Kasey Meredith?

That’s me! And yes that really is my last name. I’m a researcher through and through! I started my career as a local journalist (The Sumter Item, The Bakersfield Californian) where about 80 percent of my work was qualitative research — interviewing diverse populations to shape a narrative. It’s here where my exposure to so many different interviewees honed my empathizing skills. I’ve spent the last 3 years at Chatham Financial as a UX Researcher after graduating with my Master’s of Science in Information of UX and Human Computer Interaction at Drexel University in 2021. My work at Chatham focused on doing qualitative and quantitative research in the financial advisory space (think hedging advisory, corporate real estate management and hedge accounting) on several different product lines.

UX Design and UX Research Career?

At Chatham Financial, I worked alongside other UX researchers as a part of a larger UX team. I recommend viewing my full resume for a detailed account on my duties and accomplishments. A few highlights are:

• Working on end-to-end research projects (see Chatham Project on my page, password protected)

• Mentoring junior UX Researchers

• Advocating for and launching a UX Research Repository to promote atomic research insights and digestible research reports

I taught a class at Drexel on Human Computer Interaction as an adjunct professor. This class ran for a quarter and was mainly a class about UX laws and UX research methods! A few highlights were:

• Assessing and advising students’ research proposals, research efforts as a whole (projects they submitted) and reports

• Mitigating conflict among students on research group projects

• Spreading the good word on the importance of UX research!

As a student at Drexel, I worked as a UX researcher in Drexel’s UX Research Lab where I piloted a voice user interface (VUI) study and prototyped the VUI for informal caregivers of people with dementia. I have worked alongside various teams within my cohort at Drexel to create hi fidelity prototypes and full-fledged research protocols.

Journalism to UX?

My last journalism role (Morning Consult) focused on data-driven stories, so I designed surveys alongside interviews to create robust stories. It really made me curious about other types of research and how information is presented as a whole in the digital space, not just in media. I pursued and graduated with a Master’s of Science in Information of UX and Human Computer Interaction at Drexel University in 2020-2021 to scratch that itch!

PhillyCHI?

Yes! PhillyCHI is a lovely non-profit, volunteer-led organization that is all about Philly + Computer Human Interaction (or HCI more commonly)! PhillyCHI is all about building community by way of social and informative events surrounding the UX, HCI and adjacent spaces (like Service Design, Accessibility and more!) I joined as a member in 2020 and have since become the Board Chair! It’s a super rewarding organization and I’d love to tell you more about it!