About Me

ROAD TO UX RESEARCH

I'm Kevin, a UX Researcher by profession, a mentor and listener by all accounts, and a entrepreneur with the urge to make an impact on the world. I have a small service business, and currently mentor noobies on how to do UX research.

I graduated from UC Berkeley in 2013 with a major in Biology. I once tried Astrophysics. Ended up depriving people of sleep for some EEG-fMRI psychology research on sleep with Professor Matthew Walker.

After graduation, I worked at Stanford University with the celebrity of the life-span development world, Professor Laura Carstensen. She gives TED talks regularly and speaks on NPR. And I sat next to her in team meetings *fangirling*. I ran over 1300+ interview session with 300+ study participants, and my record was 13 participants in one day.

But I was lost.

I did not know what to do with my life. One day Apple Inc. called me. The world's leading sleep researcher wanted to talk to me about my research. While I didn't get the job there, I learned about the field of UX, two letters of the alphabet I have never seen next to each other before.

Dilemma. Stanford had recently promoted me and offered me to stay. With no other job prospects, I thought it imprudent to decline. Yet, I took that leap of faith and fully committed to becoming a UX professional. Thus commenced six months of inexorable grit, plunging into UX books and online courses, escaping comfort zones to network with industry professionals, and designing/conducting my own guerilla usability studies, where I frequently enticed Starbucks patrons with a homemade sign reading, “I’ll buy you coffee for 15 minutes of your time!”

I applied to hundreds of jobs and many graduate programs.

I got rejected from all of them.

But I kept going. Eventually Volkswagen hired me as a UX Researcher. Initially the contract was for 6 weeks.

So I made sure I worked my a$$ off. And I did. Based on my work on the $100,000 study, they extended me for 6 months. And from those 6 months, I:

• • spearheaded writing a white paper on my research, and published it (please inquire)

  • got my research referenced in Fastcodesign and presented at the Audi conference in Germany

  • got a patent based on my research

Since then, I joined the Android Wear team at Google from 2015-2017, and again in 2018 doing UX research. Read about my work here, launched 20+ products live, developed and adapted research methods in creative ways, and got patents for my work.

Now, I help aspiring UX leaders achieve their dream job in UX research.

**Have a topic you want to share with a UX Research community of 10,000+ viewers (and growing)? Feel free to reach out and collaborate with me on a YouTube video!**

I take business strategies, consulting, and user-centered design to uncover insights from data not only to improve the experience, but to look at the bigger picture for the company. Recently, I decided to pay it forward by sharing what I've learned with aspiring UXRs through my YouTube channel, Zero to UX. Fun fact, I ranked #1 for "ux research" on YouTube SEO within just 2 months of starting my channel. And I'm still #1. So if you need help with YouTube SEO, holla.

I have had training in client-centred therapy, too.

I am currently the Lead UX Researcher for the Carrier Experience team at Uber on the Freight team (2019).