Speaker Page
| Angela Martin: Building the Future We Want Artificial intelligence is reshaping how we work, communicate, and access essential services—but who gets to participate in that future? As AI scales at unprecedented speed, it carries both extraordinary potential and real risks. It can break down barriers, expand independence, and create new pathways to opportunity—or it can replicate inequities and accelerate exclusion faster than ever before. The difference lies in how intentionally we build it. Advisory UX Designer and Lenovo disability advocacy leader Angela Martin draws on personal experience and industry insights to reveal the invisible barriers AI creates while demonstrating the transformational opportunities when we design with intention. This session offers both honest reckoning and tangible hope: the next generation of AI could be the most inclusive technology we’ve ever built—if we choose to build it that way. Bio. Angela Martin is an Advisory UX Designer with Lenovo’s UXD Software group, where she designs inclusive digital experiences for more than 44 million monthly users worldwide. As Chair of ABLE, Lenovo’s disability inclusion employee resource group, she’s grown membership and advocates for accessibility at the organizational level. Angela’s passion for inclusive design is deeply personal—as a dyslexic designer, she learned to read using assistive technology on a 2008 ThinkPad, proving that accessible tech doesn’t just accommodate difference; it unlocks potential. Beyond Lenovo, she co-founded Design Storming LLC to mentor emerging creatives, ranks in the top 2% of mentors globally on ADPList with 5,000+ mentoring minutes, and is a certified Humane Technologist. She’s the author of This Is Not a Dream: From Daydream to Day Job and believes that innovation without equity is just exclusion at scale. |
| 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: Design Judgment When You're Designing with AI AI is changing how product work is done, but it is not removing the need for design judgment. In this talk, Ryan Bolick will explore how UX designers can use AI systems to support ideation, codify parts of their own design process, critique product decisions, and move from rough concepts to working prototypes faster. Drawing from recent tools he has built, the talk will focus on the practical opportunity for UX professionals: using AI as a design partner without outsourcing taste, strategy, or human understanding. 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. |
 | Caleb Furlough: The Economics of AI in UX: Practical application of theory & history to the future of UX The rise of AI has sparked a range of reactions across the UX community, from nervous apprehension to eager anticipation. What can we learn from the field of economics? Should we feel optimistic about the future of UX? This talk draws on classic economic theories and historical parallels from other industries to look at the big picture of UX in the AI age. We will explore how task automation has consistently reshaped, transformed, and expanded, rather than eliminated, different fields of expertise. We'll also explore where different economic frameworks and historical examples suggest UX practitioners should focus their time and energy in an increasingly AI landscape. You'll walk away with practical, historically grounded takeaways for positioning UX work to thrive during AI advancements. Bio. Caleb Furlough, PhD is UX Research Director I at Truist, leading research for Digital Client Acquisition experiences across retail, small business, and investment products. He has worked in UX for more than 15 years, researching and designing products in fintech, healthcare IT, medical devices, and B2B cloud software, among others. |
 | Don Sugar: Prototyping Using AI Tools: Missing the Human Touch? You have already heard the scaremongering about AI UX design tools -- we as designers will be simply replaced by AI. While AI tools like Figma Make may augment and enhance our design process, they have inherent flaws that are not easily solved and require human thought and intervention. In this lightning talk we will explore the strengths and weaknesses of AI protyping tools, including real life examples of AI prototypes, comparing and contrasting the results of a AI design using Claude and Gemini LLMs. Bio. Don Sugar, PsyD is an experienced senior UX designer and researcher, with more than 20 years of professional experience, with demonstrated ability to lead and mentor others. He is highly successful in interface design, usability testing, user research, evaluation, training, and requirements analysis. Recognized for creating highly intuitive and usable interfaces for complex enterprise and desktop, mobile and web based applications, and working effectively with people at all levels of expertise, creating practical solutions to a variety of challenging business needs. He has worked in the telecommunications, information technology, networking, enterprise tape storage, healthcare, CRM, and legal practice management arenas. His background as a licensed clinical psychologist gives him a unique perspective, and deep understanding of users and their needs, motivations, and goals. |