Research Perspective
When delivery teams resist research, they miss the solution. I shift that perspective, demonstrating that data is the core lens for successful outcomes—continuously improving experiences for people, systems, and the business.
Frameworks to Scale research ops
Heurstic Evaulation for prioritizing value
Framework Structure: I designed a protocol for leading research teams through heuristic evaluations of digital properties (including responsive web). This framework ensures evaluators capture necessary artifacts, enabling the team to organize findings and create a clear analysis communication vehicle for sales, product leadership, and clients. The framework supports evaluation for new, aspirational opportunity spaces and current, focused products for value reimagining.
Additional Framework Examples
Framework Structure: I developed a process that guides research teams from lateral thinking (divergent exploration) to vertical thinking (deep dive research). This work is synthesized into a concise point of view for clear external communication to sales and clients.
Gathering
Generate, investigate, or define > 8 distinct areas or concepts
Lateral Thinking
- Review and identify channel specific experiences
- Evaluate digital properties to catalog areas of opportunity
- Research markets and digital experiences to gain insight areas
Vertical Thinking
- Research and evaluate into multiple facets of the primary area
(expand to view process detail)
Organize
Parse, combine, or position perspectives
- Develop visual artifacts
- Utilize research content (e.g., customer quotes) to create point of view
- Create cohesive story presentation
Communicate
Share, support, define
- Facilitate origination conversations
- Evaluate digital properties to express priority areas for user value
- Identify market-fit and offerings that bring client and customer value
Framework Structure: I established a process that leads research teams in utilizing the Red Routes framework to identify and prioritize high-impact user experiences. This framework quickly focuses design decisions and measurement efforts, ensuring researchers drive better user experiences and value early in product engagement with leadership.
GATHERING
Collect, evaluate, analyze, or generate information
- Research markets and digital experiences to gain data points on task frequency and completion rates
- Evaluate digital properties to catalog areas of improvements
ORGANIZE
Goals identification
- Facilitate workshops to generate insights from stakeholders on task criticality and business value
Synthesis
Quantitative data
+
Qualitative data
+
Label for understanding perspective
Prioritize
Plot tasks on a matrix
+
Identify core Red Routes
+
Trim for impact, categorize for revisit
(expand to view process detail)
bLEND FOR direction
- The chosen Red Routes merge user needs with business value to create a clear, unified direction for the product team
Communicate
Share, support, define
- Develop visual artifacts like user flows and benchmarks focused exclusively on the Red Routes
- Combine into an output for populating communication vehicle
Research examples at enterprise scale
Margaritaville customer loyalty program
From Sentiment to Seven Figures: A Research Strategy for Maximizing Loyalty Program Value
MY ROLE:
- Led team through structured research activities
- Facilitated in-depth ideation from research data
- Created opportunity presentation to aid sales pitch
CONTRIBUTORS:
4 UX Designers | 2 Visual Designers
A Tropical Brand at a Crossroads
Margaritaville is more than just a hotel or a restaurant; it’s a global lifestyle brand built on the promise of a perpetual tropical escape. In the highly competitive hospitality and entertainment industry, delivering on that “relaxed state of mind” is paramount. Our firm engaged at a high-stakes moment: a new executive had arrived with a clear mandate to significantly increase customer visit volume and elevate the quality of the overall brand experience. The firm needed a definitive, research-led roadmap to discover where the greatest opportunity for growth lay in their current value proposition.
“Margaritaville destinations are an escape from the everyday, so we needed a loyalty program to match our fun lifestyle because there are no points, deadlines, or limits in paradise.”
— Margaritaville Perks
Leading with Lateral and Vertical Thinking
As the leader of this initiative, I knew a traditional usability study wouldn’t cut it. We needed strategic, enterprise-level research. I mobilized a cross-functional team of UX and visual designers and organized our work around a dynamic Opportunity Research Framework:
Lateral Thinking (The Broad Sweep): I clustered our team into small research pods, tasking each with simultaneously researching a specific concept area—market trends, competitive landscape, and adjacent channels. This rapid, lateral research allowed us to cover vast ground (14 different touchpoints) to understand the tertiary experiences that shaped Margaritaville guests’ expectations, ensuring our findings were informed by the wider industry context.
Vertical Thinking (The Deep Dive): The lateral phase quickly revealed a central, high-leverage area: Loyalty Programs and Perks. This touchpoint offered the most flexibility to connect existing customer sentiment to a clear commercial uplift. I immediately re-clustered the pods to execute a deep, vertical research dive, driving depth in understanding the people, technology systems, and business areas impacting the loyalty program’s success.
Connecting Sentiment to Commercial Value
when customers feel appreciated
percent say they spend more with a brand
The research rigor of combining these broad and narrow approaches was key. I synthesized the pods’ insights into a comprehensive Value Realization Vehicle—not just a report, but a clear narrative that bridged customer context and business need. This demonstrated the necessary business acumen by showing how improvements in the loyalty program didn’t just add features; they strategically enhanced the core brand promise, which would, in turn, drive volume.
The final, compelling Opportunity Presentation tied customer sentiment directly to a proposed loyalty program enhancement. This work established a clear path to both increasing customer volume and improving experience quality—the executive’s twin goals. The strength of this research and strategic guidance translated into a $2 Million opportunity for the firm, validating the strategic weight of our UXR recommendations.
SDGE utility digital payment options
The $11 Million Head Start: Accelerating Payment Implementation with a Two-Phase Research Framework
MY ROLE:
- Led team through structured research process
- Co-moderated focus groups sessions
- Contributed to the client readout from focus group sessions
CONTRIBUTORS:
2 Technology Vendors | 6 Design Vendors
An Executive Mandate for Enterprise CX
San Diego Gas & Electric (SDGE), a large regional utilities provider, embarked on an executive-sponsored rebrand of its customer portal—a critical digital hub for managing bills, energy usage, and payments across responsive web and native mobile apps. The core business mandate was to increase customer satisfaction by delivering greater energy transparency and payment flexibility for residential, commercial, and enterprise segments. My role was Digital Design Process Owner, tasked with managing the evidence-based design activities across multiple external vendor partners to ensure success.
Research Rigor Across a Multi-Vendor Ecosystem
“I feel more secure paying my bills this way. I’m not sending a check in the mail, and my card info isn’t being shared on multiple websites.”
— SDGE Customer
The challenge lay in integrating a new third-party payment vendor while ensuring a seamless, consistent customer experience across all channels. I deployed my Opportunity Research Framework to align the efforts of the design vendor and the new payment platform vendor:
Pattern Research (Cross-Industry Benchmark): I directed the design vendor to research best-in-class digital payment experiences, not just within the utilities industry, but across other industries known for excellent multi-touchpoint payment journeys. Simultaneously, I guided the platform vendor to research nuanced implementations within their existing client base. This multi-vendor lateral research quickly identified the highest common denominator for “frictionless.”
Vertical Thinking & Mixed-Methods: The collective findings were synthesized to define the most consistent, low-effort payment theme. We then shifted to vertical thinking—a deep dive to identify key friction areas and potential “dead ends” for customers in that ideal journey. This deeper insight directly informed prototyping, which was then tested in focus groups to validate the visual design details required for mass-market success.
Reduced Friction, Accelerated Delivery
By leading with research and standardizing the evidence, the team was able to anticipate and reduce potential friction areas before any code was written. This resulted in an efficient, scalable digital payment experience across all channels and customer segments. The research-first alignment allowed for faster-than-expected implementation, delivering the executive’s goal of payment flexibility and consistency in a shorter timeline. My strategic leadership in aligning the multiple vendor teams proved that evidence-based design is the most efficient path to executing complex, enterprise-level digital mandates.
percent of payments are from customers who did not pay the prior month
Microsoft global news distribution with Power BI
Measuring the Moment: Workflow Analysis to Drive Efficiency in Microsoft’s Global News Lifecycle
MY ROLE:
- Led team through structured synthesis of workflow data analysis
- Conducted in-depth interviews and analysis for complex, multi-vendor workflows
- Created roadmap for expanding Power BI MVP
CONTRIBUTORS:
2 UX Designers | UX Researcher | 2 Business Analysts
An Enterprise Information Crisis
As one of the world’s largest technology organizations, Microsoft operates a massive, global news and information distribution network. The challenge was critical: their previous systems were a fragmented collection of disparate, disconnected applications that forced the global news department to manually orchestrate workflows from offline creation to real-time online distribution. This complexity was magnified by the need to grant multiple vendors and external news outlets real-time access for collaboration. My team, a group of technologists, was already developing a new platform, but its success hinged on understanding the true impact on existing user workflows.
plus publishing partners to coordinate PR communications
Mixed-Methods Workflow Analysis
My role as a UX Design Strategist was to inject user-centered rigor into the development process. I led a small team through a specialized, two-phase research approach to diagnose and quantify workflow friction:
Workshops (Foundational Insight): We began with workshops to uncover the key attributes and mindsets of the various internal and external contributors across the news lifecycle. This foundational data allowed us to create a high-fidelity workflow analysis map of the primary overlapping journeys.
“There’s a lifecycle before the announcement; you need to let people know [how to collaborate]…”
— Client Executive
Mixed-Methods Rigor: We executed a deep-dive, quantitative research approach by combining contextual inquiry with structured observations.
Qualitative (Contextual Inquiry): We interviewed both Microsoft staff and their primary external partners in their native work environment to uncover nuances and collaboration pain points.
Quantitative (Structured Observation): We re-interviewed these same users, focusing specifically on red routes (highly impacted sub-workflows). We tracked and captured current times to complete sub-tasks and the number of communication touchpoints required to advance the workflow.
Efficacy Boost and Continuous Research Roadmap
This quantitative workflow analysis provided immediate, high-value data. It not only revealed specific design flaws in the solution under development but also created a clear data-driven case for new feature enhancements that would boost efficiency and flexibility for both internal and external collaboration.
By leading with this evidence-based analysis, we achieved two critical outcomes:
Improved Efficacy: The new insights improved the efficacy of the platform before its launch, drastically reducing anticipated friction.
Roadmap Foundation: The data-capture approach established a roadmap for continuous research, ensuring future enhancements to the news lifecycle experience would be continually measured and improved at a global scale.
Carnival Corporation casino certification event
Mapping the Journey: How Quantitative Analysis and Executive Insight Streamlined Event Management
MY ROLE:
- Facilitated internal and external user workshops
- Led team through structured synthesis of workflow data analysis
- Conducted contextual inquiries and moderated time-on-tasks workflow reviews
- Co-created surveys and workflow design direction
CONTRIBUTORS:
2 UX Designers | 4 Technologists
Bridging Two Worlds
Carnival Corporation, the world’s largest cruise company, faced a critical business challenge: connecting their land-based casino customers to their sea-based casinos and cruise ship loyalty programs. To achieve this, the company established strategic partnerships with land-based casinos, relying on event teams to distribute and track Carnival’s reward certificates. The project’s core ask was to design a low-friction experience for these event teams to manage this certificate distribution and tracking, but we started with limited visibility into the users’ operational differences.
Baselines, Bubbles, and Time-on-Task
As the research leader, I recognized we needed to go beyond simple requirements gathering and establish a deep workflow baseline. I led the design team through a rigorous, two-step research process:
percent of the fields are “required”, but essentially are not
Baseline and Relationship Mapping: We started with workshops involving department executive sponsors. This lateral approach was used to baseline our knowledge and map the entire event orchestration lifecycle. The key research output here was Bubble Charts, which not only mapped the primary themes across each persona involved but visually communicated the relationships between data as primary, secondary, and tertiary information, securing executive buy-in on our research focus.
Mixed-Methods Rigor: Armed with the executive baseline, we were granted access to the users. I led workflow review sessions with each persona group. This deep, vertical dive captured critical time-on-task data and detailed friction areas in their activities. This quantitative mapping provided the necessary data points to prioritize design efforts for a truly low-friction digital product.
Digital Product Delivery and Sustainable Feedback
The research had a dual impact, proving both our business acumen and the value of a continuous research mindset:
- Product Efficacy: The detailed workflow analysis and time-on-task data directly supported our team’s delivery of a digital product that allowed land-based teams to manage and track the Carnival loyalty certificates more efficiently.
- Organizational Adoption (Feedback Loop): Crucially, the process provided executive sponsors with a detailed, data-driven understanding of the importance of the research feedback loop. We delivered a protocol for user feedback and survey scripts to drive deeper engagement with their guests. This research approach helped the company establish a sustainable feedback loop between stakeholders and event management that drove success well beyond the project’s completion.
Cox Communications quoting and servicing customers
From Heuristics to High-Value: Aligning Qualitative Data and Analytics to Fund a New CSR Strategy
MY ROLE:
- Led planning and facilitation of stakeholder and users workshops
- Synthesized workshop and analytics data
- Created standards document to correlate data insights and requirements traceability
- Led team in creating presentations within project guidelines
CONTRIBUTORS:
3 Business Analysts | 2 Technologists
Inefficiency in the Sales Engine
Cox Communications, a top-three U.S. cable television and telecommunications provider, was plagued by inefficiencies and rework within its Customer Service Representatives (CSR) sales support application. Specifically, the product and service “cart experience” was creating internal friction that directly harmed the customer experience across all segments, from small business to enterprise. The mandate was clear: uncover the CSR issues and prescribe a strategy to improve customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores.
Triangulation with a Heuristic Framework
To move beyond anecdotal evidence and surface high-value data, I led a generative research approach that ensured alignment between qualitative pain points and quantitative application usage:
Lateral Thinking (Generative Research): I utilized surveys and workshops to engage broad user groups of CSRs, defining and surfacing an initial large volume of qualitative data points about their day-to-day pain points.
“It’d be nice if we can see everything on the service account altogether or on the opportunity screen – It’s a little confusing.”
— Holistic Customer View
Vertical Thinking & Mixed-Methods Rigor: The sheer volume of data required a rigorous synthesis strategy. I employed the design and business analysis teams to apply my Heuristic Evaluation Framework to the gathered data. This framework served as a crucial filter, allowing us to:
Funnel Focused Themes: Group qualitative pain points into focused themes of high friction.
“We can reduce the number of clicks or pages to run through to make that transaction happen faster.”
— Create Efficiency
Align with Business Value: Align these heuristic data points with the existing user analytics of the current application’s customer service process.
“I want to get directly to that number rather than manually putting a discount in different places.”
— Communicating Pricing
This combination of qualitative (surveys/workshops) and quantitative (heuristic-aligned analytics) provided an undeniable, unified picture of system-level failure points.
Unlocking Investment and Strategic Alignment
The strategic presentation of this triangulated data to executive stakeholders had a rapid and significant impact:
Funding Unlocked: The clear, data-backed evidence—marrying user-reported pain with quantifiable application metrics—unlocked immediate and increased funding to drive a massive overhaul of the application’s overall experience.
Strategic Shift: The research helped executive sponsors re-prioritize workforce experience, demonstrating that improving the internal CSR tooling was the most effective strategic lever to directly impact and boost external customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores.
I owned the outcome. By leading the strategic research synthesis, I secured executive approval and investment for core B2E application modernization. This demonstrated my ability to effectively use research as a strategic lever for change, directly impacting both employee efficiency and the ultimate customer outcome.
AI Enhanced Research Processes
Additional Research Case Studies and Impact Stories
| Research-Led Design Approaches | Links |
|---|---|
| Mixed Methods: Contextual Inquiry + Workflow Analysis | Off-Price On-Target with UX |
| Heuristic Evaluation + Impression Testing | UX Fuels Forecasting |
| Persona Definitions + Journey Analytic Synthesis | Mastering Payment Moments |
| Research Repository + Prototype Testing | Tuned for Better UX |
| Story: Persona Repository and Navigating Buy-In | Google Web Story |
| Customer Feedback and Analytics Analysis | Smart UX Powered Utilities |
| Mixed Methods: Contextual Inquiry + Focus Groups + Prototype Testing | Care Designed for Humans |