UX researcher · Anthropologist · Minneapolis
I like a question
that takes me
somewhere new.
I’m Kevin, a UX researcher and anthropologist with a decade of research experience spanning ethnographic fieldwork and healthcare. I help teams understand what people need and use that understanding to make decisions about products and services.
A little about me
For my PhD in cultural anthropology, I spent fourteen months on the Lebanon Mountain Trail, walking with people and studying how they build a sense of belonging. I taught myself photography along the way, to capture the trail and add depth to my ethnography.
These days, I work in UX research at Optum. A frustrating interaction can have a surprisingly long backstory. When I find a usability problem, I don’t stop at describing it. I trace how it came to be: which technical decisions shaped it, how the organization works, and what the team would need to change to address it.
Lately
Recently, I’ve been working on AI in healthcare settings.
I’m interested in what happens when people bring their own questions and expectations to non-deterministic systems, and how those systems handle situations their designers didn’t anticipate.
That has taken me from user interviews into conversation logs, using SQL and Python in Databricks to pursue questions that interviews alone couldn’t answer. Along the way, the research has helped the team decide where the AI needs firmer boundaries.
Working together
I care about research that helps a team decide what to do next. If you’re looking for someone who’ll dig into a question and work through it with you, I’d like to talk.