The Climate Assessment for the Southwest (CLIMAS) is one of several Regional Integrated Science and Assessment (RISA) projects established in recent years in the United States. These RISAs have begun to blur the division between climate science and society, through the production of “usable” knowledge from interaction between scientists, policymakers and the public. Climate scientists, like many other members of the science community, have typically had difficulty involving users (a.k.a. stakeholders) in the process of knowledge creation in efforts to gain broader support for their research enterprise. One critical aspect has been their inability to reconcile the needs of users with the state of their science. We address this issue by describing the way basic and applied climate science have been integrated with user needs in the “end-to-end” RISA model by CLIMAS. First, we discuss how the interdisciplinary CLIMAS team works with users to identify common research objectives. Next, these objectives are placed in a framework that summarizes the basic character of the research and its relation to users. We then highlight these interactions by examining specific examples of climate research sub-projects driven by users’ needs. We draw from our interactions with users in different areas such as water and wildland fire management, public health, farming and ranching. Finally, we discuss lessons learned and highlight how the concept of usable science can be expanded into a critical component of the climate science enterprise with the establishment of a new national climate services program.