Advancing Research 2026

March 10-12, 2026 • Live online conference

Advancing Research 2026 is your opportunity to collaboratively re-assess the state of the practice, consider the increasingly complex demands being placed

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About

Advancing Research 2026 is your opportunity to collaboratively re-assess the state of the practice, consider the increasingly complex demands being placed upon research teams and leaders, and work together to define clear roles, set goals, and establish scalable solutions for achieving them.

Videos

March 10, 2026

Tuesday, March 10, 2026 • Advancing Research 2026

Why AI Is Bad at Research (and how to make it actually useful)

Daniel Korczynski • Chief Product Officer, Survicate

Tuesday, March 10, 2026 • Advancing Research 2026

The Evolution of UX Research Platforms

Taylor Klassman • Director of UX, Dscout

Tuesday, March 10, 2026 • Advancing Research 2026

Anatomy of a Strong User Panel

Sydney Lawson • Senior Product Marketing Manager, Rally

Tuesday, March 10, 2026 • Advancing Research 2026

The Sensemaking Business

Dana Chisnell • Design Leader in Residence, Bloom Works

Tuesday, March 10, 2026 • Advancing Research 2026

Tiny team, moonshot impact: Democratizing research across continents

Dagmara Kukawka • Principal User Researcher, Siemens AG

Tuesday, March 10, 2026 • Advancing Research 2026

Faster alone, further together: Rebuilding collaboration in the age of AI research

Kurt McCulloch • Sr. Manager, UX Research, LinkedIn

Tuesday, March 10, 2026 • Advancing Research 2026

Co-creating research enablement with your tech org: a case study

Elizabeth Sklar • Senior Manager, Research and Consumer Insights, Justworks
Jessica Sheng • Research & Design Operations Manager, Justworks

Tuesday, March 10, 2026 • Advancing Research 2026

Investigating qualitative depth of AI-moderated interviews

Tara Tressel • User Research Partner, Great Question

Tuesday, March 10, 2026 • Advancing Research 2026

Voice and influence in an age of noise

Tala Tayebi • Research Operations Manager, Cloudflare
Kelly Goto • Author of Web Design 2.0
Jared Spool • Maker of Awesomeness, Center Centre

Tuesday, March 10, 2026 • Advancing Research 2026

Jemma Ahmed • Advancing Research Curator

March 11, 2026

Wednesday, March 11, 2026 • Advancing Research 2026

Research is a team sport: advancing the work when everyone does the research

James Wieselman Schulman • Senior Design Lead, Disruptive Solution Design, Evernorth

Wednesday, March 11, 2026 • Advancing Research 2026

From generic to contextual research insights with AI | Live Q&A

Daniel Korczynski • Chief Product Officer, Survicate
Justyna Parmee • Product Researcher, Survicate

Wednesday, March 11, 2026 • Advancing Research 2026

Unsticking Research for Better Information Flow

Jon White • Lead UX Researcher, User Interviews
Erin May • CMO, User Interviews

Wednesday, March 11, 2026 • Advancing Research 2026

Research Debate Club

Taylor Jennings • Research and Product Operations, Chili Piper
Alexis McNutt Unis • Customer Research Lead, One Pay
Sydney Lawson • Senior Product Marketing Manager, Rally

Wednesday, March 11, 2026 • Advancing Research 2026

Play to innovate: How curiosity and experimentation transform UX

Feyikemi Akinwolemiwa • Research and Design Manager, National Grid

Wednesday, March 11, 2026 • Advancing Research 2026

Human vs. machine: Testing AI’s ability to synthesize and analyze research

Laura Klein • Author of Build Better Products

Wednesday, March 11, 2026 • Advancing Research 2026

Don’t call it AI: Turn words into numbers with quantitative ethnography

Vitorio Miliano • Staff Design Technologist, Tertile, LLC

Wednesday, March 11, 2026 • Advancing Research 2026

The new horizon of ethnography: using AI to unlock the full potential of in-person research

Mujtaba Hameed • Senior Research Consultant, Stripe Partners

Wednesday, March 11, 2026 • Advancing Research 2026

Methodological toolkit for unique research impact

Kwabena Opoku • UX Researcher, Nationwide
Leonie Annor-Owiredu • Researcher, Writer and co-founder of Words We Write Literary Festival
Sam Ladner • Sociologist and Researcher

Wednesday, March 11, 2026 • Advancing Research 2026

Don’t Make Me Think 3.0: What Endures and What Evolves in UX

Steve Krug • Author of Don’t Make Me Think and Rocket Surgery Made Easy
Louis Rosenfeld • Founder, Publisher, & CEO, Rosenfeld Media

March 12, 2026

Thursday, March 12, 2026 • Advancing Research 2026

Testing and Experimentation Tools

Erin Weigel • Author of Design for Impact
Petra Rajkov • Senior UX Researcher & Research Advocate, UXtweak

Thursday, March 12, 2026 • Advancing Research 2026

Aleksandra Korczynska • CMO, Survicate
Caroline Jarrett • Author of Surveys That Work
Justyna Parmee • Product Researcher, Survicate

Thursday, March 12, 2026 • Advancing Research 2026

Research Repositories

Maria Rosala • Director of Research, Nielsen Norman Group
Shivanjali M. • Research Operations Manager, SumUp

Thursday, March 12, 2026 • Advancing Research 2026

Participant Recruitment and Management Tools

Kate Towsey • Author of Research That Scales
Basel Fakhoury • CEO & Co-founder, User Interviews
Oren Friedman • Co-Founder and CEO, Rally
Graham Gardner • VP of UX Design Research Operations, U.S. Bank

Thursday, March 12, 2026 • Advancing Research 2026

Panel: Stacks, Security, and Stakeholders: The Hidden Work of UXR Tool Procurement

Jon Temple • Design Principal for AI & Automation User Experience, IBM
Kalee Dankner • Research Operations, LinkedIn
Bruce Falk • Contracting Officer, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum
Lauren Galanter • Research Operations Program Manager, Elsevier

Speakers

Advancing the Work (if not the Role)

Between democratization, AI tooling, and layoffs, who (or what) does the actual work of UXR has changed dramatically of late. Experienced UXR professionals find themselves practicing less, and coaching, guiding, teaching, and partnering more than ever before. What does it mean to transition from research doer to research enabler? We’re looking for case studies that demonstrate how UX researchers are making this career pivot while ensuring that the research itself stays true to our shared principles of quality, ethics, and trustworthiness,

Advancing Research Tools and Methods

While the basics of UXR methodology are stable, the tools and expertise we use to achieve them are changing radically. New technologies make it possible for researchers and PWDR (people who do research) alike to achieve deeper insights and at a greater scale than ever before—often with a lower spend. We’re also finding ways to deepen our expertise in ways that have nothing to do with technology. We’re seeking case studies that show how people tackling UX research—professionals and PWDR—are achieving what was once unimaginable using state-of-the-art tools, approaches, and expertise.

Quotes

"The larger the dataset you work with, the more costly it is to run a single operation on AI models."

"We created monsters by stitching together many disjointed research tools that don’t scale well."

"The most successful way to ask about job function is a single-select question, not an open field."

"You are the expert in understanding the lived experiences of your users. It’s ongoing work helping those around you develop a shared understanding."

"We could either become an internal service desk that's always at capacity or find a lever that multiplies our impact."

"Growth PMs think this way because it’s the only kind of thinking the system we’re working within can operationalize."

"We went very, very big instead of an annoying side project; it became the core of our research systems."

"AI moderation, in short, is a large language model that runs a moderated interview session without a human researcher present."

"We get very fixated on our process and sometimes forget why we are here: to make people's lives better."

"Every time we say, I would prefer not to, we reclaim a little bit of agency."

"How might we democratize empathy at scale within our organizations?"

"Full automation of research is simply not working."

"We end up with this junk drawer phenomenon with spaghetti-fication of different insights being passed around with no clarity."

"Democratized research is always better as long as you have the right tools and resources to improve rigor over time."

"In a world of AI where things are speeding up, it's more important than ever to position ourselves as teams that can actually change things."

"There is a world of difference between what a participant says and what they actually do, and AI misses that completely."

"Quantitative ethnography isn’t mixed methods; it’s a unified method using both qualitative theory and quantitative validation."

"It often feels like research becomes beholden to exact quotes rather than the richer story that context provides, what I call the tyranny of transcripts."

"We are guardians and stewards of that story, giving people the agency to share their experience."

"Unlike social media, which I think should not exist, AI should exist but with caution."

"AI cannot substitute the research expertise achieved through multiple interviews and synthesis by humans."

"There are over five hundred tools that call themselves survey software on G2, making it one of the largest software categories."

"There are so many different variations of repositories, from research libraries to databases cataloging atomic insights."

"Participants themselves need to be real humans at the end of the day to get unique insights."

"We’ve been evolving from a primarily qualitative team to a mixed methods team, expanding our quant capabilities and focusing on AI."