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Rachel Fleming, PhD

Seattle, WA, U.S.A   |  www.linkedin.com/in/rachel-c-fleming

PROFILE

I am a User Experience Researcher and PhD Cultural Anthropologist working in the employee experience and service design space. I combine the iterative process of design thinking with deep ethnographic understanding to approach complex problems.

EXPERIENCE

Senior User Experience Researcher, Employee Experience, AWS, April 2021-Present

  • Lead researcher for employee experience team in AWS HR organization

  • Led and presented two mixed methods research studies to AWS CEO and leadership team to drive Striving to be Earth’s Best Employer initiative for AWS (interviews, focus groups, surveys, contextual inquiry)

  • Research impact on workplace culture initiative, internal and external communications

Senior UX Researcher, Aetna Health, Denver, CO, January-April 2021

  • Research to improve the digital Medicare enrollment experience

  • Integrated research into agile software development process

  • Research tools in include UserTesting.com, UserZoom

Design Researcher, Idea Couture, Cognizant Interactive, Remote, May 2020-January 2021

  • Researcher for client projects in digital transformation and experience orchestration, range of industries including consumer goods, healthcare, insurance, life sciences

  • Conducted user interviews, stakeholder workshops, concept testing, UX evaluations to discover current state experiences and design strategy for future state products and experiences

  • Work closely with strategists, design, product realization, internal thought leadership

Senior UX Researcher, Cognizant Accelerator, Boulder, CO, May 2018-May 2020

  • Established user research practice for new UX Research team at Cognizant Accelerator, including generative research for new products and evaluative methods for existing products

  • Lead UX Researcher for digital products in insurance, banking and finance, healthcare, and media, including research design, stakeholder analysis, participant recruiting, interviewing/prototype testing, user feedback surveys, data collection and analysis, and presentation to stakeholders and leadership.

  • Researcher for cross-disciplinary innovation team focused on product idea generation and integrating new technologies such as machine learning into enterprise digital products.

User Experience Researcher, Spire Digital, Denver, CO, October 2017-March 2018

  • Conducted user interviews, targeted ethnography, survey development, and usability testing.

  • Wrote epics and user stories catalogue for use in MVP product roadmap.

  • Design and product recommendations for client projects in insurance, financial services, aviation, real estate, legal services, consumer products, and healthcare.

Lecturer, Department of Anthropology, University of Colorado Denver, Aug.-Dec. 2016

  • Taught the history of Anthropology and applied examples in multimedia lectures.

  • Created hands-on ethnographic research projects for “Introduction to Cultural Anthropology,”

Adjunct Professor, Humanitarian Engineering Program, Colorado School of Mines, Jan.-May 2016

  • Conveyed the value of ethnographic research to engineering students through case studies.

  • Invited six female engineers as guest speakers for “Women and Development.”

PhD Student/Candidate, Department of Anthropology, University of Colorado Boulder, 2009-2016                      

  • Designed and managed 15-month field research project in Bangalore, India on gender in technology.

  • Conducted and transcribed over fifty interviews, hundreds of hours of participant observation and informal interviews, coded qualitative data.

  • Used narratives and qualitative analysis to argue that global tech industry work is improving gender equality in urban India in limited ways.

  • Analyzed qualitative data for patterns and connections, compared gap between expectations and experience for women in tech in Bangalore.

  • Presented results at national conferences, taught ethnographic methods seminars.

  • Won competitive grants for research funding and dissertation write up.

EDUCATION

Ph.D. Anthropology - University of Colorado Boulder, 2016
Dissertation Title: Working For a Happy Life in Bangalore: Gender, Generation, and Temporal Liminality in India’s Tech City
Fulbright-Nehru Student Fellowship for dissertation research in India
Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowship for Hindi language and South Asia area study
Ruth Landes Memorial Fund Grant for dissertation write up                       

M.A. Anthropology - University of Colorado Boulder, 2009

M.A. Urban Planning - University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Coker Award for best Masters thesis: Challenges and Feasibility of Rural Arts-Based Economic Development: A Case Study of Chatham County, North Carolina

B.A. Anthropology - Dartmouth College, Cum Laude
Wesbrook prize for best thesis in Anthropology: The Future of “The Tradition”: The Influence of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann on Traditional Music and Irish National Identity

SKILLS

Research Methods

  • User research design, recruiting, contextual inquiry, interviewing, analysis, data visualization

  • Usability testing with design prototypes

  • Competitive analysis and rapid problem space summarization

  • Top task survey for feature prioritization, qualitative user feedback surveys, Outcome Driven Innovation surveys

  • Workshop facilitation: personas, process/journey mapping, affinity mapping, design thinking exercises

  • UX Research education: Introduction to UXR for Agile Product Development

  • Qualitative data analysis: pattern recognition, key insights, actionable recommendations

  • Presentation of concise recommendations for strategy and product

  • Product owner duties (writing epics, user stories catalogue, product MVP roadmap)

Software

  • Surveys: Qualtrics, Google surveys, SurveyMonkey

  • Qualitative data analysis: ATLAS.ti, NVivo

  • Speech-to-Text Tools: Dragon Dictate, Livescribe, ExpressScribe

 International Expertise

  • 15 months field experience/qualitative data collection with tech workers in South Asia

  • Basic conversational skills and reading in Hindi, Kannada, Spanish, French

  • Teaching experience in world cultures and cross-cultural skills

Outreach