Iman Tahamtan, PhD

About Me

★ I'm a UX research lead who's spent the last decade moving between two worlds — the rigor of academic research and the fast pace of product teams — and found they make each other better.

★ I earned my PhD in Communication and Information from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where my dissertation looked at how people used social media to make sense of the COVID-19 pandemic.

★ Today I lead mixed-methods user research at JPMorgan Chase and teach analytics and UX metrics as a lecturer at UTK. My research keeps circling around one question: how do we know an experience is actually working for the people using it? That's taken me through health information, social media, and citation science, into journals like JMIR, JASIST, and Scientometrics.

★ In my current role, I also lead our UX measurement and benchmarking practice — building the metrics, surveys, and methods we use to track experience quality over time and see how our products stack up against the market. It's where academic rigor meets business impact: turning "does this feel better?" into something we can measure, trend, and act on.

★ I've served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of the User Experience (JUX), published by UXPA, since 2024.

★ I regularly present at conferences on UX measurement — including at Quant UXR, where I've reached hundreds of attendees, with sessions ranked Top 5 (2024) and Top 3 most watched (2025). 

I've also partnered with strategic research leaders across my firm to found and lead our first firmwide research conference, Insights 2026, creating a new platform for knowledge sharing, cross-team collaboration, and showcasing key insights about the people we serve — our customers and employees.