional leadership roles.
• How limited senior growth opportunities affect career advancement and diminish research influence across the industry—and strategies to pivot the situation?

• Designing scalable knowledge repositories and collaborative platforms that democratize UX insights while maintaining quality standards and governance
• Implementing mentorship programs and communities of practice that facilitate cross-functional knowledge exchange between UX professionals at different career stages
• Developing measurement frameworks to evaluate knowledge transfer effectiveness and its impact on organizational UX maturity and decision-making

• Streamlining ideation and prototyping processes through intelligent automation and suggestion systems
• Augmenting designer capabilities with sophisticated generative tools that expand creative possibilities
• Detailed case studies of successful implementation across multiple departments and product lines

This innovative networking session will assign you at random to other conference participants for a short (5 minute) conversation, then you move on to the next! Join this fun activity to discover new and surprising connections!

• Designing, testing, and improving a multi-path experience in a native app without delaying product development
• Facilitating real-time alignment between product owners, copywriters, and designers through the RITE methodology
• Demonstrating how RITE enables faster iteration, better stakeholder alignment, and evidence-based decisions in complex, high-stakes design innovation projects across industries

• One year back - have your predictions come true?
• Where is the industry heading in 2026
• What needs to change and what do we need to do to remain relevant?