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

This session will explore how continuous UX research sharpens product strategy, reduces costly guesswork, and drives measurable business outcomes across every stage of the product lifecycle.

What You'll Take Away:

• Understand when to use generative, formative, and summative research

• Connect research findings directly to roadmap and prioritization decisions

• Turn user insights into stakeholder buy-in and confident action

Financial apps have grown dramatically over the past decade. But as products expand, so does the cognitive load on users.

The next-gen of financial products will rely on proactive UX: interfaces that understand context, anticipate intent, and surface the right actions at the right moment.

This session will explore how “invisible banking” is becoming a real competitive advantage, and what it takes to move legacy financial products to proactive, intent-driven interfaces.

This session examines how artificial intelligence is reshaping user experiences in complex financial workflows through both visible and invisible design patterns.

We'll explore practical approaches to integrating AI that enhance decision-making and productivity while maintaining the trust, clarity, and control that financial users demand.

Two sessions that help the gap between Product, UX, Design and Dev to build better products, faster together:

• How to Use AI Ethically in Your UX Research Workflow: In this session, Shreya Thakkar will share how she approached considerations around consent, data privacy, and bias in her own work - including a recent project analyzing user interviews- and walk through a simple framework for evaluating AI tools.

• One Platform, Many Minds: Designing for Digital Literacy, Culture, and the Real World: This session explores practical approaches to designing for a broad spectrum of users using real-world examples from large-scale systems.

This session will break down how to run effective research and testing as a product designer even if you don’t have a dedicated research team.

​Key outcomes:

• Choose the right research method for the problem

• Define your core customer

• Match research to product stage

• Write solid research scripts

• What research tools to use

• Present Research to Influence Stakeholders

In a fireside chat with Vincent Fiorentini, Software Engineering Manager and creator of Color Blind Pal, we'll cover color blindness, accessibility tools, and your questions. Vincent will offer notes on your submitted flows or assets.

With implications for human safety (navigation, medicine, hardware signaling, food "doneness"), marketing, instructional design, and more, this event will help those who work in fields like design, research, consumer experience, and education see through the eyes of the estimated ~10% of color blind consumers who navigate a world cued by color.

​​Vincent will discuss:

• ​​His experiences as a color blind person

• ​​The app he built that helps people with color blindness and people with full-color vision simulate what others see

• ​​Other tools and AI "skills" for accessibility review

• And critique a few submitted assets + flows from his POV (someone with the most common type of color blindness)

Seattlelites, consider attending the in-person event in downtown Seattle. Stay after for short breakout discussions + networking! 

Investigating topics that are emotionally demanding, because of the stress of the fieldwork context and/or the sensitivity of the theme, can be a traumatic experience for researchers. This may especially be the case where the project methodology involves close fieldwork relationships and participatory investment.

In this seminar we will hear from three researchers at various stages of their careers who have experience of studying risky contexts and demanding topics, to discuss researcher trauma in qualitative research.

Is "continuous research" a philosophy or a framework? Has its definition evolved since the early days of UX? What assumptions are behind it? There's a lot worth unpacking about this topic. And this upcoming session is designed for professionals actively engaged in Research Operations.

​[PLEASE NOTE: This discussion-driven session is designed for people with direct ResearchOps experience and live participation is expected.]

It's easy to forget that with great change comes great opportunity. And UX researchers today have an unprecedented chance to become the strategy leaders within their organizations who identify and solve the highest-risk problems!

Dr. Sam Ladner has spent years developing the tools to help researchers do just that. Join us as she breaks down Strategic Foresight, a set of methods devised to help researchers anticipate risk and shape the future, based on research from her upcoming book, Practical Foresight.