Nov 2023 – Jan 2025 · 1 yr 2 mos · San Francisco, California, United States · Hybrid

• Building high impact, next frontier solutions.

May 2023 – Oct 2023 · 5 mos

• Composing and orchestrating Google's centralized UX research strategy for equity centered product design and development.

Nov 2022 – Oct 2023 · 11 mos

• Principles Pioneers is a community of trusted and trained AI Principles advisors. As a community member, I help evaluate the AI system by introducing adversarial strategies to identify weaknesses and vulnerabilities in the ML models prior to and after deployment. Assessing, reviewing, and testing the AI system through stress testing methods, with a focus on injecting potential malicious tactics into it to uncover any security gaps in the ML models both before and during production systems.

Nov 2021 – May 2023 · 1 yr 6 mos

• Leading UX research that empowers product teams to build more equitable futures.

Apr 2021 – Oct 2021 · 6 mos

Feb 2021 – Oct 2023 · 2 yrs 8 mos

• https://blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/commitments-racial-equity/

May 2020 – Apr 2021 · 11 mos

Oct 2018 – May 2020 · 1 yr 7 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

Sep 2017 – Oct 2018 · 1 yr 1 mo · Dallas/Fort Worth Area

Jan 2017 – Oct 2017 · 9 mos · Chicago | Dallas | New York | San Francisco

• After more than a decade of leading research studies in design-for-learning, I realized that Learning Design is situated in perhaps the only industry in which the negative outcomes of design failure are attributed to customers and end-users. User experience around these products suffered due to a general lack of user focus and design thinking in that market. I started considering user-centered design solutions and over many thought experiments and reflection saw that the design and product cycles behind those products and services inherently marginalized users. Thus, it was no surprise to observe widespread inefficacy and low user satisfaction. The products and services were never specifically designed for those users.
• In January 2017 I founded darkDUX, a design research studio that helps organizations and communities build more meaningful user experiences by addressing user marginalization in their product life and design cycles.
• At darkDUX I get to team with researchers and designers who donate their talents to social impact projects that improve the way people experience life by interacting with products and services designed with specific users in mind.
• My work starts by building a deep understanding and empathy for users. This includes going into the communities that many design teams never consider entering. My teams at darkDUX don't fear the margins because we're from the margins. So we enter and employ various forms of exploratory research to uncover user insight gems.
• My work at darkDUX is inspiring the design of a problem-solving platform for global purveyors of indigenous knowledge systems bringing them together to address common issues such as clean water, subsistence living, and education. It is stimulating the design of a data analytics platform that promotes engineering design and computational thinking in African-American girls.
• After 13+ years doing research I am just getting started!

Jul 2014 – Jun 2015 · 11 mos · Chicago, IL

• Developed a framework for conceptualizing validity as applied to classroom assessments;
• Developed and implemented a model for designing cognition-and-instruction based goal
• trajectories as part of an associated multilevel, multi-method design for data collection and analysis to support the validity framework and to construct validity arguments about classroom assessments;
• Developed eight student interviews and tasks using a quasi-experimental design to examine the cognitive underpinnings of performance on classroom assessments created to promote algebraic reasoning and understanding of fraction magnitude;
• Employed various knowledge elicitation methods within and across interviews including think- aloud, card-sorting, fact retrieval, physical relational reasoning tasks, and magnitude estimation;
• Analyzed large-scale and student interview data using data reduction techniques (e.g., factor and
• principal components analysis), parametric statistics (e.g., t-tests, ANOVA, linear regression, multi-level modeling), non-parametric analyses, curve-fitting analysis, verbal and protocol analysis, gesture analysis, and estimation analytics;
• Trained and mentored 13 advanced undergraduate students (3 Honors College Theses) and 1 visiting research specialist in research design, data collection, data analysis, and conference presentation.

Apr 2012 – Nov 2016 · 4 yrs 7 mos · Chicago, IL; Pittsburgh, PA; New York, NY

• In 2012, while in deep dissertation mode, a cognitive psychologist in Pittsburgh and a Brown grad with a computer science background in New York City approached me about a learning app company for toddlers they were starting and wanted me to advise them on design decisions given my background in children’s reasoning. After several meetings they asked me to join as partner and co-founder, I accepted, and at that moment became a tech entrepreneur assuming the role of Director of UX Research and Insights. We brought in a fourth partner from Brown (also in NYC) with a business background and were ready to rock.
• My NYC partners already had a successful app company. Through work with them, I learned to appreciate the lean research methods required to rapidly inspire design in a fast-moving industry. I designed and ran usability studies to test design concepts and feature functionality with paper prototypes and lo-fi mockups. I also conducted tests to assess child and parental preference for characters and scenes.
• My Pittsburgh partner was Principal Scientist. He and I devised an effective engagement measure for toddlers by adapting a paradigm used by developmental psychologists to observe attention in small children. Those data informed the design of feedback, scene length, and scene changes in the games.
• When parents of children along the autism spectrum expressed their and their child’s satisfaction with the game I designed and conducted several field studies to build greater empathy for these users. The observation inspired a second game, “Bouncing Faces,” and I realized the value added to a product by learning from marginalized users. Five years later I would share my thoughts about user marginalization in design for the first time at Big Design 2017.
• Sharp research planning and execution paid off as the games earned a design award from Children’s Technology Review and the Parent’s Choice Award for the toddler category from Parent’s Magazine.

Jan 2010 – May 2014 · 4 yrs 4 mos