Worked in Santa Fe, NM to digitize the print & media archives of Romanovsky & Phillips — the first nationally successful "out and proud" American gay male musical duo (1982-1999) — in support of an anticipated documentary film.Lived in China for 3 months, while continuing to scale my science-fiction music publishing hobby business.

Completed multi-stage, mixed-method research to support Mozilla's trusted shopping initiative.

First UX Researcher for Indeed Apply, remotely supporting a Tokyo-centered product team. * Produced numerous deep qualitative foundational explorations, enabling the team to make sense of key areas of user behavior. These durable and engaging research decks continue to be referenced regularly — years later — impacting billions of job applications. * Led creation of Indeed Apply Design Principles, synthesized from my research.* Planned & conducted ongoing strategic + tactical research programs to unblock decision-making for major product initiatives.* Ran a series of widely viewed qualitative studies during the pandemic, enabling Indeed’s senior leadership (inc. C-level executives) and staff to actionably understand the pandemic’s impact on American job seekers using Indeed.

As Squarespace's first user researcher, I started the UX Research discipline at the company: conducting research, training cross-functional peers to conduct research, and establishing company-wide research processes & infrastructure.* Trained dozens of non-researchers to lead and participate in research more effectively through classroom training, dozens of 1:1 mentoring/partnership studies, and self-service process support.* Introduced and trained on higher-efficiency methods that enabled team members to solve research problems faster and easier.* Partnered with data scientists on mixed methods research projects, to bring meaning to quant analysis, and generalizability to qualitative research.

Responsible for user research for Facebook’s developer experience. Primarily conducted tactical research that rapidly disambiguated product spaces, by identifying a specific product direction for an interdisciplinary team.Sample projects:* Reframed a cross-company team’s understanding of how developers experience our app review process. Project outcomes (and substantial metrics improvements) were featured at Mark Zuckerberg’s weekly company Q&A as the highlighted “Fix of the Week.”* Studied journalists to understand how to increase their Facebook content embedding. This led to numerous product changes, including a redesign of our embedded Facebook posts (driven by my research).* Disambiguated an open-ended ask by news publishers for sharing analytics into full product requirements, which we shipped to rave reviews.

Conducted dozens of research studies spanning consumer and developer audiences, as well as mobile vs. desktop platforms. Towards the end, I shifted Microsoft’s largest research team over to mass adoption of unmoderated testing.microsoftstore.com + Windows Store (2013-2015):* Research specifics are confidential.Windows Dev Center (2013):* Led lab research that led to a complete reset of the Windows Dev Center website’s visual language to align with developers’ expected design patterns.* Proposed and led cross-organizational field research in Silicon Valley that set the information architecture for our content, by analyzing how app developers used developer documentation in context. Two years later, my research findings are still used to train new team members.Internet Explorer (2010-2012):* Oversaw user research for IE during Windows 8.* Conducted research on browser enthusiasts that reinforced a fast, clean and trouble-free browsing UX. * Proposed and co-implemented a set of real-time telemetry reports for desktop IE 9 that enabled, for the first time, Microsoft-wide understanding of how people browse the web.Windows 7 (2008-2009):* Received the team’s outstanding contributor award for interdisciplinary partnership and research impact on the Windows XP to Windows 7 upgrade experience. Slashed support costs to an order of magnitude below projections, by building the case for – and steering the design of – a drop-in card to guide users around the data loss risks in a challenging upgrade flow, through research-generated calls to action.* Researcher for Windows Media Player, Paint, WordPad and Sticky Notes, as well as the Windows Live Mail client.

While prepping for grad school, I rejoined friends for a short stint as test engineer and ad hoc usability researcher at this social web browser start-up (later acquired by Zynga). Co-led Flock’s first in-house usability study, and produced a results video. Our results led the company to shift its focus away from blogging/bookmark sharing and towards social networking and photo sharing.

Responsible for accessible design and accessibility validation on AOL’s main DHTML applications: AOL Webmail and AOL Pictures. Assessed usability issues under the JAWS screen reader, and rewrote all spoken interface elements for AOL Pictures to comply with best practices in auditory interface design. Conducted an accessibility audit of AOL Radio for Mac (AOL’s first accessible application for Mac OS X.)

User interface tester for the successor to the Cobalt Qube web-based server management platform.I left when Sun switched from building devices with a user interface component, to building commodity Linux servers.

Recruited by Eazel’s UI designer to test for Eazel’s Nautilus file manager, a core component of the GNOME desktop for Linux. (Eazel was a company formed by the original creators of the Macintosh dedicated to bringing consumer-level usability to Linux; e.g. I worked closely with Andy Hertzfeld as the test lead for his features.) Organized and led open source community “bug hunting” days, to mentor Nautilus users in submitting developer-friendly bug reports and performing thorough bug verifications. Recruited and mentored junior software testers. This start-up ultimately closed after exhausting its funding in the dot-com crash; I ended up being both the initial and final QA team member.

Tested the Mozilla web browser front-end, installation, and profile features. Successfully advocated for hundreds of usability and polish issues through heuristic evaluation. Cited in New Architect magazine for jump-starting open source QA participation. Wrote the Mozilla Bug Writing Guidelines, which became a ubiquitous bug reporting tutorial across other companies.

As a member of the Human Interface Technologies team, I advocated successfully for fixes to hundreds of visual appearance bugs in the Mac OS 8 Appearance Manager, as well as numerous other improvements to the Mac OS user interface.