Beatrice Choi 

beachoi@gmail.com | Seattle, WA 

Summary

Seasoned UX researcher with 5+ years of experience in SaaS B2B tech companies in HR, wellbeing, and life sciences balancing customer and end user perspectives to meet business needs without compromising on empathy. I utilize both industry experience and academic training to incorporate different perspectives to contextualize the data at the right scope and address the right problems to solve. 

Relevant Experience

Sr UX Researcher

Workday | Seattle, WA Feb 22 — Present

  • Research lead for the Workday homepage working with a cross-functional team of engineers, product managers, designers, and data scientists on foundational and evaluative research on customer metrics and admin configuration for Home feature adoption and integration. 

  • Identified customer end user segments by co-creating a first ever Jobs to Be Done (JTBD) framework at Workday to discover and evaluate different user types’ priorities against existing capabilities to prioritize opportunities for product teams.

  • Directed research efforts across multiple Workday products, aligning with product teams to apply strategic recommendations surfacing in studies that overlap with customer needs and identify future opportunities.

  • Proactively influenced UX and product leaders by harnessing study recommendations to drive business outcomes and de-risk projects with intentional timing to presentations to inform roadmap planning and releases. 
     

Sr UX Researcher

Limeade | Bellevue, WA Apr 21 — Jan 22

  • Led Limeade’s first comprehensive foundational studies to understand user wellbeing priorities with the desktop and mobile solutions in order to adjust to users’ changing needs during the COVID pandemic.  

  • Consulted as Subject Matter Expert (SME) with the product team and scientific institute to improve the UX and completion rates for wellbeing assessments. 

  • Mentored junior researchers through various stages of research design and execution for professional development in efforts to upskill UX maturity within the product organization, resulting in one contract to FTE hire.  

Education

PhD, Communication Studies, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 

MA, Media Culture Communication, New York University, New York, NY 

BAs, Communication Studies and International Studies, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 

Project Highlights  

Customer Facing Metrics for Workday

  • Completed a first ever end-to-end study to determine external facing metrics with customers for the Workday homepage, an org-wide problem. I planned and led the team through uncertainty to clear product direction. 

    • Result: The study helped plug in a knowledge gap in and unblock core product teams (Search, Journeys, System Admin Hub) to advance with product strategy for customer metrics without a dedicated researcher.

Worker Type Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD) at Workday

  • Owned and completed the worker type JTBD as a lead contributing to a first-of-its-kind user types framework program, where I integrated mixed methods with a core team to systematically evaluate Workday’s capabilities and drive adoption across product development to align with users’  top priorities.  

    • Result: The resulting JTBD for the worker type now has its own dedicated experience roadmap with company-wide adoption from C-level product and design leadership. With demonstrated customer appetite for more data, the original framework team expanded its purview and added headcount to tackle additional user types.

Workday Shared Devices for Front Line Workers

  •  Identified opportunities for a product workstream on front line worker products, resulting in a next step MVP kiosk offering with a simplified Workday experience.

    • Result: I built the business case for offerings beyond clock-in/clock out to enable high-volume employee self-service and to update authentication requirements.  

Open-Source Software and the Politics of Innovation in Brazil for the Fulbright Commission 

  • Awarded $110K+ to complete an ethnographic project to understand how Brazilian organizations use open-source software to innovate without financial constraint. I used foundational research methods such as field study, contextual inquiry, and grounded theory to explore the wider cultural impact that open-source innovation has had on Brazilian startups and the local tech sector by empowering developers to build tools for a wider builder community.

Skills

  • Research Methods: ethnography, interviews, case studies, mental models; qualitative data analysis and coding; survey methods (questionnaires, product evaluation, and Jobs-to-Be-Done surveys); usability testing and benchmarking.       

  • Human Centered Design: discovery workshops; design sprints; co-creation sessions; interviews; rapid prototyping; UX mapping such as user flows and journeys

  • Frameworks: Jobs-to-Be-Done (JTBD); Double Diamond Design Process Model; Socio-Technical Systems Framework; Grounded Theory 

  • Research Tools: MaxQDA, Dovetail, Figma, Miro, Alchemer, MixPanel, Otter.ai, UserTesting, UserZoom, DScout  

  • Project Management: Agile, Trello, Airtable

  • Leadership & Development: workstream strategic direction and roadmapping; high visibility presentations to cross-functional partner teams, owners, and C-level leadership; UX mentorship and ex-academia-to-industry coaching

  • Languages: English (Native), Portuguese (Fluent), Spanish (Advanced), Korean (Basic).

Awards and Recognition  

Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Fellowship for Field Research in Brazil 

University of Pennsylvania Pre-Doctoral Fellowship for Diversity

Certifications  

IRB certification for human subjects research, with training in ethics and privacy.