I am an enthusiastic User Experience Research expert and I love to create engaging experiences and facilitate customer’s interaction with technology by understanding their needs and motivations. Following a mixed-method approach, I apply qualitative methods (interviews, focus groups, ethnography) and quantitative measurements (Google Analytics, surveys), together with my analytical skills and lively wit, to understand trends and identify design directions.

EXPERTISE

• User Experience (UX)
• User-centered Design (UCD)
• User engagement
• Usability testing
• Product / project management
• Quantitative / qualitative data analyses
• Design Thinking
• Workshop facilitation
• Prototyping
• Google Analytics
• Wireframing - Balsamiq
• Java + javascript

EXPERIENCE

UX Researcher at ICT International Doctoral School | Trento, Italy | Nov. 2015 - Oct. 2019

Researcher for a project involving 16 primary school teachers, to improve the organisation of teaching materials and transfer them from a physical archive to an online repository.

• I established user’s trust by deeply understanding their needs and expectations, involving them in co-design activities, and successfully creating as well as fully organising an online repository of 156.000 materials, facilitating the storing, sharing and reusing process.
• Wrote and participated in scientific publications such as “A reflexive analysis of participants’ engagement in the co-design of digital resources”, and presented them to different audiences of +20 attendees.

UX Researcher at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institure for Science and Technology) | Daejeon, South Korea | Jan. 2018 - July 2018

Researcher in a project involving 20 participants to redesign the file-sharing process, mentoring 10 researchers and facilitators. Design of semi-structured interviews and a prototype for a mobile app involving 5 Italian participants.

• Awarded with a personal grant (10.000€ ) from Sorbonne Univeristé to collaborate with Juho Kim (PhD. by MIT), head of KixLab.
• Design of semi-structured interviews, a focus group, and the non-disclosure agreement considering South Korean privacy law.
• Facilitation of remote usability testing through Skype.

UX Researcher at University of Trento | Trento, Italy | Sept. 2014 - Aug. 2017

Researcher for a project involving 13 Linguists to conduct usability testing and improve the design of a user interface (UI) to collect users’ contributions.

• Awarded with a Marie Curie ESR within the ESSENCE-network. 

• Increased by 46% the number of contributions resulting in a better quality resource and the associated services, facilitating the participation in research projects.
• I established a trust relationship with the participants remotely through a friendly and constant communication, influencing their engagement and contribution rate.
• Wrote and co-authored project reports, grant proposals, and scientific publications such as “Crowdsourcing a large scale multilingual resource”, and presented it to different audiences of +20 attendees.

eHealth Researcher at Barcelona Digital | Barcelona, Spain | Oct. 2011 - June 2014

Researcher in the Synergy-COPD project to coordinate the research, design and implementation of a system, user interface (UI) and backend, to facilitate the interaction between physicians and bioscientist with mathematical models.

• We successfully researched, designed and implemented a system that was adopted by a sister project called Airprom.
• The European Commission qualified the project result as Excellent.
• Wrote and co-authored project deliverables and scientific publications such as “Simulation environment and graphical visualization environment”, and presented to different audiences of +20 attendees.

EDUCATION

University of Trento | Trento, Italy | 2015 - 2019

Ph.D. in Information and Communication Technology, Major: Human-Computer Interaction

Heriot-Watt University | Edinburgh, UK | 2009 - 2010

MSc. in Artificial Intelligence - Distinction

Complutense University of Madrid | Madrid, Spain | 2000 - 2007

MSc. and BSc.in Computer Engineering