UX Research Project Examples

Due to NDAs, I am unable to publicly share the majority of the quantitative and foundational studies that I’ve conducted. I present redacted case studies as a portfolio presentation upon request.

Here’s a sample of redacted deliverables that I’ve created that are typical of a week’s work as a user researcher, including study proposals, usability reports, presentations, and writeups for a broader non-UX audience.

  • Enhancing trust with just the right amount of supportive UX copy

    Here’s a sample redacted report of an unmoderated usability test I ran evaluating if and how users corresponding to certain personas accessed supporting articles and skimmed microcopy to understand AI-driven financial recommendations.

  • Evaluating the player onboarding experience for the Walking Dead: Road to Survival

    Here’s a sample research proposal for evaluating the first time player experience for a mobile game. The proposal includes sample interview questions, a project timeline, and other gameplay metrics and telemetry to be analyzed.

  • Determining the cause of decreased website traffic with a true intent study

    Here’s a sample research proposal for a true intent study, a type of observational UX research method that’s used to develop personas and determine how successful users are in completing what they sought to do on a website or app.

  • Blogging about research insights in action as a way to evangelize the value of UX research

    Here’s a sample blog post intended for a non-UX audience showcasing insights, feature requests from a moderated RITE study conducted at a professional conference for a highly specialized audience.

Research projects from grad school in human-centered design engineering

Jumpshot: does it pass the “grandma” test?

For this project, our team conducted in-depth interviews and task analyses focusing on the first time registration and set up of the Kickstarter-funded anti-virus program, Jumpshot. The developers specifically asked us to evaluate usability of the first time experience for older and less technically savvy users. We provided recommendations around how to improve some of the on-page copy and notifications so that users would not accidentally exit during the installation process.

 

This quantitative study (featuring wholesome animal memes) investigates the effect of webpage content displayed on discrete pages versus an infinitely scrolling page on users’ recollection of content and browsing satisfaction. To explore this effect, we had 21 participants view captioned images on one of two Tumblr blogs: one containing ten entries per page and the other presenting all of the entries on one page.

We found no statistically significant difference between the paginated and infinite scrolling variations on either browsing satisfaction or content recall; however, our experiment suffered from low statistical power due to the smaller sample size. Our study provides a framework for other researchers to explore the relationship between page layout and engagement during content consumption-focused web browsing.

 

Redesigning an animal shelter website

Website redesign and research proposal featuring a heuristic analysis of the original site, a competitive analysis of similar adoption websites, KPIs, and high level description of the key user groups for the website

UX-centric analysis of the shelter’s existing Google Analytics dashboard to identify common site visitor user flows

Interview guide that we created to shape personas and guide redesign direction

3 personas that we created from interviews with prospective adopters, with

Card sorting categories used to guide information architecture and sitemap w/ users post- interview

Proposed information architecture for site navigation categories and sub-pages based on the card sort testing

Some unaesthetically pleasing sketches for low-fidelity wireframes

For this project, our student team of 4 designer-researchers helped redesign the website for MEOW Cat Rescue, a nonprofit Seattle animal shelter where I also volunteer. We conducted multiple kinds of generative user research studies to better understand the needs, goals, and interests of different kinds of site visitors to ensure that the redesigned site served them.

We also ensured that the site redesign reflected the desired OKRs for MEOW management given that the website plays a critical role in driving both adoptions as well as donations to this nonprofit which is primarily funded through donations rather than grants or adoption fees.