About

I’ve been a User Researcher now in both a retail environment and academia. I love combining my research craft with new technology stacks and experimentation to find better faster processes. Working on a fast paced team I’ve gotten many opportunities to refine my speed and process, while also taking risks to try out new methods and processes to suit the team’s needs.

While at Home Depot I’ve become a go to consultant for all things mobile testing. I’ve taught in the organization on mobile best practices and some of the processes my team and I have devised to do faster, cheaper mobile testing. I love the rush of being able to pilot a crazy idea when it works and you are able to better optimize the research process to work with Agile timelines.

I love research! My favorite research projects have been those where I am challenged to understand the needs or thought processes of a population which is new to me. I’m passionate about discovering the needs and desires of users, and using their experiences and ideas to create better products.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been an aspiring researcher. From a very young age, data and statistics fascinated me. Some of my most vivid childhood memories are of sitting with my dad as he combed thru thousands of excel cells. He would explain to me that those numbers represented people and their habits and preferences. I would read through any of the market research reports I could get my hands on (unfortunately it wasn’t exactly the reading material commonly given to elementary students), amazed I could learn about so many peculiar things people did or thought. It completely changed how I viewed stores, and I might have been a bit of a smart alack with my commentary. This sparked the interest that lead to my first bachelor’s in psychology and eventually to human computer interaction. Suddenly many of humanity’s trends were a Google search away, from color preferences to how we group things. I’ve continued to develop as a researcher throughout these many years, and marvel at how much I have yet to learn.

I have a few quirky hobbies, including lyra & pole, ceramics, and assorted arts and crafts. I have, mildly put, a penchant for tea, especially aged sheng, yanchas and dancongs. Really, I just love to travel and experience other cuisines and cultures. I like to think of my ideal life style as being one of a very adventurous hobbit, but more one who just wants to meet all the people rather than more commonly known tales of adventurous hobbits we all know and love. I’ve lived in several countries and would love to see more of the world, especially places that are less westernized. My first international trip included Vietnam, when it was just opening up to the west (that was an interesting visa to obtain). Since then I’ve visited the Amazon (we had tour guides who were from a tribe with very cool customs) when I lived in Brasil as a Rotary Youth Ambassador in High School. It was just so cool experiencing cultures so different from the one I grew up with! More recently I’ve lived in parts of Asia teaching at international schools, before returning home to pursue my masters.