Two years ago, we had an idea.
What if we built a conference that actually felt like the UX community - not a corporate stage with talking heads, but a room full of real practitioners who care deeply about this work, talking honestly about what it takes to do it well?
UXCON24 was that experiment. It sold out.
UXCON25 was the proof. It sold out too.
And the thing people kept saying afterward wasn’t “great content” or “good networking.” It was something quieter and more specific. It was I needed that. I didn’t know how much I needed that until I was in the room.
That’s what we’re building again on October 8th. And this year, we went further than we’ve ever gone.
We called Don Norman.
If you work in UX, you know that name the way architects know Frank Lloyd Wright.
He coined the term “user experience.” He wrote The Design of Everyday Things - the book on virtually every designer’s shelf, the one you’ve probably bought twice because you gave your first copy away. He co-founded Nielsen Norman Group. He was VP of Advanced Technology at Apple. He has published 21 books, holds three honorary degrees, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
One of his postdoctoral fellows once told him he was wrong about something. That fellow was Geoff Hinton - who went on to help invent the modern neural network and win the Nobel Prize. Don likes it when people tell him he is wrong.
At 88, he is still going. Still writing. Still pushing. Still asking whether the design industry is solving the right problems for the right people.
On October 8th, he will be in Silver Spring, Maryland, delivering a live keynote and sitting down for a Q&A where you - yes, you - can ask him anything.
Not a livestream. Not a pre-recorded message played on a big screen. The same room. The same air. A once-in-a-career moment, and we do not use that phrase lightly.
He is not coming alone.
Joining Don Norman on the UXCON26 stage:
Niyati Gupta — Product Design Lead at Netflix, formerly Google and WhatsApp. A decade spent building products used by hundreds of millions of people. Her talk is about the invisible work of UX - the influence, the framing, the organizational moves that separate designers who are good from designers who are irreplaceable.
Raven Adaramola — Senior Product Designer at The New York Times, working on the Games experience that millions of people open before their first coffee. Wordle. Connections. The Crossword. She helps design the daily rituals of an entire culture.
Calvin Robertson — Design leader with two decades at the Federal Reserve Bank, Lowe’s, Best Buy, and now Corning. His session is about what leadership looks like when design is the thing holding an organization together, not just a deliverable but a direction.
Twisha Shah Brandenburg — Design Leader at Target, working at the intersection where UX, product strategy, and engineering constraints meet. The place where experience quality gets decided long before anything ships.
Basel Fakhoury — Co-founder of User Interviews, now SVP at UserTesting. If you’ve ever recruited participants for a study, you’ve used something he built. He’s coming to talk about where research infrastructure is heading, and what that means for how all of us work.
Amanda Gelb — Founder of Aha Studio. Professional Question Asker. She designs workshops and learning experiences that move people from stuck to clear. The kind of session you’re still quoting in meetings four months later.
Zach Thomas — Design Lead at Skylight, doing human-centered design for the DHS, the US Air Force, and the CDC. Work where the stakes are real and getting it wrong has real consequences. Also a NASA JPL Solar System Ambassador - which tells you everything about the kind of person who shows up to UXCON.
Leo Hoar, PhD — Founder of UXR Institute. He looked at the UX research industry, saw that advanced career-focused education didn’t exist, and built it himself. He’s bringing the kind of depth that most conferences never get near.
More speakers coming….
Now the part we want you to sit with for a moment.
Research consistently shows that 80% of roles are filled before they are ever posted publicly.
They go to the person already in the conversation. The designer a hiring manager met at an event and remembered six weeks later. The researcher someone introduced to their team over lunch. The PM who asked a smart question after a talk, handed over a card, and followed up.
The people who attended UXCON in previous years came from Harvard, IBM, Adobe, Johns Hopkins, Lockheed Martin, The Met, NIH, Vanguard, T. Rowe Price, and dozens more organizations doing serious, consequential work.
These are not recruiters skimming CVs. These are the people who make the call.
One day in that room is worth more than six months of applying online. We genuinely believe that. And the people who came last year said the same thing after.
Here is what they actually said:
October 8th, 2026. Silver Spring Civic Center at Veterans Plaza, MD. Doors open 8am. Programme runs 9am – 5pm. Metro Red Line, short walk from Silver Spring station. Reagan National Airport, 30 minutes away.
We have built this event twice now. We have watched people walk in as strangers and leave as collaborators, mentors, and friends. We have watched careers shift in a single conversation over coffee. We have watched someone ask a question from the audience that changed the direction of a talk.
We are building it a third time on October 8th, and it is the best version yet.
