UX Researcher · Innovation Strategist · ex-Mastercard
I help high-stakes products earn their place in people's lives.
Fourteen years of UX research and innovation at Mastercard — a decade as a pure researcher (125+ studies), foundational payments work from the U.S. chip-card rollout to Apple Pay, designing the platform that configures how cards behave, the employee experience of a 30,000-person enterprise, and dozens of innovation engagements inside a lab recognized among the world's best. The constant: turning high-stakes questions into products people actually adopt.
Let's start with the work.
High-stakes product work across payments, government benefits, lending, and the enterprise — both kinds of engagement: de-risking new bets before the build, and finding what's quietly broken after launch. Clients are anonymized by descriptor; the outcomes are real.
A U.S. Treasury and Mastercard partnership to move Social Security recipients — many unbanked or underbanked — off mailed checks and clunky call-in systems and onto reloadable prepaid cards with a digital experience they could actually trust.
I ran the depth interviews and usability research with the people who'd actually use it — older adults, people with disabilities, low-digital-literacy and low-income recipients — then synthesized it into the decisions that shaped onboarding and the live UI.
Trust beat innovation. Calling in to check a balance wasn't friction to design away — it was a daily anxiety-relief ritual to honor.
Finding a reputable overseas provider, booking the travel, paying safely, and managing aftercare were all separate, broken steps — and the real gap was payments: wire your savings abroad and hope. I led the 40-week innovation engagement that turned that into one trusted, end-to-end platform.
From brief through a validated, user-tested concept and into development — aligning a cross-functional team plus third-party payment and insurance partners around a single experience strategy.
The product was never the app. It was recourse — turning "send the money and pray" into something backed by real rails.
Mastercard Connect is the primary touchpoint between the network and every customer it has — issuers, acquirers, partners. I spent roughly four years embedded in it, running the research that shaped how customers actually experience the platform.
The clearest example of the job: for years customers complained and no one could quite say why. It turned out Connect had two separate apps with nearly identical names — one called "My Company Manager," another "Manage My Company." Everyone felt the friction; nobody had named the actual problem. Finding that load-bearing confusion, hiding in plain sight, is the work.
When everyone's frustrated but no one can say why, it's usually a question nobody thought to ask — like "wait, why are there two of these?"
Mastercard Connect is the network's self-service portal where issuers configure how their card programs behave. Years before that configuration became today's slick self-service product, it lived in a legacy two-axis spreadsheet — dense with the logic that codes card behavior — and I designed its replacement — the Customer Parameter Management app — a single-axis web tool that lost none of that functionality, worked for everyone who might touch it, and did it with the handful of people who understood the system almost entirely unavailable. Two months on paper. It took me a year.
Self-taught on design — working from Connect's own design system and style guides — I taught myself the domain too, sitting in on sales trainings to learn how card parameters actually work, then running 6–7 full usability studies to iterate toward something the few real experts would trust. It was early, foundational work in a shift the whole industry has since made: away from manual, range-bound configuration and toward on-network, self-service control. The deepest financial-services knowledge I've ever built.
A white-label payments provider needed a self-service portal that worked for both first-timers and experts at the software companies (ISVs) they serve — across two genuinely complex spaces, payments and development. I led the 7-week innovation engagement; the client started building in production before we'd even wrapped.
A regional bank's commercial-loan process meant paper, disconnected systems, and in-person trips. In a 4-week design-thinking sprint I took a cross-functional room from problem-framing to a validated, high-fidelity prototype and executive pitch.
As UX SME for a 30,000-person workforce, I ran the contextual research and stood up the task force that unified 7+ separate help desks and rebuilt how support actually worked — severity-based routing, self-service tools, walk-up support.
When the country moved to chip cards, I ran usability sessions in 12 major U.S. cities and turned the findings into recommendations for major banks and terminal manufacturers — cutting friction during a transition that's now mandatory nationwide.
First-hand work on the Mastercard–Apple Pay partnership — meeting Apple's exacting standards for seamless, trustworthy onboarding as mobile wallets went mainstream.
The deep dives above are a sample. Across Mastercard Digital Labs and direct client work, I've run dozens of pre- and post-launch engagements — banks, card issuers, payments providers, and software companies. Two dozen-plus were full design-thinking innovation engagements — rare volume in a field where a hundred marks world-class and most practitioners never run more than a handful. A selection, described rather than named:
A debt-reduction account that threw the whole toolkit at the problem at once: spot & cancel unused subscriptions, line bills up against paydays, split bills with a partner or roommates, free banker office-hours, an open-banking overview, and financial-inclusion education — penalty fees traded for one very low subscription fee.
Built engagement-tiered personas — never-logged-in, basic, and active — each with its own barrier to going deeper, then mapped the participant journey from onboarding through annual review into retirement. Delivered a personalization strategy and a prioritized set of feature concepts for a smarter benefits dashboard, brought to life in a working product demo.
Ran ten current-state interviews and a one-day strategy workshop to map how credit offers were actually being built across channels. Surfaced the real blockers — fragmented channel-by-channel solicitations, no central offer repository, almost no test-and-learn — and delivered a coherent strategy: a dedicated cross-channel offer team, a real experimentation capability, and a single arbitration engine to replace the silos.
Segmented the cardholder base from real travel-spend data — finding that 8% of cardholders drove 63% of travel spend — and profiled the high-value traveler types worth winning. An ideation sprint generated 28 concepts, narrowed to a prioritized set of growth experiments, each written as a testable hypothesis with its own KPIs and target segment.
The bank's alert inventory was a manual sprawl — 1,000+ entries across 13 spreadsheet tabs, with no confidence it even captured every touchpoint. Through customer research, an ideation workshop, and quantitative analysis, the core complaint surfaced: irrelevant, un-personalized alerts that quietly eroded trust. Delivered customer personas, a mapped journey, and an MVP for one unified messaging experience.
Across a two-day strategy-and-design sprint, built the case for moving member and association payments off cash and checks and onto cards. Profiled both sides of the platform and pinpointed the real barrier: gaps in awareness, not willingness. Delivered personas, a communication-and-education plan, and stakeholder-ready experiments to drive digital-payment adoption.
Centered the work on the underbanked customer living paycheck to paycheck — mapping the journey from onboarding and KYC through the moments that make or break direct-deposit adoption. A two-day sprint produced 20 problem statements and 32 actionable ideas, converging on a high-fidelity prototype for a prepaid experience that earns frequent use.
For clients who couldn't afford a research department, my team was the research department.
Over 14 years I've directed UX research on 125+ products across wildly different industries — the same discipline, re-pointed at whatever the problem in the room actually is.
My work is de-risking: deep discovery and cheap, fast pressure-testing of the assumptions a strategy depends on — before they turn into expensive mistakes. A long method list doesn't make me a jack-of-all-trades.
It makes me a master of translation.
So — who's behind all this?
I'm a UX researcher and innovation strategist who spent most of a 14-year career inside Mastercard's Digital Innovation Lab — bringing structured innovation to enterprise clients from federal government to global card issuers, regional banks, and startups.
I've run dozens of full design-thinking innovation engagements at enterprise scale — rare volume in a field where most practitioners run only a handful. The through-line is always the same: find the assumption a bet depends on, and test it before it gets expensive.
Fintech was the crucible, not the cage — the discipline travels to any domain where the cost of being wrong is high.
Today I also run Onyx Studios, my independent UX research and innovation practice — bringing that same discipline to teams making high-stakes bets. onyxstudios.net →
Strategy and behavioral science underneath the craft — plus continued, hands-on training in the methods I use every day.
And a few things outside the job description.
The things I show up for when no one's assigning them — mentoring, communicating, and keeping the lights on for the people around me.
I'd rather learn a new tool by shipping with it than reading about it. Right now that means going deep on AI and the technical fundamentals underneath it.
Going to the source for CS fundamentals — building the fluency to work shoulder-to-shoulder with engineers and reason about what's actually buildable.
A suite of apps — SF Eats & Drinks, Events, Activities, Lodging, and Be A Local — that turns the job of a tour guide, social planner, and personal assistant into an interactive menu you order from. Built to learn AI hands-on, and to find my way around a new home.
A structured month of building with AI every day — deliberate reps to sharpen the craft and stay on the front edge of the tooling.
Think we'd work well together?
Some of the best conversations I've had started with someone saying "I'm not totally sure what I need yet — but something's missing."
That's enough. Let's start there.