Sean Fitzell Email & Phone Number

Advising early-stage startups regarding user research strategy

New York, NY, US

• Lead a team of 4-5 researchers supporting work on the buy, sell, mobile transactional journeys between agents and their clients to de-risk and inform product decisions
• Worked with cross-disciplinary team to define agent team segmentation that drove changes to product marketing, operational support, and product prioritization tailored to different team types
• Lead research on a successful proof of concept project to support combining generalized and localized property filters to reduce development and support costs for the addition of more Compass markets
• Co-created a series of educational workshops and activities to reestablish a shared understanding of our customers across the product organization to inform annual planning

New York, NY, US

• Lead a team of 2-3 researchers supporting work on search, listings, comparative market analysis, and agent/client collaboration, leading to successful launches of a redesigned experiences
• Continued as lead researcher for the agent search experience supporting work for successful launches of a redesigned platform and identified key feature gaps to close before launch in the strategic NYC market
• Continued to drive socialization efforts of agent archetypes to inform product marketing and prioritization
• Co-created and facilitated multiple instances of an educational workshop to drive mobile-first thinking across the product organization to reduce experience complexity
• Co-created and facilitated multiple instances of an educational workshop to drive customer empathy and improve the experience and quality of customer and product interactions and gather more actionable feedback
• Worked with other research leads and product stakeholders to establish a more strategic research roadmap and prioritization of work process to improve forecasting, reduce redundant efforts, and do work that best.

New York, NY, US

• Lead researcher for the agent search experience a strategic priority, identified multiple product issues, a short-term solution to boost adoption, and the need for a comprehensive functional redesign
• Drove 14 rounds of iterative testing on the new platform leading to successful launches in key markets (>85% organic adoption) and prioritized additional adoption-blocking functional gaps
• Lead research team to identify and define agent archetypes synthesizing qualitative and quantitative data from multiple studies for a more holistic view of our primary users to inform product marketing and prioritization
• Primary contributor to a work identifying and mapping agent jobs-to-be-done on the sell-side transaction that identified areas for improvement and automated experiences for agents
• Worked with research director to establish team processes and resources, and the hiring process to build the team from 3 to 20

New York, New York, US

• Lead research on rebuilt demand side trading platform and worked closely with data analytics team to implement and monitor usage and key workflows to identify potential adoption blockers, beta launch exceeded goals for.
• Lead research work with a cross-functional team to overhaul and improve platform structure and navigation within it, which fed into the wider platform rebuild
• Lead research across several projects with the goal of empowering customers to better monitor and troubleshoot trading campaigns without support, reducing cost and boosting adoption of augmented line items

New York, New York, US

• Redesigned and administered the company's annual NPS survey, the results identified areas of concern in business operations and product and led to renewed focus on service design
• Lead research on strategic company project to launch augmented line-items, including alpha testing that identified functional gaps for critical trader use cases, which were addressed prior to wider release
• Lead research on Deals/Partner Center from concept-testing through launch evaluations on a number of projects including advanced metrics that allowed customers to better monitor and troubleshoot issues without support.

New York, New York, US

• Drove UX initiatives for a new customer support portal by identifying usability issues and implementing analytics tracking, which led to increased adoption and reduced support costs
• Lead research for the YieldEx product and documented multiple usability issues with their correction leading to increased adoption
• Facilitated testing of the Bonsai language an API/non-UI tool that underpinned a strategic company project that was the first step to rebuilding the programmatic trading platform
• Applied research methodologies to internal employee resources including the corporate wiki resulting in improved usefulness and findability of content for greater knowledge-sharing across the company

US

• Re-designed the Institute's annual salary with a focus on ease to complete and clarity of questions with a notable increased response rate
• Conducted the annual survey for the years 2014, 2015, and 2016, including analysis and reporting to board leadership and membership presentations
• Piloted and conducted a new standalone IA Skills survey in 2016 and presented the findings in a poster presentation at the 2017 IA Summit

• Wrote feature articles, profiles, and music reviews, and pitched ideas for coverage in the monthly jazz gazette.

San Francisco, California, US

• Modeled data and created mockups for a data analytics proof of concept for a prospective client, a telecommunications company
• Sketched, wireframed, and created content for a data visualization dashboard demonstration for a client telecommunications company
• Designed new pages and content for the company website
• Conducted informal heuristic evaluation and made usability recommendations for the company website resulting in improved usage analytics

• Conducted comprehensive usability tests on 3 interfaces with an 8-person team.
• Designed and implemented a task-based user study with 24 participants in sessions lasting approximately 1 hour
• Discovered 34 unique usability issues falling into 8 broad categories, and made 5 corrective recommendations including reorganization of the information architecture
• Several issues immediately corrected by project stakeholders improved user experience and site performanceConsulted on re-design of a start-up social gifting website
• Designed pages to support the sign-up and create profile processes
• Recommendations provided owner with insight into next steps for the project

Master Of Science Library & Information Science (Mslis), User Experience Concentration

Master Of Arts (Ma), Journalism

Bachelor Of Arts (Ba), Anthropology