Me presenting research at the 2025 UXPA conference in Amsterdam.
I’m a user experience researcher leader known for finding out what motivates people to use products and then crafting their unique stories to drive organizational change. I’m skilled in diverse research methods, such as benchmark tests, concept tests, diary studies, focus groups, and usability studies.
Where I really shine? In-depth interviews that get to the heart of all the things.
I collaborated with a parents’ care collective to determine why attendance was slumping with their in-person parenting workshops.
As part of the design team for IQVIA, a company that makes products for health care providers, I succeeded in creating a more user-friendly product to set up clinical trials with user cohorts.
I reached out to small and medium-sized organizations, learning about opportunities to improve how they used Microsoft Teams during the COVID-19 pandemic.
As a research consultant at User Research International, I established best practices and templates for running studies and reporting on jobs-to-be-done research.
As the Lead UX Researcher at an AI writing company, I partnered extensively with our marketing team, running focus groups and leading in-depth interviews to determine our new tagline as well as define our ICPs. I also established usability benchmark testing in our multilingual product suite, giving us metrics, such as a Lovable score, for continual improvement.
Throughout my career in UX, I have mentored junior researchers and designers in best research practices and methodologies, as well as helping to establish interview and discussion frameworks and research repositories.
I thrive as an interdisciplinary, cross-functional resource.
My goal is to lead independent user research projects within curious, innovative organizations that are actively striving to improve their user engagement.
I'm a storyteller and professional nerd who came to UX after living in Scotland, France, and Japan. My life's other projects include: an interdisciplinary master's thesis on WWI trench poetry at NYU; a memoir about my itinerant 20s; being a postal worker; and failing after repeated owls to get into Hogwarts. A faithful liberal arts major, I enjoy curling up with at least 90 books per year, being a guest contributor on the FilmWonk podcast, and exploring the Pacific Northwest's numerous beautiful nooks. A former ELL professor and drosophila caretaker, I am as interested in language as I am in the natural world.
Things I will always talk about include but are not limited to: architecture, Cap and Stark (my vaudeville duo cats), cheese, pastries, photography (particularly the work of Eugène Atget and Jacob Riis) red barns, shiraz, Six Feet Under, Wes Anderson, and the writing of Jeffrey Eugenides, Jhumpa Lahiri, Alice Munro, and Edith Wharton.
I love conversations. Let's have one.
Ha Long Bay, 2014
