Priya Nayak Email & Phone Number

San Mateo, California, Us

Santa Monica, California, Us

I had the pleasure of helping grow our small research team into a multi-disciplinary powerhouse. I also helped drive research initiatives to help the organization understand how they could better reach and support historically underserved populations (e.g. teens, low income populations, aging populations). At the end of 2020, I also played a key role in helping the organization understand the opportunity, urgency, and imperative of Headspace becoming a provider of more serious mental health care, through the design & facilitation of multiple alignment workshops with our executive leadership team. In 2021, Headspace announced its decision to merge with Ginger (a digital coaching/teletherapy platform) in an effort to expand our service offerings and provide greater levels of care/support to our members, as needed.

Santa Monica, California, Us

As the first dedicated UX Researcher at Headspace, I helped build a culture & process of doing research early and often, integrating research at every stage of the development process process, and using qual and quant data as a strategic tool for decision-making. The majority of my research at Headspace was focused on understanding the challenges of new meditators, which led me to the field of behavior change, healthy habit formation, and designing for transformation. I partnered closely with Headspace's Behavioral Science team to design new product experiences grounded in evidence-based frameworks (COM-B, ACT). Read more about our work combining research, design, and behavioral science here: https://medium.com/front-conference/designing-with-intuition-edc569d80c83

Santa Monica, California, Us

Lead researcher on Direct Messages, a feature which was primarily being used by teens in the early days of Instagram. Their intense usage of DMs (a clunky, limited functionality feature at the time) led to a deeper curiosity about how young people were using Instagram differently than the millennials who created the product. In partnership with a data scientist who was willing to set up new data pipelines to track multiple accounts on a single device, I helped uncover the widespread phenomenon of young people having "finstas" (second private accounts) and shared a report on this behavior that was shared, discussed, and circulated across Instagram and Facebook teams. As an outgrowth of that work, I received support to lead a monthly research program with young people across the U.S. that received widespread engagement from product leaders, designers, and researchers across the company and led to a much deeper recognition of teens as an audience that deserved the company's attention, care, and respect.

Redmond, Washington, Us

I worked closely with with product managers, data analysts, and designers at Yammer to conduct timely and actionable research aimed at improving the core product experience. Most of my research involved understanding how existing Yammer users were using the platform and the challenges they faced in managing multiple collaboration tools. Beyond my core work, I was also deputized by the VP of Product to lead a biweekly meeting called "Product Brain." The goal of this meeting was to build a culture of reflection & internal knowledge sharing. Every 2 weeks, I organized speakers from Data, Product, Research, and Engineering to share their most interesting lessons from recent projects, experiments, or launches, pushing them to think deeply about what others could learn from their approach, failures, or successes.

Mountain View, Ca, Us

As a Junior Researcher, I primarily helped conduct usability studies on the Google Apps for Business IT admin panel. This involved working closely with designers to create new prototypes and user flows, recruiting participants, moderating usability studies, and synthesizing their feedback into actionable recommendations. Beyond my core responsibilities, I also supported other research teams who needed extra support. For example, I conducted at-home interviews with beta testers of the first Chrome Notebook, on-site research with teachers and students for Google EDU, and helped test new collaboration features in Google Docs and Drive.During my last few months at Google, I also joined a small group of facilitators within Google who were teaching a design thinking course for Google employees. We taught students the fundamentals of design thinking and worked on challenges/tasks to put these frameworks into action.

Mountain View, Ca, Us

Worked closely with Product Management and Engineering to resolve top user issues related to account recovery and security. I also took the initiative of leading usability research for 2-Step Verification, a new security feature for Google employees only (at the time). As a result of my early and on-going usability research, the team eventually launched a streamlined and refined web + mobile app experience for 2-Step Verification for Google Account users worldwide.

Donor relations and donor management for Al Gore's climate change awareness campaign.

Richmond, California, Us

Coordination for industry conferences and marketing events, domestic and international.