UX Research
My Approach
I love talking to users to understand their pain points, challenges, and motivations. A user researcher is like being a detective. You need to ask the right questions and in the right way to get the information needed to solve for your users’ pain.
There are many different studies and techniques to conduct user research depending on the situation. It’s important to determine the appropriate study based on your resources to ensure you get the best information from your users. I’ve worked at startups where resources were tight and learned how to get creative and be resourceful to get necessary user information. My advice is to repurpose, stay organized, and plan ahead.
Check out my investigative work!
Experience
I kicked off my UX career with a BA in Interactive Digital Design at Quinnipiac University and continued my education at the intensive bootcamp, The Startup Institute.
I started my UX Research career at the personalization Startup, Evergage (now a Salesforce company) where I worked for 5 years. When I started the engineers were designing the product. I joined the product team as the second designer under the UX Director.
The team and I created the design culture and I spearheaded the user research program. I quickly became the user advocate and “go-to” person for user research. The user base and product grew exponentially into a platform over those 5 years. The user research and testing allowed the team to design for our target users. My work advocating for UX and the user changed the mentality of the company, engineering team, and product team from the design team makes things “look pretty,” to the product team makes things usable and useful (and “look pretty”).
One of my favorite projects was organizing a dual co-design for our company’s annual summit. The UX Director and I each facilitated a session. The team gained valuable insights and direction for our next two big initiatives. I enjoy teaching and was able to teach the team about best practices and how to facilitate the sessions.
I’m a part of the Speaker Sisterhood, an all women public speaking organization. I gave UX advice and feedback on the member portal and created a survey to gain user input for an upcoming workbook that they were publishing.
Next, I worked for Bay Area data management startup, StreamSets, where I set up their user research program and conducted a user research study. Unfortunately, my time was cut short due to Covid-19.
UX Skills
UX Research
Personas
Surveys
User interviews
User scenarios
User tests
Co-designs
Validation tests
Creating user research programs
Teaching user research
Creating a culture around user research
Other
- UX Design
- Project management
- Product management
- Process Development
- Presentation Development
Software
Design
- Figma
- Axure
- Sketch
- Photoshop
- Illustrator
- InDesign
Project / Product Management
- Aha!
- Trello
- Asana
- AirTable
- Product Board
- YouTrack
- Confluence
- Jira
Don’t see what you’re looking for? Don’t worry, I’m a fast learner!