Honored as one of the top 10% of US Mentors on ADPList.org

Here are some of the kind things that people who’ve worked with me have said about what it’s like to work with me. More testimonials from other researchers, UX designers, and product leaders can be found on my LinkedIn profile. If you’re interested in being mentored as an aspiring, early to mid-career UX researcher, here’s a link to 30+ unsolicited reviews from my ADPList mentees about how I’ve helped them.

Andrea is still the very best UX researcher I've worked with in my career, and a beacon for what UX research can do. Her insights led to UX improvements that drove hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars in additional revenue at Achieve. She has deep experience with users of finance products, and leverages her career-wide insights on current projects in a way that only the best researchers can do. I've learned a ton from Andrea and hope I get the chance to work with her again.

Context: I worked with Andrea as she lead the UX research for my product, the Achieve MoLO app, along with many other user experiences.

— Travis Bjorklund, Principal Product Manager at Achieve

Andrea is, hands down, the best researcher I have worked with in my 22 years as a designer. She is AMAZING. How so? Andrea brings a thorough, unbiased approach to her work, digging into details to find those diamonds most people miss. She works in collaboration with teammates, partners and stakeholders to ensure the work is focused on the highest quality user experience.

I've worked with and continue to work with incredibly talented UX researchers, but NO ONE comes close to the dedication, skillset, and expertise that Andrea embodies.

I sincerely hope I have the opportunty to work with her again.

— Kim Spencer, Staff Product Designer at Achieve

“Andrea is both resourceful and insightful researcher. Resourceful because she doggedly determines how to work within constraints to unlock our research capabilities. She orchestrated a new research method for Capital One, our customer advisory panel that would bring current users onsite to interact with engineers and product managers. She worked across legal, risk management, product, engineering, brand, marketing and other disciplines to explain the value of longitudinal research and alleviate their concerns (real users with their real money?). Andrea insightfully listens during strategic planning meetings, formulates a hypothesis and a research plan, and closes our knowledge gaps with valid and reliable results. On multiple occasions she would formulate a point of view document, based on primary and secondary research, that provided direction for the design and product teams, all before we knew we needed that direction. I truly appreciate her exemplary bias for action, her willingness to do whatever it takes, and her uncanny ability to uncover the unexpected. She would make a great addition to any research team.”

— Julie Jensen, Vice President of Product Design and Experience at Knox Financial, who was my former skip-level manager

“Andrea is an extremely talented mixed-methods researcher that I trust to lead the highest-priority projects. She has an exceptional amount of bias for action and will do anything necessary to get a project done. Earlier this year, our LOB decided to leverage a new framework to approach solving product-related learning objectives. With minimal training on the framework, Andrea jumped right in, and in a short period of time was able to align a cross-functional team of designers and product managers on their objectives, create a research survey, analyze the data, and report the findings to a large audience. This is typical of Andrea, as she is a very quick learner and frequently utilizes innovative approaches to conduct research and answer stakeholder questions. Furthermore, Andrea has also helped other members of the research team improve their skill sets. She is an expert or master of many types of research including IDI interviews, usability research, and concept design and evaluation, and she has coached researchers on our team on these methods. Andrea is a valuable asset to our team, and I recommend her to the fullest extent.”

— Lunce Bass, Mixed Methods Researcher at Meta, who was my former manager

“Andrea is a talented, thoughtful researcher whose insights and findings were instrumental to our UX design team at Capital One. In an often times ambiguous and exploratory product design environment, she was always able to see through the clutter, key in on the most important objectives, ask the right questions, conduct the appropriate research, and then communicate any findings back to the team, and other stakeholders, clearly and effectively.

One of the projects we collaborated on was designing the experience for the tracking and monitoring of custom savings goals within our product. Andrea worked with design, product, and content to produce statements in the Jobs To Be Done framework which she was able to pare down to 6 key statements through an internal associate survey. She then worked with design to craft a number of wireframe concepts and prototypes for external user-testing. She put together a research study to test the prototypes against our key objectives, conducted the survey, analyzed the data, and then worked with us to determine how we could best integrate the findings into our designs. The results of Andrea's work were invaluable to our design process and completely shifted our views on how users perceive the tracking of their savings goals. Andrea is fantastic to work with, a terrific collaborator, and a passionate advocate for the user. I highly recommend her and would welcome the opportunity to work with her again.”

— Phil Etting, Senior Technical UI/UX Designer at Bungie

“I had the distinct pleasure of working with Andrea while at Amazon in the summer of 2014 and I was immediately impressed not only by her work ethic but also by the sheer volume of knowledge she had as a user researcher. During the time I spent working with Andrea she consistently demonstrated a commitment to the team, the product, and her research. Every single time I worked with Andrea I was impressed by her ability to create intelligent questions to get at the core of the user’s experience, her ability to digest copious amounts of data, and her skill of turning that data into real and tangible solutions for whatever project she was on. Andrea is an absolutely top-notch user researcher and has been absolutely vital to the success of both our team and the product. All of this combined with her friendly demeanor, her unflappable cool, and her ability to work under pressure and deadlines mean that I would gladly recommend her for any role in the user research field and I consider myself lucky to have had the opportunity to absorb as much as I did from her.”

— Ezra Gould, a peer user researcher on Amazon Echo

“Andrea’s project management is excellent. She gets her work done on time and often ahead of schedule. She is thorough yet fast, diligent yet flexible. I never worry about her projects or need to check on her to make sure they are done on time or done well. Beyond stating the project basics, I never have had to guide her. She figures everything out and somehow knows what questions and decisions are worth asking about and which can be handled on her own. I’m particularly impressed at that because she was capable of making excellent decisions about my involvement when she had just met me and didn’t really know that much about me.”

— Elizabeth Amini, President and CEO of Anti-Aging Games