You'll still be talking about this in December.
The man who invented UX wants to hear from you
Don Norman coined the term “user experience.”
He wrote The Design of Everyday Things - the book sitting on your shelf right now. He co-founded Nielsen Norman Group. He was VP of Advanced Technology at Apple. He has published 21 books translated into 20 languages and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
At 88, he is still pushing this field forward.
On October 8th, he will be on stage at UXCON26 in Silver Spring, MD - live keynote, live Q&A, same room as you. Not a livestream. Not a panel via Zoom. You can raise your hand and ask him anything.
But it’s not all you’re getting.
The people sharing a stage with him:
Niyati Gupta spent the last decade at Google, WhatsApp, and now Netflix figuring out why some designers become indispensable and others don’t. Her talk will tell you exactly what the difference is.
Raven Adaramola designs the NYT Games experience, the one millions of people open before they’ve had their first coffee. She’s built her career across media, edtech, and streaming, and she sees design problems most people in one industry never encounter.
Calvin Robertson has led design at the Federal Reserve Bank, Lowe’s, Best Buy, and Corning. He’s going to talk about what leadership actually looks like when design is the thing holding an organization together.
Twisha Shah Brandenburg is a design leader at Target whose work lives where UX, product strategy, and engineering constraints collide - the place where experience quality gets decided before anything ships.
Basel Fakhoury co-founded User Interviews - the recruitment platform most of you have used to run research — which was acquired by UserTesting, where he’s now SVP. He’s coming to talk about where research infrastructure is heading, and what that means for how you work.
Amanda Gelb runs Aha Studio and her official title is Professional Question Asker. That’s not a joke. She designs workshops that move people from stuck to clear. Her session is the kind you keep quoting in meetings four months later and can’t remember exactly why it hit so hard.
Leo Hoar, PhD saw that advanced UX research education didn’t exist, so he built it. He founded UXR Institute after starting his research career at Samsung. He’s bringing the kind of practical depth that most conferences never get close to.
Zach Thomas leads human-centered design at Skylight for the DHS, US Air Force, and CDC. Work where getting it wrong has real consequences. He’s also a NASA JPL Solar System Ambassador, which has nothing to do with UX and everything to do with the kind of person who shows up to UXCON.
More speakers still to come.
What it felt like to be there last year
Now the part nobody talks about openly.
80% of roles are filled before they are ever posted.
They go to the person already in the conversation. The designer a hiring manager met at an event and remembered. The researcher someone introduced them to over lunch. The one who asked a sharp question after a panel, handed over a card, and followed up.
UXCON26 is full of those hiring managers. Past attendees have come from Harvard, IBM, Adobe, Johns Hopkins, Lockheed Martin, The Met, NIH, Vanguard, and T. Rowe Price. Not recruiters reading CVs. Decision-makers who hire people they’ve met.
Your ticket gets you into those conversations.
UXCON26 is more than a conference - it’s a room full of people who chose to show up. For their craft. For their community. For growth. And somewhere in that room is your next collaborator, mentor, or best idea.