User Experience

Expertise & Methodology

I enjoy working to improve user experiences. Through my work at Google, Facebook, research, teaching assistantships, and internship, I have learned a variety of methods which I've applied both in the US and abroad. These include survey design and analysis, persona building, heuristic evaluation, cognitive walkthroughs, user interviews, ethnography, in person and remote usability testing, and quantitative analysis. I've worked at all phases of product development from formative interviews through post-launch monitoring. My favorite work is formative or big picture research, trying to understand what the users' needs are and how we might be able to meet those needs.

Google

I was a Senior User Experience Researcher at Google working on Ads and Commerce (Payments) and Google Workplace (Security Center and Migrate). I designed and analyzed quantitative and qualitative surveys, conducted usability testing, ran formative interviews, ran international studies, and worked closely with the design team. Most of my work was done using Google Drive, Camtasia, Excel, and Google Consumer Surveys. Please sign up for Google usability studies!

Previously, I interned at Google as a User Experience Research Intern. I worked on two projects of my own. The first was a formative study that resulted in data-driven personas based on data collected during user interviews. The second was usability testing for an existing project. The usability testing we ran using the RITE method. I worked collaboratively with a designer and we discussed and implemented changes between usability tests.

Facebook

I was a member of the Facebook UX research team. I supported News Feed, Videos, and Follow at various phase. I designed and analyzed both quantitative and qualitative surveys, facilitated interviews and usability testing, monitored product launches, and suggested product changes. I worked with SQL, R, Excel, Qualtrics, and various internal tools. In addition, I completed engineering bootcamp and datacamp.

Cyclopath

I was a member of the Cyclopath research team at GroupLens Research. During that time I have been one of the stronger voices for improving usability of the site. Cyclopath is a geographic wiki designed for bicyclists and, as a wiki, one of the important things is that users be able to view changes that have been made. We have struggled with how to display this to users. One of my projects was thinking about how to display edit history. The history browser work is from 2009.

I also did significant qualitative work on Cyclopath. This involved a survey, to better understand results from quantitative log analsysis, interivews, user testing, and persona creation.

Plymouth Congregational Church

As a community volunteer, I advised the technology committee of a local church. The primary task was redesigning the website. I did several sketches with pen and paper as well as some Balsamiq mockups to give others some idea of what was possible.

Resources for UXers