My Role

Intern Experience

• As an intern, conducted research that lead to opportunity for experimentation and optimization of the app to drive paid conversions. Insights uncovered drove successful experiments that showed a significant +90% lift lending to a 1% absolute higher conversion rate, yielding an $81K annualized lift in revenue.

• As an intern, formulated and executed research plans to determine users’ perceptions to paywalls within Mailchimp and why they drop off in the payment process.

• As an intern, conducted research that uncovered still-relevant insights that helped our brick-and-mortar users quickly and efficiently get an online presence during COVID-19 to recover their lost revenue. Research was still relevant even a year later!

Full-time Experience

I’ve become proficient a broad range of research methods and design tools:

• Interviewing: Planning and moderating in-person interviews. Conducting and co-facilitating remote interviews. Eliciting deeper insights from participants.

• Usability Testing (moderated + unmoderated): Moderating usability tests and analyzing findings. Annotating and consolidating insights from testing videos.

• In-app Surveys: Using a combination of surveys to evaluate a new feature immediately upon release to learn opportunity sizing, discoverability, and unmet user needs to uncover immediate iterations.

• Survey Design and Analysis: Designing, piloting, and distributing surveys. Thematically analyzing open-ended survey responses.

• A/B Testing: Collaborating with product and engineering to design a quantitative experiment using statistical models

• And others…check out my resume for more insight into my experience

I’ve championed Research Programs that encouraged regular touch-points with users:

• Partnered with Market Research to launch a Churn program focused on interviewing churned users, aligning recruitment and research with SLT and Product strategy. The insights gathered directly informed product enhancements, leading to more effective retention strategies and churn reduction.

• Weekly innovation labs and testing: Partnered with Ops to coordinate weekly testing with different product teams via sign-ups, allowing teams to witness and practice research and immediately synth and ideate solutions with the product teams.

• Partnered with Design Ops to launch a research democratization program, where I led educational presentations, office hours, and contributed to the creation of a microsite to educate cross-functional partners. This empowered designers to conduct their own research, leading to faster insights, increased collaboration, and higher-quality design decisions across the team.

Empathy for users and stakeholders is a major key.

Mailchimp's culture is part of what makes it an effective company and a great place to work. There is an implicit (and explicit) understanding, for example, that diversity is a strength and a priority for the company. Senior executives, mid-level managers and product owners all embody this commitment, and it has become a social norm in the company. Because of this, people from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds can thrive more-so than in other environments.

It should also be noted that empathy goes beyond the interview, the survey responses, the usability session, etc. Empathetic fitness is a skill that needs to be practiced to grow and REALLY be a good researcher. I don’t practice empathy if I take a user’s quote and just slap it on a slide as evidence - their story needs to be told as genuinely as possible, in a way that isn’t exploitive. When we listen and tell the users’ stories, we need to ensure we are telling a story that helps the end-user as well as the business! It’s a balancing act that takes work to get right.

UX Research + Product Analytics = *chef’s kiss*

Working closely with product analysts at Mailchimp has changed the way I think about user research and opened my mind to new ways of gathering information and prioritizing research questions. 

Imagine that your product team just released a new feature, but users are slow to adopt it. Half of the users see an in-app announcement telling them about the new feature, while others did not. What is causing the issue? Are people not noticing the new feature? Is something about it confusing?

Before jumping into usability testing, it would be wise to sit down with a product analyst and find answers the following questions:

• Who is consistently using the feature? What's distinctive about them, in terms of demographics or behavior?

• When are people using this feature? What activity are they doing in the system at the time they use the feature?

• When people activate or use a feature for the first time, how likely are they to keep using it? Is there a common falloff point?

• The people who use the new feature for a short period but stop -- what's distinctive about them, in terms of behavior?

• Are people who got the announcement significantly more likely to try the new feature?

The answers to these questions will guide the next research steps.

Imagine, for example, that the product analyst finds that once people try the feature, they tend to keep using it. But they also discover that very few users are trying the feature -- even the ones who got the announcement about it. This would suggest that the announcement may not be working. It might not be well structured, or maybe people are just ignoring it. In this case, it would make the most sense to design and test new announcements.

Or maybe the product analyst finds that lots of people are trying the feature, but few continue using it. This would suggest that the feature itself may be confusing, frustrating, or unhelpful. In this situation, the product analyst could identify some of these "early quitters," and the user researcher could contact them for interviews and usability tests. This would help the team understand why they stopped using the feature. 

By thinking through questions like this with a product analyst, user researchers can make more informed hypotheses about what's happening, and better recommendations about how to address it.

Communicate across boundaries.

A team can solve problems much more quickly and effectively when its members have a good understanding of each other's work. One of the strengths of my team at Mailchimp was our ability to "speak each other's language." Designers and product managers understood user research, for example, while product managers and user researchers understood how product analysts ran experiments. This allowed us to communicate seamlessly and think through challenges together.

A team that plays together stays together.

It's a lot easier to collaborate with people when you've had coffee with them, shared a meal, or played an intense game together. By organizing fun outings for parts of the team, our managers created an environment where people trusted each other and were comfortable giving candid feedback.

Experiment, Learn, Iterate.

When most people think of innovation, they think of novel products and services. But real innovation happens when you iterate on your process, not just your prototype.  As user researchers at Mailchimp, we were constantly exploring new strategies for:

• Finding new and cool ways to ask questions;

• Simulating product experiences for usability testing;

• Recording and distributing our research data, and

• Packaging our research insights for the broader product team.

This culture of innovation was largely driven by three words: "What if we...?"

The things we tried didn't always work, but the point was to always be learning. When we did find success, we shared our insights with the wider team, and made it available to other user researchers in the company as well.