I'm a curiosity-driven user researcher, with experience gathering insights on both consumer-facing and business-to-business teams building digital products. Learn more about me ↗
Role: UX Researcher at Atlassian
Timeframe: 6 months ✽ 2022-2023
Tools: User Interviews ✽ Dovetail ✽ Zoom ✽ Figma ✽ FigJam ✽ Confluence ✽ Jira ✽ Atlas ✽ Google Slides
Deliverables: Participant recruitment strategy for enterprise customers ✽ Postcard graphics ✽ Postcard template ✽ Guidelines for collaborating with customer-facing roles
Collaboration: Product Designer ✽ Content Designer ✽ Product Manager ✽ Technical Account Managers ✽ Customer Success Managers ✽ Engineering Leaders
How might we help
Work in progress. 📝
More info coming soon!!
Role: Contract UX Researcher at Interos
Timeframe: 6 months ✽ 2021
Tools: Microsoft Excel, Teams & PowerPoint ✽ Adobe Illustrator & Premiere Pro ✽ Miro ✽ Figma ✽ EnjoyHQ ✽ Confluence
Deliverables: Visually-rich wiki page for each persona that included a first-person profile, audio quotes, challenges & needs table, graph of challenges by importance and frequency, stakeholders matrix, and journey map ✽ Adaptable virtual workshop template ✽ Company-wide presentation ✽ Interactive poster mockup ✽ Employee engagement quiz ✽ Communication plan with pre-written Slack channel posts
Collaboration: Product Designer ✽ Graphic Designer ✽ Product Managers ✽ Customer Success Managers ✽ Engineers ✽ Subject Matter Experts
Persona Goals: Understand our customers ✽ Alignment among teams ✽ Create a long lasting resource
Interos, a B2B SaaS supply chain risk management platform, set out to better understand its users — supply chain analysts and other niche professionals across a number of specializations. The creation of research-backed user personas aimed to help the people behind the platform better understand those using it. We knew who the people spending the money to access the tool were, but those weren’t necessarily the same people using it on a daily basis.
Thirty-three interviews featuring participatory design activities resulted in 3 user personas, with plans to expand the suite as priorities allowed.
During the product team workshop I facilitated, we discussed how team members of varying roles would use the personas in their work; including 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.
Role: Volunteer UX Researcher at the Women's Parkinson's Project
Timeframe: 3 months ✽ 2021
Tools: Google Sheets ✽ FigJam ✽ Optimal Workshop Treejack ✽ Alt Text Checker
Deliverables: Heuristic evaluation & accessibility report ✽ Tree testing results with visualizations
Collaboration: WPP co-founder
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
🔗 Accessible Design Resources:
The Women's Parkinson's Project was co-founded by three women who share a life-changing diagnosis: Young Onset Parkinson's Disease. Through the WPP website, the organization is on a mission to raise their voices for better treatment and research for women with Parkinson's. I evaluated the website and made recommendations to ensure that the online home of WPP best serves its audience.
One of the early signs of Parkinson's are tremors, experienced by about 70% of people with the disease. This can make scrolling through a web page difficult, particularly on a mobile device. After collaborating with the organization's co-founder on the research objectives, I crafted custom heuristics that took into account usability, accessibility, and Parkinson's disease.
One challenge was writing the recommendations in a way that both made sense and were actionable for a person creating a website with no prior design experience. I was careful to communicate without jargon. I attempted to make the report about all the issues entertaining by using emojis to represent each of the heuristics, issue severity, and ease of fix ratings. I enjoyed the process of educating them on why the heuristics were important, and this experience inspired me to pursue my Certified Professional in Accessibility Core Competencies credential from the IAAP.
Role: Graduate UX Researcher for project sponsored by Citi Ventures Studio
Timeframe: 10 weeks ✽ 2020
Tools: Zoom ✽ Miro ✽ Google Sheets ✽ Figma ✽ Adobe Premier ✽ Keynote
Deliverables: High-fidelity interactive prototype ✽ Empathy maps ✽ User personas ✽ Customer journey map ✽ User flow ✽ Wireframes ✽ Business plan ✽ Product video ✽ Pitch presentation for Citi leadership
Collaboration: Graduate UI Designer ✽ Graduate Product Manager ✽ Professional Business Advisors ✽ Citi Stakeholders
How might we help 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 and find the most motivating when making career decisions
As part of the Citi University Partnerships in Innovation & Discovery program, my team of four School of Visual Arts MFA Interaction Design graduate students created a solution for promoting skills-based job growth. Inspired by our research and the core goals of Worthi by Citi, we reimagined the web-based tool to incorporate more exploration. Our project was the winner of the Strategic Innovation in Product and Service Design pitch competition.
I led exploratory research to better understand the motivations and struggles of job seekers. Throughout the design process, the research insights kept my team aligned and focused on our users as we created personas, journey maps, and design concepts. I conducted usability testing that informed iterations of our high-fidelity prototype. Further user feedback was also incorporated into our proposed product roadmap.
Upon competing this project, I accepted an offer to join the UX Research team at Citi Ventures as a contractor to continue working on Worthi.
Role: Photojournalist at The Herald newspaper
Timeframe: 6 months ✽ 2017-2018
Tools: DSLR Cameras ✽ Photo Mechanic ✽ Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator ✽ Google Docs for hours and hours of manually-transcribed interviews ✽ Many old fashioned reporter's notebooks
Deliverables: Front page story with 6 page spread ✽ Indiana University Words & Pictures Workshop ✽ Photojournalism conference presentations
Collaboration: Writer ✽ Visuals Editor
Photojournalism Ethics: The National Press Photographers Association Code of Ethics forbids journalists from seeking to influence or alter the scenes as they are photographing, or manipulate the content of the images with software.
While working as a photojournalist at a community newspaper, I produced this photo story about a husband caring for his wife with advanced dementia. The goal of sharing their story was to promote empathy and understanding for people living with dementia and their caregivers. This project showcases my skills in empathic storytelling, building trust, contextual interviewing, observation documentation, artifact analysis, and collaboration.
I let curiosity drive my research and interview methods. I found that the simplest way to show that I care about a person is to listen to their story with an open mind. I know that having a camera present for your most personal moments can seem daunting, so I engaged in thoughtful relationship building to ensure that each story began with a foundation of trust and respect. My process incorporated synthesis throughout, so that the final story was accurately represented through visually-impactful, informative, and emotional images.