Maria Voorhees Maydan/ Senior UX Researcher
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Featured · AI Product

Use.AI

Senior UX/UI Researcher — leading end-to-end research that informs product design and development decisions.

End-to-end UX/UI researchCompetitive benchmarkingConversion flow analysisUsability evaluation

Outcome

Research embedded directly into product design and development decisions.

The challenge

AI products move faster than the evidence behind them. Design and development decisions needed to be grounded in how people actually understand, trust and act inside the product — not in assumptions about how they should.

Approach

I run the research end to end: framing the questions with product and design, recruiting and moderating with users, and evaluating the interface against real tasks. Alongside that, I benchmark competitor products and reverse-engineer their conversion flows so we understand the patterns users already carry into ours.

Findings

  • 01Competitive benchmarking exposes the conventions users expect before they ever reach our product — deviating from them costs comprehension unless the payoff is obvious.
  • 02Reverse-engineering conversion flows makes the drop-off points explicit, so design effort goes where intent actually collapses.
  • 03Running research end to end keeps evidence attached to the decision it informs, rather than arriving after the build.
Abstract prismatic glass refracting violet, cyan and pink light

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