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

"​In an open Q&A, Joe Natoli will answer your questions about fighting imposter syndrome, boosting your confidence in your own skills, improving communications, building value and trust around research processes, developing demand for research findings, and thinking strategically about your place in the organization.

​Submit your question for Joe with your event registration."

"It doesn't matter how much data you have, if you're asking—or being asked—the wrong questions and rushing ideas into production instead of participating in functional collaboration to gain real understanding.

You can help your team make better-informed decisions faster, if you start from the right principles.

You’ll learn how to:

• Approach design research in challenging and chaotic times

• Identify what you really need to know

• Formulate and prioritize your questions

• Understand how to use quantitative and qualitative data together

• Choose research methods, activities, and tools

• Improve collaboration across disciplines

• Convince decision-makers of the value of learning"

"We’re starting to see a shift in UX from specialist roles toward more generalist roles. And while this change can seem daunting, it also brings meaningful new opportunities.

To help you make sense of what this shift means, Darren Hood and Trevor Calabro will share practical guidance on what researchers should focus on, and how to successfully navigate UX in 2026 to thrive in a changing landscape!"

"Bob will explore how the capabilities of the AI era are coming online faster than any of us can realistically adapt.

Bob will also outline a working theory of how AI will lead to a fundamentally new way of creating software products by compressing the distance between the designer’s vision and the user’s experience. In this world, the EPD triad (engineering, product, and design) collapses into a more fluid “design-geneering” organization."

"We’ll be discussing, Calling Bullshit The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World, by Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West. A timely and entertaining look at how misinformation and bad data shape the world around us. The authors, both science professors, show us how to think critically about the numbers, charts, and claims we encounter every day.

It’s a great read for anyone who wants to be a little more sceptical, a little more informed, and a lot more confident in calling out bad information when they see it."

"Debbie has been using Claude to help with qualitative research analysis, synthesis, and reporting through all of 2025. In this live session she’ll show how she does it so you can give it a try too, and adjust it for your needs. She's also tested her method with ChatGPT, Copilot, and NotebookLM, for comparison.

Using real, anonymized transcripts from one of her 2025 research projects, Debbie will show you how she works with Claude."