My Story
I’M A UX RESEARCHER
and designer with a background in marketing, design, and environmental sustainability. I leverage my storytelling experience and empathetic problem solving skills to craft designs with social impact. I develop equitable and accessible products, systems, and experiences informed by user research and feedback. My home base is Washington, DC.
THOUGHT PROCESS
I believe that through equitable, accessible, diverse, and inclusive research, more effective solutions, products and systems are created. As a UX Researcher, it is vital to me to understand the context of everything I’m researching to ensure that when I find the “root why” that it is the most relevant and actionable why within the constraints of the project, business goals/needs, and user goals/needs. My entire life I’ve been training to understand “it depends” situations. I value collaboration a lot, which in many cases relies on team mates to provide and receive feedback in helpful ways. Throughout my life, I have improved my ability to give useful feedback and ask specific questions to understand someone better before critiquing them. I also have honed my ability to receive feedback without taking it personally.
PERSONAL
I have always been a creative and curious person, often asking “why” over and over again. From a young age, my father taught me the importance of systems-thinking. He got a PhD in statistics, became a professor and consultant, and then spent the later 10+ years of his career teaching sustainable organizational strategy, design, and multifunctional multi-objective improvement of systems, as well as services and health care at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Our conversations while hiking in the mountains during our summer vacation taught me the values of talking to individuals at every level of an organization or community, asking lots of questions to fully understand an idea or concept, and the many benefits of understanding and creating diverse ecosystems and organizations.
From a young age, my mother taught me the joy of creativity and design. She worked as a graphic designer and then later as an art teacher. During my childhood she encouraged my creativity through (to my despise as a kid, and my gratitude as an adult) requiring that each child in our household learn an instrument (I chose violin), allowing me to be her guinea-pig testing out projects for her students, and supporting me through thousands of hours of dance classes and competitions. Through these things, I learned how life (and research) is much more enjoyable and effective with more creativity and play, as well as how to communicate in ways beyond words including movement, music, and design.
At the University of Iowa, my studies of marketing, environmental sustainability, and dance continued my interdisciplinary approach to communication, research, and design. After graduating, I had an amazing opportunity to volunteer on farms in Norway, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Hawaii as well as travel to Iceland, Singapore, Thailand, and Australia, while interviewing many farmers and sharing the stories of these regenerative farms and farmers on my blog, Regenerative Farming. This global experience taught me about the huge value, benefit, and joy of understanding other cultures and other methods of communication at a deeper level, some only accessible via lived experience and the passing of time existing in a certain place or around certain people.
After returning back to the US after my travels, I moved to Washington, DC, my current home base, to work as a marketer and designer with PYXERA Global, a global nonprofit that facilitates mutually beneficial partnerships between the public, private, and social sectors that leverage the unique attributes of each to tackle complex challenges. In this role, I learned invaluable skills on how to communicate the benefits of research & design to an organization. This required a deep understanding of the short and long-term business’s goals, each department’s goals, the public affair’s (my team’s) goals, and the goals of my team mates that I was working most closely with. Their lead designer helped mentor me to level up my design skills to be able to communicate ideas through images beyond just words, how to communicate the benefits of design to non-designers and how to implement and utilize processes to effectively and efficiently get a lot done in a small amount of time, while making minimal to no errors. As I am human and not a machine, I do make occasionally make errors and forget things, so learning to follow a checklist when reviewing designs from high level marketing materials to magazine layouts and to double or triple check my work was a valuable lesson I still use today. In the marketing work I did there, I communicated website, social media, and email analytics to our director, the CEO, and our board. Practicing this helped me learn how to take a lot of data and communicate (through words and graphics) the high-level why behind why specific things mattered to the organization, depending on the perspective and needs of each stakeholder. I also managed, organized, and created nearly all of the content for their LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pages to align with their business and stakeholder’s needs and goals.
In 2020, I returned to my love of movement and pivoted from communications and design at this wonderful nonprofit to doing the same for my own mobility coaching business, Mindful Impact Coaching. This organization focuses on helping individuals feel better in their body through understanding how each of their individual joints function (or don’t) independently of one another, and providing 1:1 specific plans for each client to improve their flexibility and strength where it will best help them. I define mobility as one’s usable (active) range of motion. Many people think they want to be stronger or more flexible, but upon sharing their actual goals (root why) with me, and understanding more about the science behind how their bodies work, realize that they actually needed to improve their active mobility of specific joints. This work, that I’m still doing part-time, helps me understand how to listen really well, discover the most relevant root of what clients need, all while continuously researching the more recent scientific findings related to how human bodies and minds function. It also helps me continue to improve my ability to communicate very complex scientific concepts in very simple ways that people like my parents in their 70’s as well as students in their 20’s and 30’s can understand.
I am delighted and fascinated to continue to learn about communication, collaboration, and research as my journey evolves.
If you want to learn more about me, check out my other blog posts and take a look at a few of my media appearances. I often take an inter-disciplinary approach to problem-solving, which is highlighted in a few articles below.
ON THE RADIO - UNIVERSITY OF IOWA STUDENT COMBINES LOVE OF DANCE WITH PASSION FOR SUSTAINABILITY