Research. Design. Creation.
As a researcher I conduct high quality, ethnographic studies of people to understand them in a way that gets to the core of their lives and the problems they face—simply put I have a strong background in getting to the bottom of it. As a designer, I’ve utilized these skills to convert these insights into what people need and use this to develop as product that speaks directly to users’ needs.
Projects
“When we want to understand people—real people in the rich reality if their worlds—we need this [sensemaking] type of intelligence.”
-Madsbjerg. “Sensemaking”, p. 5
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To expand on my research skillset, I chose to pursue a career in UX design with Career Foundry where I designed a financial app to help users feel secure when moving money, spending money, or saving money. By conducting thorough research into their lives, I was able to learn what they were doing, what they weren’t and what they needed to succeed.
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Developing EV’s is an unknown frontier. Tasked with studying construction culture, I was able to gain insight into what mattered to those in the industry and what they demanded from their vehicles.
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Gen Z doesn’t want to study or work, or so we’re told. In this project I conducted research with a marketing agency to dig deep and make sense of what Gen Z is doing to make a name for themselves today.
Floos
Project
Career Foundry is a bootcamp where I began my journey as a UX designer. With this case study, I developed an app that aimed to help users manage their money, save, send, and move money, and track their financial behavior. As a solo project, I had to ensure that each phase and individual steps were followed as well as ensuring the data gathering and analyzing, as well as the data itself, were thorough enough to validate the product’s design and overall structure.
User Personas
To ensure I kept to the exact needs of the user, developing user personas helped me to stay focused on the multiple users for whom I was designing. To create the personas, I ensured that their development was derived solely from data gathered through surveys, interviews and observations. Focusing on their background stories, the exact and unique goals to each persona, tasks they currently do to complete these goals, motivations and tech abilities, I was able to feel secure in knowing that I was designing for the user at every step of the way, and have an easy to understand resource if I ever felt stuck.
These personas allowed me to also develop user maps, which helped to flesh out the tasks that I wanted to implement and the flow of them through my design.
If you’d like to check out the interactive prototype, click here!
Objectives
The initial goals described in the project brief were to develop an app that would allow users to use their money without the need for a physical card or cash and without the need to visit a physical store or bank. Ultimately, I needed to develop an app that allowed users to send, save, and move money, track and filter their financial behavior, and the bonus goal of giving users a way to budget or set goals for themselves. In this project I tackled all objectives and had to ensure the app included the following features:
An onboarding page
A way to sign-up or log in
A home screen
A navigation menu
Search through and filter financial behavior
Ability to send/save/move money
Ability to set a budget or goal
A form of security authentication
Work
In order to ensure I developed a well structured app that spoke directly to user needs, I conducted research using a variety of methods to gather data to understand user needs. Through a competitive analysis, I learned what users needed and what I could offer the market. Conducting surveys, interviews, and observations helped to better understand what people wanted and how they interacted with their money. I was able to gain insights not only into how they talked about their money, but how they felt and thought about it. After rigorous research and design, I was able to develop a product to test and iterate upon. This became Floos.
My first iteration allowed me to begin focusing on my mid-level wireframe where I created a product that one could begin to see the experience coming to life. By focusing on the location, size, and flow of the app, I could do something with it and take it to the next level.
Wireframes and final mockup
Starting off by drawing out low fidelity wireframes, I focused on fleshing out the user flows into sketches and developing the high level organization of the app. I aimed to have a dashboard that would reflect a high level summary of the most pertinent information found throughout the app. I first developed sketches for the other pages and incorporated the most pertinent information into a dashboard, laid out in a way that was influenced by the initial research and what users wanted.
By sticking to rapid prototyping, I was able to test my design quickly, test, and reiterate in order to get a testable prototype out and receive data that either validated or rejected the design. However, what this meant for the overall design is a successful product that users found effective to use and pleasing to look at. Through A/B and preference testing, I was able to identify exactly what users wanted to see in my product, either due to familiarity or to their tastes. What I came up with in the end is an app that is simple to use, simple to understand, yet embraces the complexity of their finances in a way that makes it easier to save, send, and understand money.
User Flows
With personas developed, I now needed a way of visualizing the tasks to be accomplished in the form of user flows. By laying out the step by step process, I was able to find ways to streamline the flow and minimize unnecessary steps for the user, making it not only a efficient experience but an effective one.
The user flows included a way to:
Monitor and track information
Set up a fund
Create a budget
Organize credit cards
The layout and structure of the app was heavily dictated by the mental model of how people related to their money—what I had to answer was “what mattered most to people when they think about money?”
Project
The automotive industry has been under immense pressure in recent years to shift with the times and experiment with the development of electric vehicles. Ford Motor Company is not new to the game, but it seems that the data on electric vehicles is so limited that in the development phase, their guiding compass isn’t validated in where it’s directing them. We, a team of 12 student researchers from Wayne State University, were brought on to help study the culture of the construction industry in order to understand their needs and wants in an electric vehicle. Being a study of the construction industry, we needed to gather a large pool of participants from various regions in order to understand the needs of the people but also their environments. By conducting ethnographic research, we were able to gather in-depth, cultural data of our participants and analyze this for a deeper understanding of their needs.
Objectives
1) To study the construction industry
We were specifically brought on this project because as anthropologists we meticulously developed the right questions, made keen and vital observations necessary to understanding the people involved, and dug deeper when there was more than what showed at the surface. The timing was crucial as Ford needed to have this data in order to know what their most important EV’s would be going forward and how to develop them around their target market. The problem at hand was that they didn’t have validated data about their users and this led to the opportunity to know exactly what their users needed from an EV and how to develop one catered to them exactly.
2) To understand vehicle tracking and software
A secondary objective was to understand how a company managed their fleet and the relationship of the vehicles to owners: were they privately owned or company owned? It was important to understand the immediate users and, when developing a vehicle for the construction industry, know if this user was an individual or a business in order to integrate tracking software to help understand specs of the vehicle but if this would even be accepted by the users. This would give Ford the data they needed to know for whom they were designing.
Work
In order to get the deep, rich data necessary for understanding the industry, we recruited participants from a variety of regions to understand their industry and environmental needs, either from personal connections, a site visit, or cold calling participants. We conducted a background research phase by digging into the history of electric vehicles to understand what challenges had faced EV’s in the past and where we were in the present. We then carried out field research by making site visits to companies large and small. As solo or partnered visits, we conducted participant observations, ethnographic interviews, and focus groups, and we were able to gather data that would help us in our analysis later on. We coded the data in MAXQDA, validated it through inter-rater reliability testing, analyzed it using affinity mapping, and delivered a strong report for Ford.
End Results
By conducting this type of research, we were able to understand users needs in a deep contextualized manner. This helped Ford
Save money by not developing a product and realizing the dissonance between user needs and the actual product
Make money by speaking directly to user needs, ensuring that what users didn’t see in competitor products they saw in Ford’s and chose to use their vehicles instead
Ensure that the products utility would be maximized as it served most if not all the needs of the user in the variety of ways they needed rather than requiring multiple vehicles or tools.
What this gave Ford was the data necessary to develop a truly human-centered, holistic vehicle that spoke to the exact needs of the user whether or not they were aware of it.
Reflection
This was an immensely helpful project not just for Ford but for myself as an anthropologist and researcher in the business field. This taught me how to apply the theory and skills gained in my master’s program in a real world application where I was able to see what the field demands. With this project behind me, I can confidently say that I know how to recruit as well as who, how to develop a strong method of conducting research based on a projects individual needs, carry out the research and think on my feet in real time, and lastly how to analyze all the dat gathered to make sense of it all for a report out. By working with others I was able to see what keys skills I brought to the team as well as how to work with other people strengths, helping to support them and working together to conduct the best research possible. If I had the opportunity to do this project again, I would take more photographic evidence—one thing I realized in the analysis and report out phase is the importance of imagery in reviewing the data and utilizing photos for examples of user context.
Ford Motor Company
Project
As a market research consultant with Nativa, I was tasked with conducting research for the State of Ohio’s Greater Ohio Workforce Board. Being a board dealing with labor in Ohio, they were excited to welcome a growing manufacturing industry, but were concerned with the labor force and some misconceptions surrounding the up and coming workforce—Gen Z. The study was to understand “why Gen Z doesn’t want to go to school or work,” and through market research, I was able to deliver a report that went in-depth to explain the current phenomenon and develop insights that the board could use to promote the manufacturing industry to connect businesses with the labor force, speaking to each party’s concern.
Objectives
1) To understand why Gen Z wasn’t going to school or work; how to retain employees in the industry
There were two questions, but had significant overlap: to understand Gen Z and how they’re living their current lives as well as understanding how to retain employees.
2) To develop solutions to the problem
This knowledge of the Gen Z experience and learning what pain points the have in general as well as in the manufacturing industry is critical information to have, but without value if there isn’t a solution. Through the development of insights and a laying out of the data in an organized manner, I was able to devise solutions to the concerns of the board.
Work
I conducted research through an intense analysis of primary data that allowed me to understand the experience Gen Z is facing at this point in time, that is: What world did they grow up? What problems are they facing today? What are they doing to progress their education and survive, financially speaking? What does their behavior reveal about the culture of being in Gen Z and where do we go in furthering the study?
These sort of questions forced me to dig deeper beyond what other studies had said as I was able to find gaps in their work and connect missing points to the study for deeper, better, more grounded insights. By uncovering the relationships between the data points gathered I was able to express my final findings in a report that drew heavily on data from government agencies, independent agencies, other studies, primary data, and personal interviews.
End Results
With this information, the report delivered was comprised of a quantitative research report as well as my findings in the qualitative research. With this balance, the Greater Ohio Workforce Board had a better understanding of their youngest workforce generation and possible solutions to move forward with. This has allowed the board to:
Save money, time and reputation by advising business on exactly what they need to do in order to attract, retain, and develop this incoming workforce
How to market and speak directly to the concerns and aspirations of the workforce by knowing their exact pain points and goals
Have validated data in one concise, organized, and well written report to back up their recommendations and advice to business clients
Reflection
Being able to conduct thorough, in-depth, cultural market research is what was important to the development of this report. After reflecting on this project, what surprised me the most is that a lot of other reports I used to help inform and guide my own report weren’t asking the right questions and missed out on getting down to the very experience of being in Gen Z. Although there were a few things I could’ve done differently, I recognize that what I succeeded at was not delivering a “market research report” but an ethnographic study of Gen Z to better the market.