Hey there. I'm

Graham Smith,

Mixed Methods
UX Researcher

and general data person.

I have 4+ years of experience with quant/qual analysis and am passionate about research methodology and system-based solutions. Based in NYC.

I have an academic background in applied statistics, and have spent most of my career at internal agencies, and become an expert in efficient end-to-end research on unfamiliar and technical enterprise products. There are some summarized examples of my work on this page, but please, contact me for details on (redacted) UX case studies.

You can see all my public code on Github. I also do a little design, some writing and am of course on Linkedin.

Sample Projects

Benchmarking When Nobody's Happy

Challenge: How do you measure improvement when technical or business limitations prevent fixing a product's main problems?

2

3rd party services providers whose systems we can't touch

Approach: Run longitudinal benchmark surveys with a mix of open-ended qualitative questions and quantitative metrics (ESUS, task error rate, etc.) and focus on relative improvement over absolute values

35

Users surveyed

3

Benchmark surveys

Impact: We determined that our redesign had indeed significantly improved on several primary KPIs

~7%

Reduction in help requests from users

~5%

Reduction in time for task completion

Frankenstein's Dashboard

Challenge: A dashboard was built piecemeal and presented a lot of orphaned data. We needed to figure out where all that data is coming from and if anyone was actually using it.

5

Different backend systems

Approach: Interview representatives from every department that contributed to build a comprehensive backend map. Run focus groups with users to determine what information was being used by who, and for what tasks

10

Hours of stakeholder interviews

2

Focus Groups

Impact: We were able to eliminate a lot of the data presented on the dashboard, reducing both maintenance costs and the time needed to find relevant information

~33%

Reduction in the # of data fields

~15%

Less time needed to find info

Personal

As a diehard New Yorker, I'm a big advocate for public transit, walkable cities, and urbanism generally.

I've done a lot of volunteering for public transit advocacy groups, and am on a mission to visit every MTA station. Viva la subway!

I have a lifelong passion for tabletop gaming, both in the spirit of collaborative storytelling and as studies in design.

Made with ❤️ in NYC

Contact me at Graham.macisaac09@gmail.com