Sarah Ann Jump

User Experience Researcher

I’m a curiosity-driven user researcher, with experience gathering insights on both consumer-facing and business-to-business teams building products and services. Learn more about me ↗

Selected Projects: Controlling Change // Risk Analyst Personas // Web Accessibility for Parkinson’s // Reimagining Worthi // Love Is Not A Memory

A collage of research deliverables for the Women's Parkinson's Project

generative & Evaluative Research

Controlling Change

Recruitment Strategy

Activity-based Interviews

Concept Testing

Co-synthesis Facilitation

Company: Atlassian, a B2B SaaS maker of team collaboration software

Timeframe: 3.5 months ✽ 2022-2023

Project Goal: Explore giving enterprise software admin more control over the change management process

Research Objectives: Learn admins’ motivations for wanting more control ✽ Understand the use cases and expectations for controls ✽ Identify concerns, risks, and complexities

Deliverables: Recruitment strategy for enterprise customers ✽ Discussion guide ✽ Customer postcards ✽ Postcard framework & template ✽ Collaboration model with customer success teams

Cross-Functional Team: Product Designer ✽ Content Designer ✽ Product Manager ✽ Technical Account Managers ✽ Customer Success Managers ✽ Enterprise Advocates ✽ Engineers

Impact: Stakeholder engagement throughout all phases of this study led to increased relationship building. Improved collaboration was noticed by the team's leadership and influenced future project planning.

By involving Design and PM through open interviews, debriefs, and co-synthesis, the team felt confident making decisions efficiently. We were able to seamlessly move from the discovery interview phase to exploring solutions with concept testing.

The research insights are currently being used to reevaluate the product roadmap to prioritize this feature.

Fellow researchers expressed interest in the easy-to-digest customer postcards I created to share with my stakeholders, so I documented the framework and created a template to contribute to our organizational research socialization practices.

Customer postcards deliverable

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A collage of deliverables from my persona project at Interos

generative research

Risk Analyst Personas

In-depth Interviews

Participatory Design

Socialization Strategy

Workshop Facilitation

Company: Interos, a B2B SaaS supply chain risk management platform

Timeframe: 6 months ✽ 2021

Project Goals: Understand our customers ✽ Alignment among teams ✽ Create a long lasting resource

Research Objectives: Understand the professionals’ motivations, processes, tools, challenges, needs, and stakeholders relationships

Deliverables: Visually-rich persona profiles ✽ Journey map ✽ Adaptable virtual workshop template ✽ Company-wide presentation ✽ Interactive poster mockup ✽ Employee engagement quiz ✽ Communication plan

Cross-Functional Team: Product Designer ✽ Graphic Designer ✽ Product Managers ✽ Customer Success Managers ✽ Subject Matter Experts ✽ Product Marketers ✽ Engineers

Impact: During the product and engineering team workshops I facilitated, we discussed how they would use the personas in their work. Responses included understanding user needs for specific upcoming features, writing product requirements based on user pain points, identifying new use cases, and prioritizing the evolution of features and enhancements.

One engineer said that the personas helped them to “understand how heavily the users rely on our platform for their sanity”.

Product leadership insisted that a persona field be added to their project management software so that with every task, team members were asked to identify and keep in mind the people they were developing for.

The personas were also incorporated into strategic planning use cases by Engineering and Product leadership.

Customer journey map deliverable

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A collage of deliverables for the Women's Parkinson's Project

evaluative research

Web Accessibility
for Parkinson’s

Heuristic Evaluation

Accessibility Audit

Navigation Tree Testing

Organization: Women’s Parkinson’s Project, a non-profit advocating for better treatment and research for women with Parkinson’s Disease

Timeframe: 2 months ✽ 2021

Project Goal: Ensure the WPP website best serves its audience through considering usability, accessibility, and hand tremors from Parkinson’s disease

Research Objectives: Understand users’ impressions and expectations of the website’s navigation ✽ Uncover opportunities to improve the user experience and accessibility of the website on desktop and mobile

Deliverables: Research plan ✽ Heuristic evaluation ✽ Accessibility audit

Accessibility Resources ‍

for web design for Parkinson’s

    Impact: Crafting custom heuristics that took into account usability, accessibility, and Parkinson's disease led to dozens of findings that were used not only to improve the user experience of the Women’s Parkinson’s Project website, but also the platforms of other Parkinson’s organizations, such as the Davis Phinney Foundation.

    I enjoyed the educational responsibility that came with writing recommendations in a way that both made sense and were actionable for a person creating a website with no prior design experience.

    This project inspired me to pursue my Certified Professional in Web Accessibility credential from the International Association of Accessibility Professionals.

    Heuristic evaluation rubric

    Click to view deliverable

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    A collage of research and design deliverables for Worthi by Citi

    generative & Evaluative Research

    Reimagining Worthi

    In-depth Interviews

    Concept Testing

    Usability Testing

    Workshop Facilitation

    Company: Citi Ventures, an innovation incubator promoting economy vitality

    Timeframe: 6 months ✽ 2020-2021

    Project Goal: Redesign Worthi, a free web app, to be more useful in helping job seekers use workforce data to make informed career decisions

    Research Objectives: Identify the ways people research potential careers ✽ Learn how people identify and acquire new skills ✽ Understand which factors people consider when making career decisions

    Deliverables: Research plan ✽ Discussion guide ✽ Participant screener ✽ Insights presentation ✽ Interactive visual report ✽ Ideation workshop ✽ Empathy maps ✽ User personas ✽ Customer journey map ✽ Competitive analysis ✽ User flow

    Cross-Functional Team: Product Designers ✽ Product Manager

    Impact: Foundational research helped the team to better understand the motivations and struggles of job seekers.

    I collaborated with Worthi’s Product Manager to develop and implement the first protocol for recruiting existing product users for research studies, leading to increased stakeholder exposure to users.

    Learnings from my concept testing study with existing users influenced the design direction of the next iteration of the product, which shipped in fall 2021.

    Further user feedback was prioritized during a team workshop that I facilitated. It was incorporated into the long-term product roadmap and product-market fit strategy.

    Worthi by Citi was a Webby Awards Honoree in the Employment Websites & Mobile Sites category.

    Annotated prototype deliverable

    Click to view deliverable

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    A collage of photos and handwriting from a newspaper photo story

    visual storytelling

    Love Is Not A Memory

    Documentary Photography

    In-depth Interviews

    Ethnography

    Artifact Analysis

    View Photo Story →

    Company: The Herald, a community newspaper featuring long-form stories

    Timeframe: 6 months ✽ 2017-2018

    Project Goal: Promote empathy and understanding for people living with dementia and their caregivers

    Deliverables: Front page story with 6 page spread ✽ Indiana University Words & Pictures Workshop ✽ Photojournalism conference presentations

    Cross-Functional Team: Writer ✽ Visuals Editor ✽ Newspaper Publisher

    Why is this in my user research portfolio? This photo story, produced when I was a photojournalist, showcases my skills in empathic storytelling, building trust, in-depth interviewing, and observation documentation.

    My hope is that by sharing this project, you will appreciate the challenging environment in which I spent years honing my instincts and can see how these skills are transferrable to user research.

    Stay tuned after the photo story for more about my storytelling process and the story’s impact.

    Annotated prototype deliverable

    Click to view deliverable

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