Looking for opportunities to build & lead Research teams informing meaningful and complex products with customer-centric leadership.

Experience

Lyft, User Experience Research Manager

April 2019 - Present

Currently a Research Manager, leading a team of six, and leading UXR for Customer Platform at Lyft. 

Chariot (Ford Smart Mobility), Head of User Experience Research

April 2018 - March 2019

First/team of one ux researcher at Chariot, working to build and grow our understanding of the microtransit rider, driver, and operations experience. In addition, I assumed the role of Product Manager in October 2018 to drive the release of our redesigned driver mobile app after several team departures. 

Chariot, a division of Ford Smart Mobility, will be ending operations by March 2019.

Common research methods: Think-aloud testing, in-depth interviews, focus groups, field research, survey design, beta testing

Ford Motor Company, Ethnographer

October 2016 - April 2018

Focused on immersive, ethnographic observations of routine and complex workflows.

Common research methods: Think-aloud testing, in-depth interview, contextual inquiry, survey design, guerrilla user testing

Twitter, User Researcher

June 2015 - October 2016

Focused on user growth; improving the signup and new user onboarding experience.

Common research methods: Think-aloud testing, in-depth interview, diary study, survey design, rapid iterative testing and evaluation (RITE), guerrilla user testing

VMware, Senior User Experience Researcher

Jan 2012 - May 2015

Owned end-to-end user research project management. Utilizing various research
methodologies to improve dense and complex web-based UIs (vSphere web client). Led usability scorecard initiative to track feature and product quality across VMware. Mentoring interns and new hires.

Common research methods: Cognitive walkthrough, think-aloud testing, contextual inquiry, focus groups, diary study, survey design

Microsoft, User Experience Research Intern

June 2011 - Sept 2011

Planned, performed, and reported on multiple user studies, worked with PMs, developers, and designers, and presented research findings to my team while working on Windows 8 and Windows Live products.

Common research methods: Think-aloud testing, heuristic evaluation, paper prototyping, card sorting, diary study

Carnegie Mellon, Research Assistant

May 2009 - Aug 2010

Drove implementation of user studies to determine modality preference for rider reports on public transportation. Led planning and execution of think-aloud studies and deployed a field trial to collect user feedback for a public transit mobile application. 

Common research methods: Rapid Iterative Testing & Evaluation (RITE), think-aloud testing, paper prototyping, survey design

Education

University of Washington, Seattle - MS Human Centered Design and Engineering | Dec 2011 

Carnegie Mellon University - BS Electrical and Computer Engineering with 2nd major in Human-Computer Interaction | May 2010

Georgia Tech-Lorraine - Study Abroad Program in Metz, France | Summer 2008

Le, T., Reeder, B., Yoo, D., Aziz, R., Thompson, H., Demiris, G. (2015). An Evaluation of Wellness Assessment Visualizations for Older Adults’. Telemedicine and e-Health. January 2015, 21(1): 9-15. [link]

Zimmerman, J., Tomasic, A., Garrod, C., Yoo, D., Aziz, R., Hiruncharoenvate, C., Thirunevgadam, N. Huang, Y., Steinfeld, A. (2011). Field Trial of Tiramisu: Crowd-Sourcing Bus Arrival Times to Spur Co-Design. Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). ACM Press. [link]

Steinfeld, A., Aziz, R., Von Dehsen, L., Park, S. Y. (2010). Modality preference for rider reports on transit   accessibility problems. Transportation Research Board 2010 Annual Meeting. Washington, DC: Transportation Research Board. [link]