Susan Masten

As the company's first UX Researcher, established and scaled the UX Research and product analytics functions from the ground up, transforming product development from assumption-driven decision making to a customer-centered, evidence-based practice across a seven product portfolio.

• Built the organization's UX research practice from inception, selecting tools, defining research operations, establishing processes, and creating scalable frameworks that enabled consistent customer insight generation across 6 product teams.
• Drove a company-wide shift toward user-centered product development by introducing customer research programs, evangelizing research findings, and building stakeholder trust, resulting in widespread adoption of research-informed decision making.
• Led strategic research initiatives across 6 products, uncovering user needs, pain points, and behavioral patterns that informed product strategy, prioritization, and experience improvements.
• Established the company's product analytics capability using Mixpanel, developing a comprehensive measurement framework that expanding tracking from ~20 events across 3 products to 100+ events across all 7 products.
• Partnered with product, design, and leadership teams to combine qualitative research and behavioral analytics, enabling teams to validate assumptions, quantify customer behavior, and make more confident product investment decisions.

Drove product vision on mobile app based on user insights across multiple mixed methods research studies, enabling the product teams to make confident design decisions and drive business growth.

• Led mixed methods research to identify opportunities for growth, user pain points, and product gaps, leading to a 283% increase in page views on the mobile app.
• Partnered with other researchers, ux designers, and product managers across product verticals to strategize and prioritize research needs, generating quarterly research roadmaps that met the needs of 5 product teams.
• Spearheaded foundational research to improve the mobile onboarding experience for new DNA users, creating actionable insights to design a new onboarding flow for the mobile app.
• Generated research insights from both qualitative and quantitative data for new features, which contributed to expanding the product offering into new user segments.

Coordinated with 6 product teams as the primary UX Researcher with the goal of modernizing and optimizing the user experience across 7 internal digital tools and platforms.

• Applied quantitative and qualitative research methods to identify user problems and presented insights to key product stakeholders, which drove ux design and future product iterations.
• Strategized with product managers, designers, and engineers to define and prioritize user problems and to evaluate design solutions that address those problems, bringing about a well-defined product roadmap with plans for additional research projects in the future.
• Created and maintained a research repository on Dovetail for knowledge sharing, which enabled cross-functional teams to access and utilize valuable user insights to aid in decision-making and future planning.
• Conducted foundational research for the development of a new tool, which contributed to a clear understanding of user needs and processes and laid the groundwork for building workflows and design prototypes.

Headed mixed methods research study for an internal communication and collaboration platform with the goal of increasing adoption and improving user engagement.

• Designed heuristic analysis of the website to assess the current design against ux standards, which identified 4 key areas for improvement.
• Administered user surveys using SurveyMonkey as part of quantitative analysis to gather broad feedback, contributing additional data points to the final insights and report.
• Led user interviews to understand the current usage and to identify major pain points, creating a clear understanding of reasons for low engagement on the platform.
• Synthesized data and learnings from multiple sources, resulting in recommendations and actionable insights to improve overall user experience.

Served as a subject-matter expert, contributing knowledge and insights to support multiple teams across the institution.

• Supervised observational research study of visitor traffic flow in an exhibit space to identify potential solutions, leading to a written report, which was presented to key stakeholders, and a clear solution that improved overall visitor experience.
• Steered a multi-national team to design an exhibit using a 3D prototype, saving the project 3 months of work and improving visitor experience of the exhibit.
• Tested a prototype of a new collections database, to improve its overall usability and its ability to address the specific needs of stakeholders, resulting in clarity on pain points that still needed to be addressed and on potential design solutions.
• Executed multiple research projects to bring together engaging stories and insights, producing over 10 presentations and public programs and 3 exhibits.