David Justh
Research, Design, Strategy, Journey Management
16 years of experience bringing major projects across finish lines. As a thought partner and change agent in fluid problem spaces, I:
Formulate penetrating questions ➔ Capture, disentangle, and translate data & context
Derive meaning, framing, direction, readiness, and value ➔ Reduce ambiguity, friction, risk, and waste
Cultivate relationships ➔ Convey critical insights and perspectives ➔ Gain allies ➔ Align with executive leaders
Guide functional decisions ➔ Drive accountability ➔ Develop system conditions & solutions fit for purpose ➔ Adapt to change ➔ Evolve
Field testing semiautonomous military drones
This page summarizes 6 projects. Detailed presentations with visual artifacts available for live shareouts.
Employer: Shield AI
Features: B2B, strategy, military, aviation, startup, risk assessment, Agile, Lean, sprints, influence, leadership, alignment, conflict resolution, organizational ergonomics, service design, design crits, research (desk, discovery, guerrilla, foundational, empirical, formative)
Product innovation through organizational innovation
Designing stakeholder engagement to stand up a strategic and resilient research service
Researchers twist themselves into pretzels 🥨 trying to gain influence. With that premise, this is an expository account of how I resolved a conflict (of communications and expectations) in a challenging business environment and information landscape.
Impact: By weaving together elements of risk mitigation, decision-making frameworks, research theater, forms of non-verbal communication (paralanguage), philosophy of science, underutilized rhetorical persuasion techniques, and by shining a bright light on the subtle yet inescapable presence of biases, I:
Exposed a problem the organization didn’t know it had
Gained cross-functional allies
Actualized a test lab
Socialized better research
Reduced cycle times by 70%
Successfully launched the company’s first research practice
Improved organizational communication by connecting knowledge across teams
In the end, this effort enhanced product coherence and trust.
Advocating for “brilliant basics” in mission planning software
Applying first principles to a complex adaptive system headed toward its 1.0 release
Set in a semi-regulated space, this story outlines how I prevailed upon a team of designers unfamiliar with how foundational human factors concepts would aid their work in the design of a multi-modal system focused on ISR missions (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance). Topics most fundamentally relate to the limits of human information processing (perceptual, cognitive, and psychosocial), such as:
Signal detection
Color psychology
Task performance
Aesthetic usability effects
Human-AI function allocation
How people do and don’t learn
Occupational stress and emotional valence
Impact: By bringing clarity to a sophisticated socio-technical system, designs better conformed to military standards and began to satisfy customer/government expectations. This study demonstrates one such non-NDA-protected feature (among 29 instruments I worked on).
Employer: Viator
Features: B2C, SaaS, travel product strategy, e-commerce, segmentation, information architecture, content design, expert review, research (pathfinding, formative)
How to reduce marketing costs by creating a more targeted SEO/SEM strategy through research
What motivates people to travel? Which information sources do they trust? Which devices do they prefer? What kinds of emotional bonds are formed?
On behalf of one of the world’s largest travel excursion sites — and in a bid to make the site more navigable, relatable, sticky, and resilient — I conducted an expert review of booking processes and a meta-analysis of primary research reports to systematically assess multiple dimensions surrounding travel planning. With 116 participants, rich data coding techniques allowed the inquiry to move from the abstract to the concrete, and substantively address attributes related to:
Brand loyalty
6 influencer typologies
Threats to the company
Content design and IA governance issues
10 new customer archetypes through segmentation
Theories of value, motivation, trust, and customer identity
Traveler priorities, tactics, goals, obstacles, emotions, and technologies
Biases related to participants, methodology, and, naturally, the lead researcher (myself)
Impact: Ultimately, the effort revealed opportunities that speak to how the company can alleviate high SEO/SEM costs through factors related to personalization and the psychology behind how people search for information. Actionable recommendations were added to the roadmap and then global navigation, used by 35 million monthly users. At a high level, prime examples include:
Content funnels organized by interest
Content funnels organized by geography
Client: Nuance, a Microsoft company
Features: Product strategy, medical technology, healthcare, risk assessment, workplace culture, research (foundational, formative), experience mapping
Saving money through the evaluation of nurses’ attitudes toward AI-powered speech technology
As frontline workers, nurses face numerous challenges. How do they communicate with colleagues and patients? How do they record and share patient information? What are their workflows and priorities?
By exploring such questions, this inquiry into occupational culture and technology used a desirability study to crystallize a client hypothesis that its high-touch AI-powered technologies (DAX, DMO) might find product-market fits for nurses in inpatient settings (e.g., ICU, medical-surgical, rehab). From discovery to readout, representative samples of nurses shared their attitudes, values, and lived experiences in a study both operationally and intellectually complex. Research yielded remarkably consistent themes, thanks to several advanced qualitative techniques, including:
Cognitive interviews: To enhance memory recall, reconstruct context, provide detailed descriptions, elicit emotions, and detect loaded language
Different coding types: Codes are knowledge objects. Matching code types gives systematic form and flow to the data, has a de-biasing effect, and helps to avoid contested vision
Ethnomethodological workplace study: Applied interpretative phenomenological analysis to:
Contextualize lived experiences: e.g., perspectives, attitudes, values, beliefs, behavioral norms
Understand how participants constructed, ordered, and made sense of their social realities
Facilitate theoretical development
A detailed experience map visually summarized 800+ coding instances, 40 core findings, and 24 distinct insights
Impact: In the end, the study demonstrated that: (1) this was a solution in search of a problem; (2) technology isn’t the answer to every problem, which; (3) in turn, saved the client millions of dollars while identifying narrower opportunity areas to consider pursuing. (More specific opportunity costs could not be obtained.)
“There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.” — Peter Drucker
Client: Chime Financial
Features: B2C, FinTech, SaaS, agile, product design, behavior change, content design, high-fidelity prototype, research (discovery, formative, summative)
A proof of concept to ease mental burdens associated with student loan debt
In 2022, American college students collectively owed $1.75 trillion in student loan debt, with 44% of fully employed borrowers saying they couldn’t afford monthly loan payments or were in default.
This work explored — and designed interventions for — a problem space fraught with angst. Surprisingly voluminous data were captured from a sequence of activities that included:
Market competition assessments: To assess the current landscape and mitigate risk by identifying trends, positions, threats, gaps, and opportunities
Charrettes: To foster iterative collaboration, generate imaginative ideas, resolve conflicts in time-bound fashion, and test feasibility
In-depth cognitive interviews: To enhance memory recall, reconstruct context, provide detailed descriptions, elicit emotions, and detect loaded language
Concept tests: To test hypotheses, prioritize and refine ideas, assess viability, mitigate risk, and inform development and strategy
The emergence of clear themes, feedback loops, and guided knowledge embedded inside of prototyped interactions led to welcome solutions that addressed financial goal-setting and integrated loan repayments.
Impact: With an eye toward healthier financial living and reducing mental burdens, a proof of concept for a more comprehensive money management system provided Chime members with tools that afford greater agency through practical economics, which was this project’s remit.
Client: GoodRx
Features: B2C, healthcare, SaaS, e-commerce, product design, content design, research (exploratory, formative, summative)
Defining an opportunity space for the discount prescription giant
In a bid to increase customer retention and lifetime value, GoodRx sought to expand beyond its core prescription discount service by moving into a more holistic space built around a “Managing Illness” theme. In this instance, a bespoke usability study doubled as discovery in how it additionally explored a sizable investment opportunity: the wellness management arena.
The hybrid approach utilized a multi-stage protocol that leveraged customized heuristic evaluations, competitive landscape analyses, and a usability study with participants who:
Represented diverse sampling: They managed 11 chronic health conditions and used 16 other wellness resources for self-care
Responded to series of verbal probes in cognitive interviews
Completed randomized tasks to mitigate demand characteristics: To obtain accurate sentiments and discover how they attuned to value (“valueception”)
Dozens of findings were synthesized into 7 core themes, and a gap analysis revealed how GoodRx does and doesn’t help customers manage certain illnesses. It additionally revealed differences in mental models, which form rather variably against (1) the crowded field of comparable wellness resources on the market, and (2) the US’ opaque healthcare system.
Impact: This work introduced to GoodRx the first critical assessment of emotional tolls associated with chronic illnesses, as well as the evolving self-care strategies that people form as a result. The client accepted the study’s findings and insights, which it used to inform design recommendations about how to rethink not only the existing content funnels in question, but even a wholesale reconsideration of its core service.