About David Justh

Thank you for visiting! First thing’s first: My last name tends to confuse folks because the pesky “h” throws them off. It happens to be silent. Just(h) pretend it isn’t there 😉

I study human interaction with the designed world and leverage 20 years of experience with transdisciplinary interventions focused on shared understanding, desired outcomes, high-touch experiences, and downstream business value. This includes:

3 years of international ethnographic research
12 years of research, service design, and CX at an R1 university where I balanced deliberate and emergent strategies to scale educational, financial, occupational, and counseling initiatives
6 years of UX research and design client work

Throughout this time, I’ve worked in versatile ways to develop total quality management (TQM) in sociotechnical systems. Areas of practice include:

Mixed research methods
Participatory action R&D
Design for safety
Service design
Ethnography
Applied ethics
Content testing
Information architecture
Mid-fidelity prototyping

Organizational ergonomics
Employee experience (EX)
Customer experience (CX)
Stakeholder management
Change management
Tacit knowledge management
Process optimization
Design for the margins
Matrixed team coordination

Why am I a researcher? In short, because this work affords a license to create and co-create knowledge. This is not only an enticing proposition but a tremendous privilege. But, as much as tractable research may carry influence — if not power — it carries even more humility and care to ensure it’s done properly: e.g., debiased, replicable, inclusive, safe, and relevant to business goals.

When arriving at the nexus of insights and actions, and as informed by first principles in design, I draw from these areas to better understand:

Information systems
Communication styles
Contexts
Interior cognition
- e.g., values, emotions, personal rules

The limits of human information processing (cognitive ergonomics) to drive evidence-based design decisions
- e.g., signal detection, guided search, inattention, and interference surrounding:
  - sensory perception, mobility, prior knowledge, memory, load, and comprehension
And, ultimately, clarity and substance in bids for coherence, agency, and efficacy in amorphous spaces
I also use these to manage complex relationships with situational awareness, all of which is to say: I enjoy applying the relational and analytical aspects of my personality, not only so it’s easy for resources to succeed, but hard to fail.