Research That Changes What Gets Built
Three case studies from a UXR III role at Staples. Generative research, card sorting, content design, and stakeholder-led studies across internal tools and e-commerce products.
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Generative Research, Office Supplier Intranet
26 live interviews across departments and leadership levels to understand how employees actually used a decade-old company intranet. Findings shaped Hub 2.0, released with a 12 percent site usage increase and a 6 percent drop in HR tickets within 60 days.
Big Shot Award given for UX work that made life easier for thousands of employees.
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Content Design and Card Sort, Online Print Center
An unmoderated study testing seven placeholder text candidates on a B2B print center's product search field. The winning phrase, 'Search print products,' beat the researcher's own hypothesis and shipped as written.
The UX research team was eliminated shortly after this study. This was the last study before that decision.
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IA Exercise, Knowledge Base Migration to Confluence
A self-initiated card sort using UXtweak to inform the migration of a 400-plus page Google Sites knowledge base to Confluence for Staples' Salesforce support team. Only 4 of 10 invited participants completed the sort, producing 46 unique category groupings, a signal used to shape the final architecture.
Self-initiated. Identified and solved a structural problem before being asked.
Behavioral Over Attitudinal
Distinguish what users do from what they say they do. Design studies that don't blur the two. Hypotheses are starting points, not conclusions.
Stakeholder as Partner
Research that sits in a silo does not change what gets built. The most valuable output is a room of stakeholders who have seen what you saw and cannot unsee it.
AI-Augmented, Not AI-Replaced
AI accelerates synthesis, transcription, tagging, and pattern recognition. Human judgment determines what the data means, whether the finding is trustworthy, and what the organization should do about it.
The same principles that govern rigorous research, defined requirements, source evaluation, corroboration, calibrated confidence, and decision-useful outputs, are the foundation of the Clifton Ash Institute curriculum and the Night Agent intelligence pipeline. The disciplines are not separate. They are the same discipline applied to different environments.
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