I build research systems for designers. Here is the design & research work that taught me how.

Grounding mobile product strategy in the customer's actual voice

Nationwide Insurance · Personal Lines Mobile Experience

The problemNationwide's flagship mobile app served millions of personal lines policyholders across auto, home, and pet insurance. As self-service expectations accelerated, product leadership needed unvarnished qualitative insight into how customers actually navigated high-stakes moments — filing roadside claims, retrieving digital proof of insurance, and understanding bundled coverage — to inform roadmap priorities.

What I didLed a 4-week generative and evaluative Voice of Customer (VOC) sprint. Recruited and conducted 12 in-depth 90-minute 1-on-1 interviews with policyholders, stress-testing live mobile flows against emerging feature prototypes, taxonomy models, and crisis scenarios. Synthesized the findings into a 35-slide executive readout delivered directly to cross-functional product, tech, and UX leadership.

35 Slides

Browse All 35 Slides ›

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Nationwide Flagship Mobile VOC Research Readout (PDF) Full 35-Slide Executive Deck · 83 MB

🔒 Confidential · Internal Nationwide Artifact

These research documents and slides are proprietary and confidential. They are presented solely for portfolio review and are not to be copied, shared, or used elsewhere.

Directly informed the mobile roadmap for claims status tracking, policy card accessibility, and navigation architecture across iOS and Android releases.

Artifact — Executive Readout presented to Product, Technology & UX Leadership

Unpacking customer mental models for conversational AI guidance

Nationwide Innovation · NORA Virtual Assistant

The problemNationwide's conversational assistant, NORA, was designed to guide policyholders through routine inquiries and support tasks. However, conversational interactions often stalled due to mismatches between how users framed problems and the bot's deterministic decision tree. The innovation team needed deep qualitative research to uncover mental models, trust triggers, and handoff expectations.

What I didDirected a 4-week qualitative discovery sprint involving 12 in-depth 90-minute interviews with policyholders. Explored perceptions of automated intelligence, language clarity, boundary transparency, and escalation paths to human agents. Benchmarked against industry virtual assistants and mapped customer mental models to conversational dialogue flows.

24 Slides

Browse All 24 Slides ›

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Nationwide NORA Chatbot VOC Research Readout (PDF) Full 24-Slide Executive Deck · 8.8 MB

🔒 Confidential · Internal Nationwide Artifact

These research documents and slides are proprietary and confidential. They are presented solely for portfolio review and are not to be copied, shared, or used elsewhere.

Delivered foundational dialogue principles, boundary communication frameworks, and escalation guidelines adopted by the conversational AI engineering team.

Artifact — Executive Readout presented to Innovation & Digital Engineering Leadership

Establishing the practice, not just the project

Twin Disc · and the UX practice at Quinlan Marketing

The problemA century-old industrial manufacturer whose buyers had moved online ahead of its catalogue. But the larger problem was inside the agency: a creative firm with no UX practice, and clients who had not been asked to buy one.

What I didDelivered the work, and used it to establish user experience as a discipline the firm sold — which meant persuading clients to adopt it and bringing writers and designers through the transition rather than around it. It became a new profit center for the firm. This is the project where design practice turned into operations, and it is the reason the rest of this record is worth reading.

Before

After

“George was essential in persuading our clients to adopt a UX philosophy. He allowed us to develop a new profit center… his website creative philosophy provided an easy and welcomed transition for our designers and writers.”

John McCaig · Owner, Quinlan Marketing

Grew $8K to $100K in monthly sales

Stouts Footwear · shoestores.com

The problemA family footwear retailer, more than a century old, doing about $8K a month online through a purchase flow that lost people before it finished.

What I didResearched the buyers, built personas, restructured the catalogue and the checkout around them, tested, and stayed on it. The relevant detail is the last one: this was not a redesign that shipped and ended. It was iterated for ten years, and the result held for ten years. Durability was the design goal.

Persona set — 3 of 3Click any to open the set

Before

After

“George helped us transform $8k monthly sales into $100k monthly sales. It's as simple as that.”

Brady Stout · Owner, shoestores.com

A mobile product shipped ahead of an IPO

Allison Transmission

The problemAllison was going public. The brand needed to exist on mobile before the offering, not after it — which made speed-to-market the constraint every design decision had to survive.

What I didRan the research, built the persona set, prototyped the application interactively, tested it, and took it through to code. An earlier engagement in 2011 covered the trade-show product experience — generative research through hi-fi design and interaction.

Persona set — 3 of 3Click any to open the set

Live artifact · opens in a new tab

The 2012 prototype is still running

Built in Axure, and still running on that original build fourteen years on. Period-accurate hardware and OS — iPhone 5, iOS 6, a 3G indicator in the status bar. This is the thing that was tested with users, not a rendering of it.

When the new tab opens, the phone is sitting on its home screen. Click the Allison icon at the lower left to start the flow.

Open the prototype →

Nine personas, and an architecture derived from them

Eli Lilly and Company

The problemClient NDA limits what can be published about the engagement itself. What can be shown is the method, which is the part that transfers anyway.

What I didBuilt nine research-grounded personas, then derived the site's information architecture from them rather than from the org chart — so that every structural decision could be traced back to a person it was made for. That traceability is the same principle the analysis systems I build now are built on.

Persona set — 9 of 9Click any to open the set

Before

After

“He implemented certain processes or technology that we still use to this day, ten years later. There was a kind of fearlessness to him.”

Jon Arnold · Founder, Tuitive Group

A statewide catalogue with one front door

Indiana College Network · Indiana Higher Education Telecommunication System

The problemDistance education across Indiana was many campuses and one consortium. A student had to find a course before they could enroll in it, and finding was the part that did not work.

What I didRebuilt the catalogue's structure around how students actually searched rather than how the institutions were organized, and ran the statewide service on top of it — staff and nine interns.

Click any image to enlarge it.

Before

Artifact

After

“George is actually trying to ask, ‘How can user-centered design impact the world?’ Tech is the tool rather than the main purpose; he uses tech as a connection with others.”

Jason Patterson · VP of SRE, Nationwide