Workshops

AI is rapidly changing how teams conduct UX research–but most practitioners still lack a reliable way to determine where AI improves business outcomes and where it introduces too much risk.

In this workshop, you'll use transparent, custom-built AI research tools to observe exactly how AI impacts research data and business decisions. Through hands-on experimentation, grounded in academic research and controlled testing, you'll gain an accurate understanding of AI's capabilities and failure modes for common research approaches.

You'll leave with a framework for evaluating AI research tools and evidence-based best practices for making informed trade-offs between AI and traditional methods.

Somewhere between 50 and 80% of AI projects fail. That's at least double the failure rate of traditional IT projects. Companies have poured tens of billions into AI, and the returns so far are dismal: one recent MIT report found 95% of organizations getting zero return on their investment. The problem usually isn't the technology. It's that teams keep picking the wrong projects: technically ambitious, high-risk endeavors that demand near-perfect accuracy to be useful, when what most organizations actually need are the many modest, valuable, low-risk AI projects hiding in plain sight. The traditional user-centered design process alone won't find them.

This workshop teaches a set of techniques that designers, product managers, and researchers can start using immediately. It adapts what we've been teaching our graduate students at Carnegie Mellon's Human-Computer Interaction Institute for working practitioners: short lectures to introduce each method, then hands-on exercises to practice it. You'll work in teams on real concepts, not hypotheticals.

AI is full of promise for users, but it introduces risk as well: over-reliance and deskilling. The good news is that you as a designer can do something about each of these.

Come hear Christopher Noessel introduce the problems, share examples, and walk us through the patterns we can implement to help take some of the sting out of AI.

There is a part of your work that doesn’t fit in a prompt.

The reading of the room. The timing you feel before you can explain it. The knowing that something is off in a system long before the data says so. You have been trained to treat this as background — the soft part, the instinct, the thing you leave at the door to focus on the real work.

It is the real work. And it is precisely what the systems being built right now cannot do.

Agentic AI is reorganizing what work is, who does it, and what it’s for. It is optimizing for the legible, the repeatable, the extractable. What falls outside that optimization is the sensemaking that happens in the white space. You cannot automate it. You can only automate around it, which is what most organizations are currently doing, and in doing so they are losing something they cannot recover by adding more tools.

This workshop is about that something. What it is, why it matters more now than it ever has, and what you owe the systems you are already shaping.

An all-day development salon for user experience leaders

UX leaders are getting it from all sides. Mandates from senior leadership about incorporating AI into the work. Frustration, anxiety, even outright fear from team members worried about their workload, their processes, their futures. All of it on top of everything already expected of them.

It makes for an emotional roller coaster. The ability to deliver powerful new value is tempered by exhaustion and insecurity — about the job, and sometimes about the relationship to the work itself. Research by Noam Segal for Lenny's Newsletter found that UX and research professionals are the least happy in their work.

Compounding this is the isolation inherent in both the role and the technology. UX leadership has always been demanding and lonely. That is now amplified.

Shift UX advances this premise: roles disappear, but the work matters more than ever. For leaders, that premise raises a harder question. If your title no longer defines your value, what does?

That's the question this salon takes on.

A companion to the Shift UX conference, this all-day gathering brings together UX leaders at director level and above to wrestle with the real challenges of leading with purpose during turbulent times. Facilitated by Peter Merholz, the salon is an opportunity to step back, gain perspective, and lead from a place of clarity rather than exhaustion and reaction.