As UX roles evolve amid AI tooling, democratized practices, and shifting org structures, many experienced researchers are spending less time conducting studies—and more time enabling others to do it well. In complex environments like healthcare, the question is no longer whether research should happen continuously, but who does it, when it happens, and how “good” it needs to be to move the work forward.

In this lightning talk, James Wieselman Schulman shares how he’s helped build a culture where research isn’t reserved for specialists, but embedded throughout design and delivery. Drawing from service and healthcare design, he explores how cross-functional teams can engage in research responsibly—without lowering standards or losing sight of ethics, rigor, and trust.

You’ll hear practical examples of how to:

• Use research continuously—not just at the start—to shape workshops, prototypes, MVPs, and business decisions
• Create clear guardrails so non-researchers can conduct meaningful (even if imperfect) research and learn through doing
• Redefine research ROI around impact, learning velocity, and organizational confidence, not methodological perfection

The opportunity isn’t to replace expertise, but to extend it. When expert researchers shift from gatekeepers to coaches, they raise the floor for everyone, protect what makes research human, and ensure empathy remains at the center of the work.

This session is for researchers, designers, and leaders navigating the shift from research doer to research enabler. It offers a pragmatic, human-centered view of research—one where five good conversations can be better than none, learning happens through action, and advancing the work matters more than protecting the role.

In this talk, Dr. Feyikemi Akinwolemiwa redefines play as a serious strategy for innovation. Through The Innovation Playground, she shows how curiosity, collaboration, and experimentation transform overlooked insights into powerful UX breakthroughs. From intentionally incoporating puzzles that unlock strategic thinking, to LEGO sessions that make data challenges tangible, her case studies reveal how user research becomes more than discovery, it becomes learning enablement and a bridge to unified insights.

Nielsen Norman Group (NNG) has conducted and continues to conduct extensive research testing various large language model (LLM) tools designed for research synthesis and analysis. Our goal was to determine whether these AI-powered tools could meaningfully accelerate the work of experienced UX researchers. Through rigorous testing across multiple models and specialized research tools, we’ve found that while a few tools provide modest speed improvements for experienced researchers, none come close to replacing human expertise in research synthesis and analysis.

The core problem is that these tools consistently exhibit critical flaws: they hallucinate findings, fail to identify meaningful patterns in qualitative data, cannot adequately consider nuanced research questions, and produce only superficial, high-level summaries of participant behavior. What makes this particularly dangerous is that these AI-generated outputs often have the veneer of legitimate research results—they look professional and sound plausible. However, closer inspection reveals significant gaps, inaccuracies, and missed insights that would mislead stakeholders and result in poor design decisions. The appearance of competence masks fundamental limitations that make these tools unreliable for serious research work.

While we’ve found several places in the research process that can benefit from LLM usage, analysis and synthesis consistently falls short. In this talk, I can share the specific research we’re doing and explain what actually works.

Join us for a live session on how to run research projects with AI – without compromising quality or replacing the researcher.

Built on insights from hundreds of interviews with product researchers at global companies, Survicate’s new Research Projects feature is designed to work with full research hypothesis context and real-world workflows.

We’ll run a research project live using real data and sources, then open the floor for honest feedback, questions, and discussion around your hesitations and challenges with AI in research.

All participants will receive early access to the product, and help shape the final direction of this next-gen Research Repository!

Quantitative ethnography is the niche subfield you’ve never heard of, but it’s one you’ve been increasingly pressured to practice in over the past couple of years. It’s the math that turns words into numbers underlying generative AI, and LLMs have been getting in between you and a radically new approach to working with verbatims, transcripts, and other texts.

Business stakeholders are always pushing for greater efficiency, faster turnarounds. Qualitative researchers are always looking for more contact with users, and greater engagement with findings and reporting. Quantitative ethnography (and epistemic network analysis) offers a compromise: by trading structure and semantics for human sensemaking in the analysis part of research, perhaps both groups can get what they want.

I’ve had the opportunity to conduct quantitative ethnographic analyses in enterprise studies involving dozens of products, and impacting hundreds of thousands of end-users. Stakeholders were willing to accept a different kind of analysis, and engage more deeply with the process, in exchange for quicker answers.

In this talk, I’ll share how quantitative ethnography differs from qualitative ethnography, the tradeoffs you’ll have to make, and the kinds of results you can expect. This isn’t a tools talk, but you won’t need to do any math, either. I’ll close with a look into the near future, one where you can talk with as many users as will take your call with effectively zero additional analysis work; where you can have the analysis running live during your session, and have the user participate in the sensemaking process on-the-fly; and the dream of every product manager, one where stakeholders can have dashboards of evidence updated live as users talk.

In-person research has been squeezed for years. It’s viewed as expensive, slow, and hard to scale. As AI accelerates everything else, the temptation is to automate away human time in the field, for the sake of speed.

I contend that AI’s real opportunity lies in depth, not just speed. We’re getting distracted by speed, and failing to see the potential of depth.

In this talk, I argue that AI gives us the rare opportunity to restore depth to qualitative research. Instead of treating automation as a shortcut, we used AI tools to absorb labour-intensive tasks (cleaning transcripts, tagging footage, structuring notes etc) so we could reinvest that time in what remains the most data-dense method in our practice: immersive, in-person ethnography.

I’ll draw on three recent consulting projects I directed:

1. In-home health research in Atlanta
2. Retail ethnography across London, Hamburg, and Milan
3. A follow-on multi-city retail study in London, Paris, Berlin, and Milan

By redirecting AI-generated time savings into deeper fieldwork, we expanded ethnographic activities: from extended “deep hanging out” (to borrow Clifford Geertz’s phrase) to ethnographic journaling and collaborative interpretation moments in-field.

I’ll also share how we brought non-research stakeholders into the field, and why AI was essential in making that investment possible — transforming not just insights, but internal conviction and cross-functional alignment.

My goal for the audience is to come away from the talk inspired and motivated. I want people to use AI tools to help mitigate all the usual tradeoffs we as researchers have had to make over the years when conducting in-person research.

Creating and sharing knowledge to make better decisions and solve problems is the core of a research function. An “insight” helps organize disparate information – it makes things clear.

The UXR role is changing fast. You’re coaching more and conducting less. AI and democratization tools are everywhere. And the question lingers: Is this evolution or erosion?

Join leaders in the UXR space as they debate the spiciest questions in UXR today—from whether democratization creates better decisions or just noise, to whether our craft obsession is hurting our business impact.
Moderated by Rally’s Sydney Lawson, expect sharp takes, healthy tension, and the candid conversations we’re having behind closed doors—finally said out loud.

An intimate conversation between Sam Ladner and Leonie Annor-Owiredu examining the methodological toolkit researchers need to stand out in a landscape where traditional methods are widely accessible, AI is ubiquitous, and everyone is a researcher. Hosted by an early-career practitioner, this intergenerational discussion draws on the experience of two veterans to uncover what gives researchers unique value, what adds impact, and how methodological choices can deliver clarity, relevance, and measurable influence in a democratized research world.

Two of the most influential figures in UX, Steve Krug and Lou Rosenfeld, sit down to reflect on the thinking that built the field and what must change as we move forward. In a world shaped by AI, wider access to tools, and growing expectations of UX research beyond design delivery, they will explore how core principles are being stretched, challenged, and reinterpreted. The conversation will also focus on what does not evolve—the values, practices, and instincts that remain essential and universal. Grounded in experience across multiple cycles of growth and contraction, this conversation will provide you with perspective, continuity, and reassurance for a field in motion.

Behind every great UX research practice lies a complex puzzle of procurement, budgeting, and tool integration. In this candid discussion, UXR leaders from large organizations share hard-earned lessons on selecting and sustaining research tools—from navigating opaque vendor pricing and security compliance to balancing specialized versus all-in-one platforms. You’ll have the opportunity to ask them how they roll out new systems, drive adoption, and experiment responsibly with emerging AI-powered tools—all while keeping budgets, stakeholders, and researchers aligned across a complex tech stack.

Note: This session is for Advancing Research 2026 ticket-holders only. Today’s other sessions are all free to attend.

Join us for a deep dive into testing and experimentation tools at the UXR Tools Summit. Design for Impact author Erin Weigel will lead a broad discussion on the category, and will also be joined by UXtweak, who will reveal their vision for the future of experimentation, showcase innovative capabilities. Ideal for UX, design, and market researchers eager to explore how emerging tools are transforming decision-making, optimization, and evidence-based product design.

As user experience research professionals, we have some specific requirements for survey tools that can complement but not be exactly the same as those of our market research colleagues. Come to this session, hosted by Surveys That Work author and acclaimed surveys expert Caroline Jarrett, to hear about how leading vendors help us to handle challenges such as integrating their panels with our user research panels, surveys that are associated with other types of research activity such as usability tests, and working with colleagues and respondents who have specific access needs. We’ll also learn from vendor Survicate about their vision for survey tools, and how their product helps put that vision into practice.

Dive into what’s next for research repositories at the UXR Tools Summit. Maria Rosala, Director of Research at the Nielsen Norman Group, will be joined by ResearchOps expert Shivanjali M. to discuss how repositories are evolving to connect insights across teams and organizations in smarter, more integrated ways. If you’re a UX, design, and market researcher, bring your questions, thoughts, and concerns about repositories to the discussion.

Explore the evolving world of participant recruitment and management tools at the UXR Tools Summit. Kate Towsey, author of Research That Scales and founder of the Cha Cha Club, will host leaders from UserTesting and RallyUXR who will outline their vision for connecting researchers with the right participants faster and more ethically. They’ll showcase innovative features that streamline screening, scheduling, and incentive management, and invite attendees into thoughtful discussion. Ideal for UX, design, and market researchers focused on improving research quality through smarter participant engagement and operational efficiency.