Work / Case study / Enterprise research program / 2018

North Star: customer-centric design for enterprise analytics

A mixed-method UX research program inside a Fortune 10 Chief Data Office. Contextual inquiry, cognitive task analysis, and survey validation produced personas leadership could actually prioritize against.

Role: Led and directed the UX research program within the Chief Data Office (AI User Experience), defining the research plan and methods and translating findings into product direction.
Context: Chief Data Office of a Fortune 10 telecom, designing service and self-service analytics systems for internal data analysts.
Engagement types: Expert consult, Strategy sprint, Workshops and speaking
Date: 2018 to 2019

The problem

The organization wanted data-powered decision-making across a 200,000-person company, but the analytics tools its own data analysts used carried friction that slowed adoption. Leadership needed product decisions grounded in how analysts actually worked, not assumptions, to raise effectiveness without taxing the efficiency of skilled users.

The approach

A formal User Experience Research Plan applying human-factors engineering to persona development, then using those personas to drive design.

Contextual inquiry, observing analysts doing real work in their existing tool suite.
Cognitive task analysis to locate pain points and the drivers of productivity.
Empathy mapping (think, feel, say, do) to build a shared, human picture of the user.
Training-needs and tool-gap analysis to separate capability gaps from design gaps.
UI analysis to surface usability issues in current and proposed systems.
Survey research to quantify and validate the qualitative signal at scale.

Findings rolled up into a customer-centric design approach: personas, objectives, and a vision-casting frame that gave the organization a common reference for prioritization.

The outcome

A validated persona set and a customer-centric design framework that grounded analytics-product decisions in real analyst behavior. Leadership got a defensible basis for prioritizing friction reduction where it mattered most, in service of enabling data-driven decisions company-wide.

What it demonstrates

Standing up rigorous, mixed-method UX research, qualitative plus survey validation, inside a large enterprise.
Translating human-factors findings into personas and a design framework leadership can act on.
Connecting research to a business objective (adoption, effectiveness, cost and revenue) rather than usability for its own sake.

Method-only. Proprietary tool names, real persona content, and internal data removed. No confidential employer material reproduced. Consolidates the North Star customer-centric design program and its persona-research workstream, which were one body of work.