Speaker Page
| Rosa Carbajal: Bringing UX Research to Life Via Persona Agents Persona agents offer a powerful new way to bring UX research to life. In this interactive workshop, attendees will collaboratively design and build AI-powered persona agents, learning how to translate research insights into dynamic, behavior-driven representations. Participants will be guided through the fundamentals of prompt engineering, including how to structure persona inputs and shape agent responses to reflect how users think, act, and make decisions. Working hands-on, attendees will leave with a functional persona agent they can immediately apply in their own work. Bio. Rosa Carbajal is a Senior UX Research Manager and experience strategy leader who integrates AI-augmented workflows with human-centered design to deliver actionable enterprise intelligence. Beyond my technical leadership and stewardship of the NetApp Innovation Leaders program with NC State University, I serve as the Director of Volunteers for the UXPA, where I foster community growth and leadership development. |
| Cindy McCracken & Archana Shah: Speeding Up Research Without Losing Rigor This session explores how UX researchers are using AI to accelerate their work—without compromising the rigor that makes research trustworthy. Through a short framing talk and interactive discussions, we’ll examine where AI truly adds speed, where it introduces risk, and what guardrails are emerging in practice. Participants will share real-world approaches across different types of research and leave with clearer ways to balance efficiency, depth, and defensibility in their work. Bio. Cindy McCracken, a UX Research Director at LexisNexis with about 20 years of experience in technology. My background includes financial services, email marketing, and legaltech, with previous roles at Fidelity Investments and iContact. I’ve spent the past five years leading UX research teams and working with product, design, and engineering partners to support product development across North America and global initiatives. Much of my work involves improving how research is shared and used to help teams make better decisions |
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Bio. Archana J. Shah is a Principal UX Researcher at LexisNexis, where she leads research across complex product ecosystems and helps teams translate insights into impactful decisions. With 15+ years of experience spanning fintech, telecom, and legal tech—and a background in software development—she brings a hybrid lens to modern research. Her recent work focuses on how AI is reshaping the research lifecycle, with an emphasis on balancing speed, rigor, and trust while scaling research at an enterprise level.
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| Rajiv Ramarajan & Riley Benson: The LLM User: Designing for Novel Cognition
LLMs placed in an agentic system will sometimes act without checking documentation, make seemingly simple mistakes, or attempt creative workarounds. It is important to not attribute human intelligence to LLMs, but they nevertheless exhibit similar weaknesses and variable behavior. The equivalent of an interface for an LLM is currently the agentic “harness”. If we can find the appropriate abstractions for the novel “user” and “interface” the development of LLMs has introduced then there may be an untapped area for UX practitioners to apply their skills to. And even if you aren’t building a harness, knowing more about it helps design tools and information that LLM driven harnesses will interact with. Bio. Rajiv Ramarajan recently led the product design team at SAS. He has over 20 years of experience in design, design management, and design strategy. He has led teams of user experience designers, visual designers, and user researchers and collaborated with various product leaders to help deliver compelling, approachable, and easy-to-use analytic products. He has also worked at various brand and creative agencies. |
| Bio. Riley Benson has been a UX designer at SAS since 2009. He works on data visualization, productivity software design, and most recently GenAI and agent integration. As a career-long UX designer, his degree is in Computer Science and have found a niche in bridging the gap between engineering and design. |
 | Laura Ruel: Your Users Aren’t Evaluating AI Content the Way You Think UX teams are rapidly integrating AI-generated content—but often based on assumptions about how users perceive it. This session shares findings from eye-tracking research and a real-world “AI vs. real” experiment, showing how Gen Z actually pays attention, makes judgments, and forms trust around generated content. The results reveal a gap between what users notice, what they believe, and what actually drives trust. You’ll leave with practical ways to test, evaluate, and use AI-generated content more effectively in your UX work. Bio. Laura Ruel is an applied UX researcher and professor at UNC–Chapel Hill. She studies how people actually respond to AI-generated content, with current work including an eye-tracking study on Gen Z’s attention and trust patterns, along with a real-world experiment where users try (and often struggle) to distinguish real vs. AI imagery. |
| Ryan Bolick Bio. Ryan Bolick is an experienced engineer and designer with a diverse background in SaaS, AI, user experience design, and FDA-cleared devices. He has a notable history of delivering software products to millions of users, with expertise in UI/UX, web development, and branding. Additionally, Ryan has successfully taken physical products from the stages of industrial design and R&D to scaled-up manufacturing. His passion for bringing ideas to life, combined with his broad-ranging expertise, makes him a reliable asset in bridging the gap between conceptualization and implementation. |
