The UX community is having a conversation you need to be part of.
Don Norman. Netflix. The New York Times. Target. One room. One day.
In This Issue
→ What is actually changing in the UX field right now and why it feels bigger than usual
→ The one day this year the community comes together to face it honestly
→ Who is in the room and why this lineup is different
→ How to get your ticket
Every few years something changes in this field that is not just a trend.
Not a new tool. Not a methodology debate. Not another article about whether UX is dying or evolving or being absorbed into something else. Something structural. Something that changes what the work actually is, what it requires from the people doing it, and what it means to be genuinely good at it.
That is what is happening right now.
AI is not coming for UX. It is already inside it. Research processes are changing. Design workflows are changing. The way organizations think about who they need on their teams and what those people should be able to do is changing faster than most job descriptions have caught up with. And underneath all of it, a lot of practitioners in this community are sitting with a version of the same question.
What does my career look like from here?
Not in a panicked way. In a serious, I need to actually think about this way. The kind of question that deserves a real answer from people who are operating at the highest level of the field right now, not a thread, not a webinar, not another piece of content to consume and forget.
A real conversation. In a real room. With the right people.
That is UXCON26.
October 8, 2026 · One Day · One Community
This is the day the UX community comes together to have the conversations that actually move things forward. The kind you think about on the drive home. The kind that change how you show up to work on Monday and keep changing how you show up six months later.
The People In The Room
Don Norman
coined the term user experience. He wrote the book sitting on nearly every designer’s shelf. He helped found the world’s first Department of Cognitive Science, became Vice President of Advanced Technology at Apple, and co-founded the Nielsen Norman Group, the firm that shaped how the entire industry thinks about human-centered design. At 88 he is still publishing, still challenging, and still asking this field to be braver than it is comfortable being.
Hearing Don Norman speak in 2026 is not a conference checkbox. It is a once in a career opportunity.
Alongside him:
Niyati Gupta has spent a decade leading design at Google, WhatsApp, and Netflix. Her talk, The Invisible Work of UX, pulls back the curtain on the facilitation, the framing, and the organizational influence that separates good designers from indispensable ones.
Calvin Robertson has built and led design teams at the Federal Reserve Bank, Lowe’s, Best Buy, and Corning. His session on overflowing leadership is about what it looks like when design thinking and genuine care for people drive outcomes at every level of an organization.
Amanda Gelb, founder of Aha Studio, designs high-impact workshops that spark genuine insight and move people toward real action. Her keynote is the kind of thing you find yourself quoting in meetings for months afterward.
Raven Adaramola is a Senior Product Designer at The New York Times, where millions of people open the Games app every single day to play Wordle, Connections, and The Crossword. She designs that experience.
Twisha Shah Brandenburg leads design and product at Target at the intersection of UX, strategy, engineering constraints, and organizational systems, where experience quality gets decided long before anything ships.
Zach Thomas leads cross-functional teams at Skylight modernizing mission-critical federal systems for the DHS, the US Air Force, and the CDC through human-centered design, the kind of work where getting it wrong has real consequences.
Leo Hoar founded the UXR Institute after seeing a gap in advanced, career-focused education for UX researchers. He filled it himself.
Basel Fakhoury co-founded User Interviews, one of the most widely used research recruitment platforms in the industry, now acquired by UserTesting where he serves as SVP.
Your Host: Jeremy Miller
Jeremy Miller has been in design since the early 2000s. Through his podcast Beyond UX Design he has been making one argument consistently: the practitioners who last are not always the most technically skilled. They are the ones who know how to build relationships, navigate organizations, and make people believe in the work.
He co-founded Edge Kase Design Co. in 2024 and has spent years mentoring practitioners at every stage of their careers. He will be guiding the entire day at UXCON26 and there is no one better suited for it.
UXCON26 is not a content marathon. It is not a day of back to back slides you close your laptop on and forget. It is the one day of the year where this community gets honest about what is actually happening in the field, what is working, what is not, and what comes next for the people who care enough to show up.
The room is almost full. This is your moment to be in it.
📚 Resource Corner
→ Beyond UX Design Podcast with Jeremy Miller · The show built around the skills that actually determine how long a UX career lasts
→ Design for a Better World by Don Norman · His most recent book and his most urgent argument for why this work matters
→ Making an Impact Substack by Twisha Shah Brandenburg · Practical thinking on design leadership and organizational influence from one of UXCON26’s speakers
Final Thought
The field is changing. The community is gathering. October 8 is where you show up for both.
The UXU Team