Sasha Williamson Email and Phone Number

Recent clients: Getty Images, Meta, Eminence Organic Skin Care, Autodesk.

Working on multi-product, multi-audience, complex product releases. Research included developer segmentation, understanding general market trends, interviewing users of competitor products, working with data science to determine drop offs and the behavioural characteristics of our target addressable market.

First led the user research for the Think and Explore phases of Shopify Home. Home is the admin landing page for a million merchants varying in organizational size, maturity, and business model. In the Analytics team, I had direct input into team strategy which was presented to our CEO and turned into a major product area for our roadmap. I was the primary researcher on this project and helped my product manager drive the team through our Think and Explore phases. Other responsibilities included prioritization of key metrics, communicating chosen metrics to the team, keeping an eye on long-term strategy including feasibility and vision, handling relationships with other teams to avoid experience gaps and misalignment, and unblocking designers with quick insights. A highlight was working with data to identify success metrics and points of inefficiency in the admin.

Racing Post is a daily print and online newspaper publishing data, opinions and analysis on horse racing and other sports. This research surrounded the Betting Shop Display (BSD); a print newspaper displayed in bookmakers showing racing fixtures and form details for the horses. For three months I immersed myself in the betting shop environment. I carried out generative research to establish the relevance of the BSD, and created core personas for the specialist communities which visit betting shops. This research lay the foundations of a fundamental redesign of the existing BSD and its digital equivalent.

As User Researcher for Messaging, I lead and facilitate a variety of research initiatives for some of IBM’s most long standing enterprise products:Facilitate design thinking workshops with end users and IBM multidisciplinary teams for generative problem discovery and alignment of goals.Embedding generative user research, and the assumption that "we don't know what we don't know”, into the culture of product development in Messaging.Embedding user testing into the product life cycle with immediate benefit to design and development.Contextual Inquiry, storyboarding and exploratory research methods to maximise empathy towards end user. Always asking “which words will help this person think creatively?”Regular, concise research presentations to multi-disciplinary team, and working closely with product management to influence product direction.Providing resources which empower designers and developers to adopt robust research practices (facilitation and analysis).Advocating for robust research practices throughout organisational network, including diverse participant pools and ethnographic research to ensure our user’s are heard.Raising awareness of IBM Design within the external messaging customer and business partner communities.Targeted recruitment of customers for long term research programmes and maintaining relationships with a diversity of end users for shorter initiatives.

My internship in the Applied Innovation team was a mixture of user research and interaction design to inform the design of a machine learning recommendation system based on interests and thinking style. User research: remote quantitative methods, remote moderated interviews, guerilla user testing (paper prototyping and task setting), and expert reviews. Interaction design: user stories, domain modelling, sitemaps, user journeys, and hi-fi prototypes.

Jugnoo is a mobile app start up that established itself in November 2014. It currently provides three hyperlocal services to cities in India; on-demand auto rickshaws, freshly cooked meals, and an ‘order anything’ delivery service. During my internship, I focused on expanding our understanding of Jugnoo users and improving the quality of their interactions through ethnographic research, surveys and low-fi prototyping.

Throughout this placement year (10 months) I worked on two major research projects. - I conducted focus groups, designed qualitative interviews and wrote seven questionnaires for a large project looking at the use of MediCinema (a UK based charity providing cinemas to places of care) by patients, relatives and staff. I also processed and obtained ethical approval across six research sites. - In a second research project looking at children’s experiences of hospital and major orthopaedic surgery, I recruited participants, conducted qualitative interviews and maintained research records.Other placement work included observing and helping to score neuro-psychological test data, conducting literature reviews, and producing reports and proposals which I presented to the team. I also jointly ran a youth group for adolescent patients which met several times a month on the weekend. This required the organisation and facilitation of numerous workshops and trips.