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KELLIE RAE CARTER

RESEARCH LEADER, UX AND PRODUCT RESEARCH

3 favorite words to describe myself: Synner, Rhetor, Geek. I’m a Synner, a human synthesizer, from Pat Cadigan’s book of the same name. I am also a rhetor, a crafter of experiences and products that are situationally aware and contextual. And I am a geek because I like nothing better than to geek out on learning the problem spaces I work in. I love hard questions, complex tasks, messy data, and complicated problems. For the last almost 5 years, I've added a new descriptor, Mentor, to my list. I had the pleasure of building and scaling a team of amazing researchers, research ops professional, and leaders at MongoDB. I utilized my background in education and my years of professional experience to develop my team.

PROJECTS 

Enterprise Customer Foundational Research

MongoDB / 2024 — 2025

in the spring of 2024, I saw a developing theme in leadership discussions around targeting enterprise customers. As this focus crystalized in May, I created a tiger squad of researchers, designers, and research operations to coordinate the research, design projects, and the recruiting of enterprise customers, who were a small but very in- demand segment of our customers. For several months, we held weekly stand-ups to share project status, developing insights, design in-progress, and recruitment strategies. Multiple, siloed research studies were conducted with these customers, including their billing challenges, identity management needs, purchasing decisions, and onboarding practices. This work culminated in a broad thematic analysis to compliment the deep insights and an executive presentation that tied it all together.

Journey Builder Enablement

Salesforce / 2016 — 2017

In November 2016, the new CEO of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud launched an initiative to improve customer satisfaction and help our customers onboard to our marketing automation tool, Journey Builder. I was tapped to led a cross-functional team of 3 UX researchers, 2 designers, and a content writer to create an enablement strategy and deliver customer-facing documentation by January 2017, and provide a framework for improving in-product learning experience.  More

Contact Builder and Expression Builder

Salesforce  / 2012 — 2014

When I began at ExactTarget, we were just beginning new product work to build a consolidated data model and data management system for marketers. The product was called Contact Builder and would provide cross-channel functionality for marketing users to create, consume, and view customer data in an easy and simple wa. We also needed to make it easy for our customers to query the data model and create marketing audiences. For over two years, I led the design team and conducted research on the MVP launch and subsequent redesigns of the suite of data management products.  More

Open Account Redesign 

Vanguard  / 2007 — 2008

I was the usability engineer on a large project team tasked with redesigning the Open Account flow. I conducted six RITE studies over the course of several months to help finalize an innovative goal-state design and decrease the number of steps between 30 to 80%.  More

SKILLS SUMMARY

Focus Areas : People management, Mentoring and skill development, Product strategy, Journey mapping, Service design/blueprinting, Enterprise personas, User enablement, Research knowledge management, Data management and governance, Data integrations, Agile, SaaS/Enterprise products

Research Methodologies : Usability testing (Formative, Concept, RITE, Evaluative), Accessibility (using ZoomText and JAWS), Contextual Inquiry and Interviewing, Persona Development, Participatory Design, Task Analysis, Cognitive Walkthrough, Survey Development and Analysis, Heuristic Evaluation

Software : Dovetail, UserTesting, Ballpark, Rally, Qualtrics, Figma, FigJam, Sublime Text, User Interviews, SurveyMonkey, GetFeedback, Google Analytics, JIRA

AI and Programming : Gemini, Glean, ChatGPT, Python, HTML, CSS, XML, SQL, API

Read more about me on LinkedIn: Link to Linkedin Profile