strategic user research to define 3-year product strategy

How a simple user research approach can answer big-picture product strategy questions.

Outcomes

• Findings and recommendations copied and pasted into 3-year product strategy documents.

• The creation of 4 new project workstreams.

• Adjusted roadmaps for 5+ existing workstreams.

• Facilitated workshops with design, PM, and eng to translate big picture research strategy into tactical design decisions.

R.I.T.E. method | driving innovation through concept evaluation

A design partner and I felt particularly passionate about a certain opportunity area: to re-think the way our users navigate through data correlations. We convinced design leadership to give us the time and space to innovate.

Outcomes

• Prioritized improvements to existing navigation features.

• Another product team, inspired by our explorations, implemented the same concept in their tool.

• Design principles resulting from this work were used to define a suite-wide re-design.

creating a usability lab for $0 | Wizard of oz prototyping

I was hired as the first User Researcher at Andy Rubin’s smart phone startup in Silicon Valley: Essential Products. I worked with an incredibly talented team to explore innovative & experimental products in a stealth environment.

Outcomes

• Created a usability lab to evaluate GUI and voice assistant usability for both a smart phone and a smart home.

• Usability findings were immediately implemented by design & engineering, leading to significant improvements to the user experience of both products.

• After presenting my first round of usability findings and recommendations, I was immediately converted from a contractor to a full-time employee.

maxdiff survey | 3-week turnaround on user-centered roadmap prioritization

A design partner approached me, concerned about the current product roadmap’s lack of data-backed prioritization. His team had a ton of ideas on what they could build, but didn’t know which ideas were most important to our users. “Can user research help us determine what to build first?”

Outcomes

• Focused efforts on 2 roadmap items, de-prioritizing the rest.

• De-prioritized mobile design & development from the roadmap.

• Quantitative report with supplemental qualitative findings to answer the “why?” behind the quantitative findings.

Mixed methods | simplifying the complex data ingest journey

A long-term project involving many methods & stakeholders. What started as a request for a journey map turned into a persona re-design, service mapping, usability testing, and a hackathon project inspired by our learnings.

Outcomes

• Usability-tested Data Ingest workflow was built for AWS data sources.

• A new set of User Mindsets as a replacement for outdated personas; mindset concept was then adopted by other User Researchers in different product verticals.

• Hackathon project won an award & inspired future Data Ingest projects.

• A participant database of Splunk Admins to empower the team to continue conducting user research in the future.

starting a company | how i would solve meeting culture

Myself and two technical co-founders set out to solve meeting culture. We agreed to work for ~3 months part-time to see what we came up with and decide whether or not to pursue the company idea. While we ultimately decided to put the project on hold, I still found it to be an incredibly valuable learning experience.

Outcomes

• A working product demo.

• Accepted into a startup investor program.

• Completed Buildspace’s Nights and Weekends program.

• A waitlist of 10+ users and 3 companies.

Tracking UX Metrics longitudinally | quantitative

Coming soon!

Outcome | Roadmap changes, UX improvements