This post is for PhD students and early-career UX, HCI and design researchers who find conference networking draining. The goal isn't to turn you into a schmoozer. It's to give you a small, repeatable set of moves so you leave a conference with two or three real conversations instead of a stack of forgotten badges.
Why conference networking feels gross — and a better frame
Most networking advice treats a conference like a sales floor. Work the room. Hit your numbers. Follow up with everyone. No wonder it feels off to researchers, who spend their working lives trying to be precise about who they're talking to and why.
The better frame is simpler: a conference is a rare chance to start a few conversations you couldn't start over email. Not fifty. Three. Maybe five. The people whose work actually overlaps with yours, where a 20-minute chat would change how you think about your next study.
Once you swap "meet as many people as possible" for "start three real conversations," most of the gross feeling goes away. You stop scanning the room. You can listen.
Before: pick 3 sessions and email one question ahead
The work that makes a conference feel good is mostly done before you arrive.
A week or two out, read the program properly. Pick three sessions where the work is close to yours, not just interesting. Close enough that you could ask a specific question about method, sample, or framing. If you're heading to DIS 2026 in Singapore this June, or CSCW in Salt Lake City this October, the program is usually up early enough to do this without panic.
Then do the part most people skip: email one of those authors a single, short question before the conference. Not a coffee request. A question about their paper. "I'm working on something adjacent on X — how did you decide to exclude Y?" Most researchers reply. You've now turned a stranger in a hallway into someone who half-knows you.
If you're going to a bigger event like UIST in Detroit or CHI 2027 in Pittsburgh, this is even more important. Big conferences are hard to navigate cold. A few pre-arranged "oh, you're the person who emailed" moments make the whole thing feel survivable.
During: smaller rooms, single-track, lunch over lanyards
Once you're there, optimise for small rooms, not big ones.
Workshops, doctoral consortia, and single-track sessions are where conversations actually happen. The plenary hall is networking theatre. A 30-person workshop where everyone introduces their work is, functionally, a small conference inside a big one. Sign up for one even if the topic is slightly off your core area.
Lunch and coffee breaks are where the real work gets done, and they're also where most early-career researchers freeze. A small trick: don't try to network at lunch. Just sit at a table that isn't full and ask the person next to you what they're working on. That's it. You're not pitching. You're a researcher asking another researcher about their research. It's the most natural conversation in the world, and the lanyard does the introduction for you.
Skip one session a day on purpose. Tired-you in the back row of a talk you half-care about is not networking. Tired-you sitting outside with a coffee, ready to talk to whoever sits down, often is.
After: the follow-up that turns a contact into a peer
The follow-up is where most conference networking quietly dies.
Within a week, email the two or three people you actually had a real conversation with. Reference the specific thing you talked about. Send the paper you mentioned. Ask one follow-up question. That's the whole email. You're not proposing collaboration. You're keeping a thread warm.
The goal over the next six months is to move from "met at CSCW" to "person I occasionally email about method problems." That's a peer. That's what makes the next conference easier, because now you have people to find instead of people to meet.
This is also where a monthly rhythm helps. Conferences are spiky. You see your community once a year and then go quiet. We built Research Lunch Club around a monthly cadence because most researchers we've designed for don't need one more annual event — they need a low-effort way to keep talking to peers between the big ones. You can see how the lunches are matched and which cities we run in if you're curious.
A small checklist you can actually use
One short list, because lists are easier to remember in a hotel lobby.
- Pick three sessions where the work overlaps yours.
- Email one author one specific question before you fly.
- Choose one workshop or small-format session per day.
- At lunch, sit at a not-full table and ask what they're working on.
- Within a week, send two follow-up emails referencing the actual conversation.
That's the whole playbook. It works because it treats networking as research behaviour — reading carefully, asking precise questions, following up — instead of as performance.
None of this requires you to become a different person at conferences. It just shifts the target from quantity to a handful of real conversations, which is what most researchers wanted from the event in the first place. If you're a researcher and you'd like a lower-stakes way to practise this between conferences, the next round of lunches is open for sign-ups. Apply at /join.