Always a pleasure to work with, Michael was a great colleague at Constant Contact. His excitement and passion for the UX practice was palpable within our team. I witnessed him grow and excel within the User Research practice, but he also became a great contributor within the design and strategy space, always there with new ideas and possibilities.
Lead UX Researcher + AI Methodologist · 14+ years
I turn observations into findings and insights into decisions your team can act on.
Mixed-methods research, practice-building from the ground up, and AI-enabled synthesis — for teams who need clarity faster than a slide deck usually delivers.
About
I'm a Lead UX Researcher and AI Methodologist whose titles have included Principal UX Researcher, UX Designer / Researcher, and UX Research Operations specialist. My background spans practice-building, mixed-methods research, AI-enabled insight synthesis, and cross-functional stakeholder engagement. I've spent much of my career being the first researcher in the room — building the practice, the rituals, and the trust that make research part of how a team decides, not an afterthought to it.
Recently that's meant pairing traditional qualitative rigor with AI tools for synthesis at scale, so teams get findings while the decision is still open, not after it's already made.
I am also playing around with the idea of having a digital design agency, and you can see my exploration here.
- MS, Human Factors in Information Design — Bentley University
- BA, Visual and Media Arts — Emerson College
- NN/g UX Management Certification
- Enterprise Design Thinking Certification — IBM Security
- Graphic Design Specialization — California Institute of the Arts
- Experience Mapping Workshop — Adaptive Path UXWeek
- Gamification (Kevin Werbach) — University of Pennsylvania
- Co-author, “You Want Me to What? A Practical Guide to Diary Studies” — UXPA International Conference
- Designing, Running, and Analyzing Experiments (R, SPSS) — UC San Diego, The Design Lab
Experience
A field log, roughly in order.
-
Research ConsultingFeb 2026 – May 2026UX Research Lead
- Owned the research strategy for a new paper billing process at a Florida utility company: screener design, a mixed-methods study plan, an AI capture process, and reporting format, tracing what was driving billing-related call volume and escalations.
- Built a structured, AI-queryable research repository indexing 50 interviews in NotebookLM, letting the client keep extracting insight after the engagement ended.
- Delivered findings across virtual and in-person sessions with customers frustrated by billing errors, reducing bill-comprehension call times and increasing first-bill customer confidence despite a low-trust starting point.
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SimSpaceMay 2024 – Dec 2025Senior UX Researcher II
- Built a new UX research practice for four product teams on a cyber range platform: a repository, personas, and standardized protocols that became their shared operating infrastructure.
- Ran ongoing customer feedback programs, including a Design Partner Program and the 2024 Customer Advisory Board, to shape and prioritize the roadmap.
- Developed AI-enabled synthesis protocols with Claude, NotebookLM, and GPT to speed up turning interview and testing data into findings.
- Validated a major milestone release through iterative testing to retain the company's top contracted DOD customer.
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RCG Global ServicesOct 2023 – May 2024Lead UX Researcher
- Led discovery research and multi-day design thinking workshops across five user groups for a USAID-funded financial reporting platform, where reporting accuracy tied directly to congressional funding.
- Reframed findings as “how might we” statements that directly shaped a platform redesign, eliminating the pain points surfaced.
- Built a formal intake, synthesis, and decision-making process, plus reusable artifacts the design team kept using after the engagement ended.
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Nielsen Norman Group & Eager LabsJan 2023 – Oct 2023
Leadership & Management Development
- Completed a UX Certificate with specialty recognition in UX Management, concentrating on leadership, workshop facilitation, research operations, design systems, and product/UX partnership.
- Completed Eager Labs' invite-only Emerging Leaders program on executive referral: five sessions, a 360 feedback assessment, and ongoing 1:1 coaching.
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SecurityScorecardOct 2021 – Jan 2023Senior UX Researcher
- Drove a 5–15% improvement in customer retention and conversion through end-to-end onboarding, pricing, and plan research with Growth product teams.
- Defined user archetypes for multi-jurisdictional security monitoring through Jobs-to-be-Done research, informing a new public-sector monitoring tool the company shipped.
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VeracodeMar 2020 – Oct 2021Principal UX Researcher
- Formalized Veracode's first UX Research practice from the ground up: protocols, discovery frameworks, and design thinking capabilities.
- Co-created a Developer Partner Program feeding discovery, concept, and usability testing, growing the participant base to scale research.
- Delivered 14 strategic research initiatives using a Jobs-to-be-Done framework to drive product vision, while mentoring researchers in methodology.
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IBM Resilient & IBM SecurityNov 2017 – Mar 2020UX Designer / Researcher
- Led UX design and research for Resilient, IBM's first large-vendor incident response platform, earning IBM “Leader” recognition from IDC and Forrester.
- Ran participatory design research and rapid iterative testing, using Sketch and Figma prototypes plus a formalized GitHub-based research workflow.
- Became a certified design thinking facilitator, formalizing years of practice into IBM's official training.
- Designed a feature letting analysts cross-reference security incident artifacts directly, cutting incident resolution time roughly tenfold.
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Constant Contact & Endurance InternationalSep 2012 – Nov 2017Senior UX Researcher / UX Researcher
- Pioneered an academically-grounded site-visit research program that shifted company culture toward centering the small business owner.
- Ran a company-wide customer panel discussion, surfacing themes that shaped empathy and roadmap direction.
- Executed 20+ studies annually using the widest methodology toolkit of my career, including card sorting, tree testing, and quantitative testing in R and SPSS.
- Maintained and evolved the research practice through the company's acquisition by Endurance International, co-creating a strategic journey map with a participatory field research team.
- Helped build a fixed in-person usability lab with a one-way mirror and multi-camera capture system for stakeholder observation.
Full role details and additional history on the resume.
Toolkit
Research & testing
UserTesting- UserZoom
Userlytics
User Interviews
Maze
Qualtrics
Optimal Workshop
Synthesis & surveys
SurveyMonkey- SurveyGizmo
dScout
Ethnio
ProvenByUsers
Respondent
Pendo
Design & strategy
Figma
Miro
Mural
Sketch- IBM Carbon Design System
GitHub- InVision
Data & analysis
R / RStudio
SPSS
jamovi
Python
Excel
AI-enabled synthesis
Claude
NotebookLM
Dovetail
Great Question
Selected work
Three research efforts, from the ambiguity going in to what changed because of it.
Constant Contact → Endurance International
Building a Research Practice from Zero
Standing up foundational persona research where none existed, then scaling that same practice into a company-wide customer journey map.
IBM Security / Resilient
From Discovery to Design: Artifacts & Related Incidents
Redesigning how security analysts work with incident data, from contextual inquiry through several rounds of iterative design.
Research Consulting
Scaling the Unscalable: AI-Augmented Qualitative Research
Validating a redesigned utility bill format across 50+ interviews by designing research methodology around AI-assisted synthesis.
What people say
Michael was a key reason that our UX team delivered better features and a better user experience for our customers. He leveraged his deep expertise to design research campaigns that delivered insightful and actionable results. We kept knowing our customers better and better because of Michael.
Michael is a passionate and incredibly talented user experience professional, that possesses an uncommon level of creativity and an advanced understanding of UX methods and strategy. He is highly empathetic to the needs and expectations of users; advocating for the creation of extraordinary user experiences.