About
Christopher Ferrell
I am a Staff UX Researcher and applied anthropologist with 10+ years of practice across financial services, commercial real estate, logistics, and higher education. My work begins where standard research often stops: at the system level. I look for what users have internalized and normalized, what organizations have stopped noticing, and what the data reveals when interrogated, then make that visible to the people with authority to act on it.
That instinct has surfaced engineered churn in trucking, four years of unaddressed trust failures at a major fintech, and friction so embedded in leasing workflows that site teams had stopped experiencing it as anything other than their lived reality.
That same instinct, surfacing what is tacit and making it explicit, is the foundational work that responsible AI implementation requires before automation can be trusted in regulated environments.
How I Work
"Don't just give us a dashboard with more widgets and metrics. Give us recommendations. Tell us what to do."
A client once told me that directly and without apology. It stuck with me, because it is what most teams are really asking for.
Data is only useful when it helps people decide what to do next. My role is to generate that clarity, not just the inputs to it.
In practice, that means I invest heavily in domain knowledge before I recruit a single participant. The projects in this portfolio reflect that investment directly. Understanding compliance and prudential regulation in banking was not incidental to the UBA information architecture work; it was foundational to designing a structure that could accommodate the range of institutional contexts Fiserv products needed to serve. Understanding how multifamily executives actually think about portfolio performance shaped every interview question in the MFA study. Understanding the operational economics of a four-person analyst team was the prerequisite for making any credible claim about what automation could and could not accomplish in the Sustainability Analyst Portal project.
Domain expertise is not a credential I accumulate for its own sake. It is the condition under which good research becomes possible.
What I Focus On
My work tends to concentrate in a few recurring areas.
Strategic Research in Complex Systems
I am most useful when the problem is not yet well defined. The On-Site Leasing project began as a request for sales testimonials and became a discovery study after I used existing data to confirm that the premise was factually wrong. The MFA research was framed as feature validation and was redirected toward behavioral discovery because the feature in question had not yet cleared feasibility review. Getting the question right before committing resources to answering it is where I add the most early value.
Connecting Tactical Findings to Strategic Outcomes
I build research frameworks that link observable user behavior to aggregate business metrics. The Capacity Calculator in the SAP project was not a UX artifact; it was a financial model built from task timing data that quantified exactly how much headcount leverage was available from specific operational improvements. The longitudinal analysis at Fiserv paired workshop findings with a four-year-old customer survey to show that core trust issues had not moved in either direction across that period. That kind of framing turns research findings into strategic diagnostics.
Information Architecture in Regulated Environments
Designing navigation and content structure for enterprise software in regulated industries requires understanding not just user mental models but the compliance and workflow logic that shapes them. The UBA IA framework was validated across three rounds of testing with screened banking professionals, achieving 67% in v1, 85% in v2, and 98% in a final moderated round with active Fiserv clients. Internal SMEs confirmed applicability across multiple core banking and teller products beyond the original scope.
Research Operations and Cross-Functional Coordination
In environments where research access is fragmented across Sales, Account Management, Product, and Development teams, the logistics of recruiting and coordination are themselves a research challenge. I have built tracking systems, navigated competing organizational priorities, and maintained participant relationships across multi-month engagements in environments that were not structured to support sustained research. Getting the right people in the room is not administrative work; it is part of the research.
Background
I have worked across financial services technology, commercial real estate software, and logistics, with stops in higher education research and academic UX consulting along the way. That range is intentional. Complex systems in different industries share structural features, and moving between them builds pattern recognition that does not develop from working in a single domain.
At Fiserv, I am embedded in a core banking modernization initiative as the UX research lead for a legacy teller and core platform serving financial institutions from community banks to regional and national fintechs. I proposed and validated an original information architecture framework designed to scale across the full product ecosystem. Three rounds of testing with screened banking professionals produced a validation trajectory from 67% to 85% to 98% task success, with the final moderated round conducted with active Fiserv clients in operational and IT/SysAdmin roles. This work is AI readiness in practice: validated domain clarity is the prerequisite for trustworthy agentic systems in regulated environments.
I am also writing a book. "Work as Designed" examines how organizational systems produce outcomes that often diverge from their stated intentions, tracing the structural and cultural conditions that shape how work is actually experienced by the people doing it. It is a different kind of research project, but it draws on the same analytical instincts I bring to product work: look at what a system produces, not just what it claims to intend.
Have a quick question about my work?
The chat bubble in the lower-right corner is an AI assistant trained on this portfolio. It can help you explore my case studies, methods, domain experience, and background without reading every page. Ask it anything.
What I Am Looking For
I am looking for Staff or Principal-level research roles where deep domain fluency is recognized as part of the research capability, where research is positioned upstream of product decisions rather than downstream of them, and where the organizational context supports sustained inquiry rather than one-off studies tied to release cycles.
The work I do is most useful when there is enough organizational patience to let findings shape direction, not just validate decisions that have already been made. I am looking for environments where that patience exists, at least some of the time.
If that describes your team, I would like to talk.