About Yan: Principal Design Researcher

Welcome to my portfolio! I am Yan, a passionate Principal Design Researcher with thirteen years of experience. Diligently democratizing user research, ethically employing AI and energetically empowering teams with user-centric practices is my modus operandi. My expertise extends across a broad breadth of experiences. These include business analysis, founding a UX agency, and UX leadership at Tallwave, T-Mobile, Infosys, Ford, and Walmart. I have worked for clients in gaming, finance, and healthcare (among many other industries). As part of my pursuit of self-improvement, I am currently exploring insight repositories like Condens and Dovetail for research ops as well as reading about quantitative ethnography. As I learn new things, I take care to share them with the team.
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Skills in Focus

UX research, design, strategy, usability analysis, and team leadership
Proficient in research tools: Dscout, SurveyMonkey, Optimal Workshop, Usability Hub, UserInterviews, UserZoom, UserTesting, Condens, Hotjar, and Dovetail
Design tools: Sketch, Figma, and Invision

Contact me via:
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📞 Phone: 347-446-8226
📧 Email: yanvpersonal@gmail.com
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"Yan is a strong candidate for a UX Researcher role. He's very receptive to feedback and ensures that he has incorporated it to be stronger. His dual research and design experience makes him ideal to bridge the gap between the two practices."

- Megan Falzone, UX Researcher, Mentor, IBM

Yan, Outside Of Work

Podcast host of Human-Centered AI (a labor of love) discussing new ways user researchers can use AI tools as well as AI ethics in the context of user research.
Fluent in Hindi, English, and Russian, conversational in Spanish, and currently learning Farsi.
Listens to podcasts such as Awkward Silences, NN/g UX, UX Research Geeks, and Dear Nikki
Pursuing certifications in NN/g with the goal of getting a Master Certification with a specialization in User Research, in a year.
Mentors junior to senior user researchers. I also gets mentored in turn on ADPList.
Loves to read books in the genres of User Research, Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Passionate about computer games, modding open-world games, and revisiting classic titles
Enjoy weightlifting and immersing myself in sci-fi literature and films.

Applying "AI" to My Process

In my ongoing commitment to improvement, I have been pushing the boundaries of my user research work by adding methodologies from other areas:

Applying an ethical AI approach to my process, protecting user data and healthy human-AI cooperation.
Working with ChatGPT v4 for first drafts or revision of Study Designs and Scripts and to analyze user data
Using ChatGPT to study user research using Edx, Tutory and QuickRecall plugins and using ChatGPT as a debate partner.
Using Data Science and Statistics to analyze User Research data
Creating images with Midjourney
Make portfolio SEO and CSS friendly to ChatGPT browse tool