Four years of human-centered design, in a lab.
I worked as a research assistant at the Human-Centered Design Lab at UPR Mayagüez, supporting work as an LSAMP researcher and ultimately co-authoring a peer-reviewed paper on immersive technology and user preference.
Building rigs, training researchers, running studies.
I built four spatial testing environments for discrete choice experimentation, recruited and trained three researchers, and led user tests with 100+ participants. The lab work was less about novelty and more about discipline — designing protocols, controlling variables, treating user studies as actual experiments.
One peer-reviewed publication.
The work culminated in a peer-reviewed paper on immersive technology and user preference — published as part of my LSAMP research. The paper was the first time I'd written something where the standard wasn't "is this convincing" but "is this falsifiable."
UX research is research.
- Discrete-choice methods carry overThe same protocols I used for spatial environments map cleanly onto enterprise software studies.
- Training researchers is half the workA study is only as good as the human running it. Train deeply before you scale.