DESIGNER RESEARCH: SARA CAMBRIDGE

Sara Cambridge is a senior UX designer at Gotomedia. She graduated with a master's degree from UC Berkeley. She has done a lot of research and interactive interviews but loves getting out in the field to talk to users wherever they are doing activity being studied. Sara did a great interview about dairy studies when she was working with google in 2015. She explained why they were so helpful and how a researcher can get instant feedback as people naturally use a product or service •Ask them follow-up questions throughout the study •Access everything through a digital platform. Moving forward she continues this method and the digital aspect of research design. Her passion in taking delight in uncovering the workarounds people have created to make technology better serve their needs. 

Sara worked on a project called "House Call" which was a health monitoring system for heart failure patients. Heart failure is one of the most frequent causes of both hospitalization and readmission among the elderly. She worked with a company who made sensors called Healthcare Media Solutions. They created two types of sensors: an ingestible and a wearable sensor in order to make heart patients more accountable of their health. She researched how to motivate these patients to take better care of themselves and be more independent. She focused on a small group of elderly individuals and their families.  Her end result was an in-home health monitoring system that could improve the readmissions of patients into the hospital. 

Sara has continued to work on an on-going project called "Becoming a Bike Commuter in San Francisco". Bicycle usage in San Francisco has increased by 71% in the past five years alone. This is largely credited to the significant restructuring that streets are undergoing to make them more bike-friendly—such as creating separate bike lanes—since fear of being hit by a car is the #1 reason people don’t bike more. She started the research with a heavily populated bike intersection on the bike trail, and tracked the number of pedestrians, cars and bikers. Sara moved on to conducting different types of interviews. She did  2 interviews that would gave her a better understand of the major issues around cycling in San Francisco. She came to find that there were different barriers that were stopping some of the cyclist from riding in/near the streets. She used an empathy map to find out what phase people were struggling the most in riding. Although she has not found a solution yet she is continuing her research. She will be looking for a product or service idea which could lower some of the barriers to becoming a regular cyclist.

Sources: 

https://saracambridge.wordpress.com/design-research/

https://saracambridge.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/cambridge_bikereport.pdf

https://dscout.com/people-nerds/google-ux-researcher-sara-cambridge