Thomas Stokes Email & Phone Number

Raleigh, Nc, Us

Centennial, Co, Us

As Principal of Drill Bit Labs, I lead engagements that deliver impactful user research insights and drive digital strategy for clients across various industries. With a deep understanding of user research methodologies and a keen eye for digital trends, I help organizations optimize their product development processes, enhance user experiences, and achieve measurable business outcomes.

Los Gatos, California, Us

San Jose, Ca, Us

In my role at UserZoom, I partnered with stakeholders to develop strategic UX research solutions and programs that map to business goals and maximize the quality and impact of insights.

San Jose, Ca, Us

As a Lead UX Researcher at UserZoom, I lead a team of UX researchers, guiding the execution of short-term, ad-hoc projects, as well as ongoing research programs. Our portfolio of work included discovery (i.e., uncovering users' needs, attitudes, and current behaviors), iterative (i.e., informing the design of a product), and measurement (i.e., collecting summative performance metrics) methodologies for a variety of private-sector companies.

San Jose, Ca, Us

Charlottesville, Va, Us

I worked as a senior product researcher at WillowTree where I conducted user research to assist in product strategy, inform design decisions, and help make products that delight users. I advocate for a mixed-methods approach and used a variety of qualitative and quantitive methods to answer questions about user needs, attitudes, and behaviors to help address the various goals of our F500 clients. Nothing gets me more excited than when a client comes to us with a question about their users that seems difficult to measure. On any given project I typically helped frame the client’s problem to form a list of questions we need to answer, generated a research plan using just the combination of methods and measures to answer those questions, collected data, then used my analysis and synthesis skills to distill the findings into actionable outcomes delivered in easy-to-understand reports. At WIllowTree I also had the pleasure of being the DRI (directly responsible individual) for the usability lab in the new Durham office.

Durham, North Carolina, Us

I lead human factors training and process improvement efforts at EG-GILERO, a medical innovation agency, helping bring human factors, user-centered thinking, and UX research into their medical device design process. I developed best practice documents and trained the team on usability testing, user research, and user-centered design. Also, I had the exciting opportunity to build an on-site usability lab and observation room.Highlights:• Established an in-house usability lab• Developed and delivered training documents for formative and summative usability tests, user research and human factors inspection techniques• Generated template documents to make research activities and reporting more efficient for other team members

Salt Lake City, Ut - Utah, Us

As a user research consultant with Fulcrum, an online courseware company, my work focused on improving the experience with online courses for both students and instructors. I conceptualized user research to improve student learning outcomes and satisfaction through better course design, and instructor’s ability to monitor their student’s success through information visualization and dashboards. Additionally, I would help facilitate design workshop sessions, making sure that user experience and design decisions were grounded on the findings of our research.

Raleigh, North Carolina, Us

As a primary instructor, I was solely responsible for a class of ~125 undergraduate students each semester. My teaching style focused on showing students how to apply psychology to everyday life. I choose to teach online so that I could continue working towards giving students the best e-learning experience possible. In this role, I was able to apply our findings from the ALMAP Grant program to and improve learner's experiences with distance education.

Raleigh, North Carolina, Us

I worked as a graduate research assistant for a Bill and Melinda Gates ALMAP grant— the project focused on improving outcomes and student experience with online courses through adaptive technologies. I directed project activities that included a longitudinal experimental design with random assignment to compare qualitative satisfaction and quantitative outcome measures between traditional and online-adaptive courses.In this role, I was responsible for… • Research operations including organizing recruitment/random assignment methods and implementation• Communicating with stakeholders and team members• Developing research protocols (e.g. surveys, assessments, interview scripts)• Data analysis • Conducting user interviews and focus groups• Writing and delivering various reports and presentationsMy favorite part of this project was that we were able to implement a longitudinal experimental design that used both qualitative and quantitive data to answer complex questions about student experiences, motivation, and outcomes with online courses.

Raleigh, Nc, Us

I worked as a human-factors intern at Red Hat pairing with a search and findability expert to help make all of RedHat’s content findable for its users. I was responsible for managing my own projects, where I used various UX methods and small-scale usability tests to generate ideas to improve our search design, testing those ideas through A/B tests and using the resulting data to inform design decisions. I was able to use my training in human factors, user experience, and cognitive psychology to improve users' experience with our on-site search page, and significantly raise KPIs. Highlights: • Developed a streamlined process and project plan for running A/B tests• Analyzed data from test results to inform design decisions• Helped increase search KPIs by ~20%• Performed Heuristic evaluations, and informal usability studies to generate ideas for UX improvements• Revised measurement strategy and analytics to better reflect user behaviorsDuring my time at Red Hat I got to research so many interesting questions like ‘What makes search results more scannable?,’ How do we measure if our search page satisfies our users' needs?’, and ‘What makes a user decide to either click a search result, re-phrase their search, or exit the page entirely?’ If you’re interested in learning more, feel free to reach out any time.

Ph.D., Human Factors And Applied Cognition

M.S., Human Factors And Applied Cognition

B.A., Psychology, With A Minor In Statistics