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Professional background

User Experience Researcher 🇨🇦

March 2019 - ongoing
Oracle NetSuite

User experience researcher for the Cash Management and General Ledger Accounting teams within the ERP Financials product area (B2B focus).

I am an efficient individual contributor who understands product development as a team sport. I highly value peer feedback at any stage of the research process to challenge assumptions, approaches, and ideas to achieve a well-rounded outcome. My tasks include:

  • Leading end-to-end research projects covering all phases of the research process in any research stage (discovery, exploration, evaluation) which includes designing and executing research activities
  • Synthesizing and delivering actionable insights that have an impact on the product and design directions for commonly used features that are used by the 28,000 NetSuite customers
  • Systematically applying and participating in design-thinking activities as the voice of the user
  • Collaborating closely with all stakeholders (designers, product managers, strategists, scrum teams, and re-search ops) to prioritize activities and align the research approach with strategic and stakeholder needs
  • Sharing research insights and findings creatively and tailored to the various stakeholder audiences
  • Working collaboratively with globally distributed colleagues across time zones (Northern America - Europe - Asia) and cultures
  • Growing the internal design research practice through sharing approaches and tooling approaches
Interested in the juicy details?

Have a look at selected project briefs from this cloud-based ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) showcasing the goals, approach, research methods, and findings/results for executing

  • design feedback sessions,
  • concept validation sessions,
  • customer visits an contextual interviews,
  • surveys, and
  • unmoderated studies

Research Assistant and PhD student 🇨🇭

July 2010 - August 2017
University of Zurich, Department of Informatics, Information Management Research Group

I was responsible for executing user research, user-centered service design, prototyping, and research on personal information management behavior related to e-government and e-business. My research insights impacted the project partner’s product and service design on the strategic and feature level in their industrial or governmental sectors.

Work experience highlights
  • Using ethnographic methods such as semi-structured interviews and field visits to perform job shadowing. Analyzed current practices and identified pain points related to service encounters in public administration and personal information management
  • Designed research plans, interview studies, and workshops; conducted them and analyzed the results
  • Researched and analyzed existing business models and business processes for service delivery
  • Created scenarios and personas and developed a clickable prototype in Axure
  • Independently conducted experiments and user tests with software prototypes
  • Clearly documented and communicated research findings to various stakeholder groups (executives, developers, designers) by compiling reports, research papers, and presentations
  • Co-wrote grants and co-managed the overall research project (370,000 CAD/24 months)
  • Teaching coursework in information management with topics in IT governance, business models, architectures, portfolios, IT strategy, benefits management, and service management (ITIL-based)

Research Associate at Staff Level 🇨🇭

June 2006 - August 2010
University of Applied Sciences HTW Chur,
Swiss Institute for Information Science

Full-time staff researcher working on projects in the domains: evaluation of information retrieval systems, institutional repositories, open access, long-term data curation, and ontology learning.

Work experience highlights
  • Designed and set up online surveys, analyzed the results using quantitative methods, and compiled reports and research papers
  • Co-designed a heuristic evaluation of the full text search function of Swiss corporate web sites. Assed sites, assisted in the analysis using quantitative methods, and contributed to the final reports
  • Planned the project for the organizational and technological implementation of an institutional repository; submitted a budget and a detailed project plan to the university’s management
  • Elicited requirements using semi-structured interviews with multiple business stakeholders
  • Co-wrote project proposals and controlled project budgets (total of 204,000 CAD/4-24 months)

Internships 🇩🇪

abaXX Technology AG1, Stuttgart, Germany

August 2005 – January 2006
Student intern while working on my Master’s thesis (1) (see the theses section).

  1. Title (translated to English): "Integration and Modeling of Distributed Business Processes Using Web Services Within the Context of a Process Portal"

DaimlerChrysler AG2, Stuttgart, Germany

August 2002 – October 2002
Student intern in the International Procurement Services/Systems, Processes, Quality department.

Developed a project quality plan for the material purchasing system including interviews and document analysis with internal and external partners.

IBM Deutschland Entwicklung GmbH [R&D], Böblingen, Germany

January 2002 – April 2002
Department: Content Management Development.

Performance analysis of linguistic services in a content management environment.

  1. Acquired by Crealogix in 2011. ↩

  2. Now: Mercedes-Benz Group since 2021 and formerly Daimler from 2007. ↩