An agent that challenges designers to become senior researchers
Building a self-service research framework that let an entire design team plan and run their own studies, with senior-level rigor.
Org
IBM
Surface
Secure UX
Role
Lead UX Research Strategist
Team
Embedded across the Secure UX design team
Timeframe
Ongoing engagement, ahead of an upcoming release
Sample
Whole-team deployment across the Secure UX design org
Methods
Senior signals
TL;DR
Facing a need for higher-quality tactical research without the headcount to support it, I built an AI-powered framework that guides designers through the end-to-end research process. It upskilled the design team to produce near-senior-level tactical insights, which freed me to shift my focus to long-term strategic initiatives.
The artifact
The framework, as built
A modular set of Markdown task files loaded into IBM Bob as senior-researcher personas. Designers chat with Bob to plan, run, and analyze studies. Each task carries domain context, mentoring rules, and a small canon of research literature (Portigal, Hall, Fitzpatrick, Goodman, Creswell) so the persona resists generic answers and pushes back where a senior researcher would.
The five modular tasks
- ux_plan_from_scratch.md Walks a designer through a full study end-to-end in six phases (research questions, participants, method, guide, fieldwork, analysis), with Socratic challenges at each step.
- select_best_method.md Matches the research question to the right method, with tradeoffs and a falsification check for each candidate.
- challenge_and_refine_plan.md Applies rigor and bias checks to an existing draft plan before it goes in front of stakeholders.
- analyze_your_data.md Synthesizes qualitative and quantitative data without confirmation bias; surfaces the strongest counter-evidence before the headline insight.
- senior_user_researcher_agent.md An always-on Socratic mentor persona, referenced by the other tasks for in-context coaching on ad-hoc questions.
Systems map · Systems thinking
From a research-ops gap to scaled influence
The framing the team came in with was a staffing problem: “we don’t have enough researchers.” I reframed it as a capability problem with a different shape. Designers were already doing research; they just lacked the scaffolding to do it well. Treating this as a hiring problem would have produced a slow, expensive, unscalable answer. Treating it as a framework problem opened up a self-service path that compounds: every study a designer runs raises the floor of evidence informing the product, and frees the research function to focus on the questions only senior researchers can answer.
Symptom
Designers running ad-hoc research with uneven rigor.
Reframe
A capability gap, not a headcount gap.
Intervention
A modular task framework, AI-operationalized.
Scaled outcome
Designers run their own studies at senior quality.
Strategic effect
User insight raises the floor of every product decision.
What I almost missed · Critical thinking
What I almost missed
The first version of the framework was task-driven: “do this, then this, then this.” When I tested it with designers, I noticed they could follow the steps but were still producing leading interview questions and confirmation-biased synthesis. The framework was missing the part that’s hardest to teach: why each step exists. I rebuilt the tasks to make the reasoning explicit. Not “write an unbiased question” but “here’s what bias looks like in this question, and why your answer will tell you nothing.” That reframe is what made the framework act like a senior researcher rather than a junior one.
Methodological note
Every study gets a deliberate falsification pass before write-up: a structured hunt for the strongest evidence that the conclusion is wrong.
Impact
What changed because of the work
Outcome 01
End-to-end
Research executed by designers, with no researcher gating.
Outcome 02
Faster
Timelines no longer queue on a dedicated researcher.
Outcome 03
Higher rigor
More consistency across the whole team’s studies.
Outcome 04
Upcoming release
Informed by evidence the team gathered themselves.