Over the past two years, I’ve been running the Bridging the gap between research and design survey. What started as a way to better understand collaboration between researchers and designers gradually became something broader: a way of listening to the challenges researchers themselves are facing.
Again and again, similar themes emerged.
Researchers talked about struggling to demonstrate the value of their work. About organisations wanting quick answers rather than deeper understanding. About feeling pressure to produce certainty from ambiguity. About methods and frameworks being treated as more important than judgment, sensitivity, or interpretation.
And underneath all of that was a deeper question:
What does it actually mean to understand people well?
That question became the starting point for Clear Insight.
Clear Insight is a new one-day conference in Brighton for design and research practitioners. It’s for UX researchers who want to become better at understanding people, not just better at running research.
Who is Clear Insight for?
The conference is for researchers at any stage who feel that surface-level findings aren’t enough, and who want to develop the judgment, confidence, and sensitivity that lead to deeper insight. It’s also for stakeholders, commissioners, and leaders who want to think more carefully about research quality, value, and what meaningful understanding really takes.
What's it all about?
This isn’t trying to teach people how to 'do research'.
There are already many excellent conferences, courses, and talks focused on methods, tooling, recruitment, synthesis, and process. Those things matter. But Clear Insight is interested in something slightly different: the gap between observing behaviour and truly understanding people.
In UX research, we’re often very good at describing what happens. What people say. What they click on. Where they struggle. Which journeys fail. But understanding why those things happen is often much harder.
People can be contradictory. Motivations are not always visible. Behaviour doesn’t always fit neatly into frameworks. And people themselves don’t always have easy access to the reasons behind their own actions.
Good research requires more than simply collecting observations. It requires interpretation, curiosity, empathy, and the ability to sit with uncertainty long enough for clearer understanding to emerge.
That’s what Clear Insight is about.
The conference won’t be built around quick tips, growth hacks, or “10 things to improve your usability testing”. Instead, it’s intended as a space to reflect more deeply on the craft of understanding itself.
We’ll explore questions like:
- How do researchers move beyond surface-level findings?
- How can we make insight meaningful rather than merely descriptive?
- How do we handle ambiguity, contradiction, and complexity?
- How do we understand what people are thinking when they might not be aware of it themselves?
- How do we protect the quality of understanding in fast-moving organisations?
Most importantly, Clear Insight is intended to be a conference where research is taken seriously - not just as a process for generating outputs, but as a practice concerned with understanding human beings.
The event will take place in Brighton and will bring together people from research, design, and related disciplines who care about developing deeper, more thoughtful approaches to understanding people.
If that resonates with you, I’d love for you to join us.
We're also looking for speakers, so if you've got something you'd like to share, then send us your idea.
You can find out more about the conference at clearinsightconf.com.