Case Studies

The Work, As It Actually Happened.

Twenty years of discovery research, facilitation, and design work. No invented drama, no reframed job titles: this is what happened and what came out of it.

TeleTech Brand Consolidation

Research subcontractor via the1st Movement (agency engagement)

TeleTech had absorbed several acquisitions and needed to consolidate their content and services into one coherent site and story, one that could hold its own against management-consulting-caliber positioning from Bain, Accenture, and McKinsey. I led the research team: stakeholder interviews across the business, a full content audit, and competitive analysis, synthesized into an insight report and a set of personas organized around five brand-story pillars. From there the work moved into experience architecture, taxonomy, user stories, use cases, card sorts, a site map, and wireframes, the full path from research to a build-ready structure.

Takeaway

Full-funnel research-to-design work, from raw stakeholder input to a structure a design and development team could build against.

Quote-First Commerce Redesign

Senior UX Researcher, Nutrien Ag Solutions

The headquarters team wanted a conventional eCommerce build. Field sales teams worked in a relationship-driven market where published list prices would have undercut negotiated deals and disrupted branch workflows. I led field research with branch managers and sales consultants to understand how the field actually operated, then brought that reality back to the digital leadership team. The reframe: quote-first instead of price-first, with compliance checks, inventory visibility, and regional flexibility built into the core workflow instead of bolted on afterward. I also built the research function on this account from one person to four, hiring and managing a team through the delivery.

Takeaway

Field research changed the fundamental shape of the product, not just its features. Compliance and branch operations became first-class parts of the design, not back-office add-ons.

Project Metro: 14-Stakeholder Study

UX Researcher & Designer, Hewlett Packard Enterprise

As part of a major platform transformation at HPE, I led the Project Metro study: interviews with 14 stakeholders across the business, analyzed in MAXQDA, to ground product direction in evidence instead of the loudest opinion in the room. That work sat alongside broader usability testing and survey work for HPE's enterprise SaaS and cloud infrastructure lines. I communicated the findings directly to executive stakeholders, and they factored into product direction and investment decisions at a global scale. I also co-chaired HPE's 100-person, three-day UX Design Summit during this period, running facilitation and event production end to end.

Takeaway

Research at this scale needs both rigorous method and a clear path to the people who make investment decisions. Method alone doesn't move a roadmap.

Two-Phase Research Program for an Agency Partner

Research subcontractor to a marketing/advertising agency

An advertising agency brought me in as a research subcontractor to support one of their clients. The engagement ran in two phases: ethnographic fieldwork first, to see how the experience actually played out in the real world, then in-depth interviews to explain the why behind what we'd observed. Each phase ended in a client-facing workshop, synthesizing findings into something the client's leadership could act on directly. The whole engagement was delivered under the agency's name, from kickoff through the final readout.

Takeaway

This is the exact model for how I work with agencies now: full ownership of the research scope, delivered clean, under your name, so your team doesn't have to manage the fieldwork to get the benefit of it.

Federated Access Platform

UX design and research contractor, via staffing partner

Working alongside a product team, I contributed UX design and research to a federated single sign-on platform that lets researchers reach institutional access to academic databases. Work centered on identity provider filtering design (helping users find and select their institution correctly, a genuinely hard usability problem in federated login), accessibility research and development, and usability click-testing to validate design decisions before they shipped.

Takeaway

Complex, infrastructure-level UX problems, the kind where the interface has to work correctly for hundreds of institutions with different requirements, need the same rigor as consumer-facing work.

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