Let's Meet Up: UX Research Meetup & Event Guide October 2026

A practical 90-minute online workshop for UX professionals navigating complex product organisations. Work with Oliver Dürr and Peer Langermann to identify where UX can have the greatest influence, compare challenges with peers and turn organisational complexity into an actionable agenda for change.

UXfolio shares the results of its survey of 100+ hiring managers and design leaders who reviewed more than 5,000 portfolios this year, backed by in-depth interviews. Learn how portfolios actually get reviewed, which formats, projects and case studies land, how reviewers react to AI use, and the red flags to avoid; a recording is shared for those who can't join live.

Userlytics and Sage share findings from a multi-market study of how B2B software buyers now use AI tools to discover, compare and shortlist vendors. Expect a look at how the study was run as well as what the observed buyer behaviour means for vendor selection and the wider buyer journey.

The Knot Worldwide's insights lead and Rival Technologies' CEO look back on two years of running an insight community, using three concrete cases where ongoing conversational research added human context to business decisions. They also cover how to structure a community for both strategic and quick-turn questions, and how AI makes the growing body of insights easier to search and reuse.

Julian Della Mattia, author of Building the Research Engine, breaks down the three pillars that support a sustainable research practice and gets research in front of decision-makers: culture, infrastructure and communication.

You'll walk away with the tools you need to diagnose where your own practice is leaking, and concrete actions you can immediately put to practice.

Designer and roboticist Dr. Madeline Gannon, known as "The Robot Whisperer", presents "UX/UI for Robots: Sentience as a Design Material". Drawing on ten years of human-robot interaction work, she shows how a robot's behaviour and personality can be designed to build trust and connection rather than control.

Chris Gibbins (Creative CX) and Amrit S Bhachu (UserTesting) look at how AI can shorten the path from raw findings to a convincing story without costing you credibility. The aim is to close the gap between insight and impact so researchers are seen as strategic partners rather than order-takers.

Research and strategy consultant Maxwell Forrest explains why companies that thrive in their core business often stumble when they move into unfamiliar markets or product categories, and how research can reduce that risk. Topics include spotting expertise bias, running assumption audits and building confidence in findings when you have no baseline to compare against.

Nicole Zeng, Head of Research at Dialogue, walks through the AI agents she has built to support her research work and what each one does. She also talks about leading a team through this change and other AI projects she is running.

Adobe's Shrut Kirti Saksena (Staff Experience Researcher) and Gina Ranalli (Staff Product Designer) draw on their work on marketing AI agents to show how UX acts as the integrator in AI development. You'll leave with practical techniques and a reusable protocol for surfacing tensions around governance, safety and agent-to-agent interactions. Rescheduled from September.