About Me

I am a Senior User Experience Researcher with an additional background in UI/UX Design and US Strategy. I lead teams to understand what products and features to design and build based on a user-centered research approach that puts users first, while acknowledging very real business needs. I also help teams to validate products with users through concept and/or usability testing.

Education

Ph.D., Information Science
University of Michigan
June 2008 - September 2013

B.S., Psychology
Carnegie Mellon University
August 2000-May2005

User Research

My research approach is to use whichever qualitative or quantitative research methods are best suited to answering questions and tell a complete user story or communicate user needs and support gaps.

I have conducted UX research in B2B settings, pharmaceutical advertising/marketing, finance, and the HR/People space.

Some examples:

  • Usability Testing with Multiple Sclerosis patients to understand their patient/customer journey on a MS medication website
  • Task Analysis to explore how portfolio managers perform their jobs, and used the data from that to inform the design of next-gen investor tools
  • User interviews to uncover the experience gaps in new-hire Onboarding and determine how existing tools did or did not support those employees
  • Employee Survey to provide key data in understanding the post-COVID back-to-office experience at Meta

Recent Things I've worked on

A few examples of past projects. To learn more about work, send me an email!

Meta People Analytics

I led a research work stream to understand the manager experience at Meta. I worked with stakeholders in the HR space and our internal People Products team to understand the types of work managers do through interviews and focus groups. Used the "Jobs to Be Done" framework to inform a an HR/People and Product strategy that prioritized programs, training, product features and new tools that support managers where the managers needed it most.

JP Morgan Spectrum

I led Design System Research with support from Design and Product in JP Morgan's Asset Management organization. Conducted internal research with employees to discover how to best drive user adoption, which problems the design system could solve, and test how the design system implementation performed across user personas.

Impacts of the research included:

  • Discovered a design opportunity to bring experience and visual cohesion the Spectrum family of apps together through a new, consolidated charts/graphs feature. Further research explored user needs from both the end users (Asset management's front-office and back-office) as well as the developer end users (the ones to implement the features into the apps).
  • Settled a long-running debate between whether to support light and dark versions across the Spectrum family of apps by conducting research to understand employee needs and impacts of supporting both versus sunsetting/deprecating one of the styles.

Betaseron.com

I led discovery workshops and design thinking sessions to inform the strategy for the redesign of a product website that caters to a pharmaceutical drug, BETASERON, that treats multiple sclerosis.

I designed a usability test for our vendors to execute with patients and led the translation between research findings to customer experience strategy and design recommendations.

I also led the user experience design for this website, using a mobile-first approach and working heavily with developers, a content strategist, and graphic design team.

Greenstone Pharmacy Locator

Worked with Pfizer subsidiary, Greenstone LLC to establish user needs and brand goals for a mobile app—Greenstone Locator.

This mobile app helps patients on Greenstone's generic medications to locate a pharmacy that most likely has that generic in stock. It can be found on the iTunes and Google Play app stores

Discovery: Personas & User Journeys

Used research to develop personas of people who smoke. These personas informed the user journey and content strategy (as well as the upcoming website design).

The persona and journey process led to a general Sketch template for my UX team to use as a foundation for the development of personas for future projects

Augmented & Virtual Reality

At ghg (greyhealth group), I am part of an innovation team that helps brands strategize around and implement augmented and virtual reality applications.

In addition to strategy, I help develop the tactics, which includes ideation, wireframing, and working with developers and visual designers to ensure that the products we make meet product requirements established during the discovery phase.