We advised RESET on the user experience of integrating a conversational AI agent into their bio-intelligent mental performance Pod. This included guiding the AI agent's persona direction, providing feedback on pitch deck narrative and story flow, and suggesting efficient prototyping approaches to validate the voice interaction before committing to development.

SnapTag is an iOS app created by DREi Studio. "Snap. Tag. Remember." This visual reminder and to-do list app is designed to help users tag photos and screenshots they take for reference – but later forget about anyways. To refine the initial concept into a design that addresses people's existing pain points, we conducted a user survey to identify different categories of content and current workarounds. A WhatsApp-based diary study helped provide more qualitative data on the moments in which people take or retrieve these "snaps." We defined the product design, detailing user flows with wireframes and initial iOS screen designs, complete with logo and color palette in Figma for the first version to quickly get user feedback. Then we hired a freelance designer for a refined UI refresh.

We partnered with the team of This One to define and iterate on the functionality of their domain-specific recommender system. Starting with the domain of movie recommendations, we conducted Design Sprints resulting in concepts and wireframes that showcase innovative potential solutions. Based on user interviews and a set of user tests, we derived data-driven Ideal Customer Profiles and supporting Personas. By conducting think-aloud studies of competing products, we also identified categories and severity of pain points in the existing user experience. These UX deliverables informed the prioritization of the product roadmap, driving continuous improvement.

At Spotify, Sarah primarily worked on projects called "Mountain Bets" – special projects that explored the feasibility of emerging technologies, such as voice assistants, speech synthesis, and reinforcement learning, within a business context. She led and participated in numerous activities that are also crucial to the success of early-stage startups and any company in need of user interfaces for novel technology. This included rapid prototyping, efficient user evaluation, design iterations, synthesizing published work, and tailoring communication to various members of multidisciplinary teams. For each project, she quickly picked up new skills as they were needed, crafting design specs for developers, defining the tone of voice for voice assistants, and coding simple prototypes in Python and JavaScript.

Several of the projects were launched publicly as products. Press Announcement for Hey Spotify, Car Thing, AI DJ.

As part of the founding team, Sarah took on various responsibilities to help the startup succeed: from designing a logo and a website to showcasing the technologies' competitive advantages. In addition to conducting literature review and market research, she engaged in creating and illustrating use cases that highlighted the technologies' unique capabilities and 3D-modeling prototypes for camera mounts. Leveraging her computer science background allowed tight collaboration with machine learning researchers and engineers to understand the limitations and novel advantages of the technologies and communicate the competitive edge efficiently in use cases and demo scenarios.

At Microsoft Research, Sarah conducted the initial user research for a cutting-edge telecommunication technology called Holoportation that captures the 3D scene in real-time and visualizes it in Augmented or Virtual Reality. This involved comprehending the research prototypes' capabilities and limitations to enable seamless user testing and generate reliable data for subsequent research. She closely collaborated with machine learning researchers and engineers to effectively orchestrate the study setup involving the various technologies.

At Google, Sarah learned and applied best practices and a diverse array of user research and iterative design methodologies for different stages of product maturity. She conducted semi-structured interviews to gather initial requirements for early product ideas as well as traditional usability techniques ranging from think-aloud walkthroughs supported by eye-tracking technology to in-app survey designs for more developed products. Working with multidisciplinary stakeholders she created various formats of research communication to drive product improvements.

— Martin Gould, Head of Product, AI Foundation at Spotify (previously CEO at This One).

— Thomas Glod, VP Product at Ingrid.