{"id":2,"date":"2011-05-16T06:54:18","date_gmt":"2011-05-16T06:54:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/aaronlevisohn.com\/wordpress\/?page_id=2"},"modified":"2026-06-12T04:12:07","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T04:12:07","slug":"about","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/levisohn.com\/portfolio\/about","title":{"rendered":"About"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
<\/div>\n\n\n\n

About<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

I’m a Principal UX Researcher based in Denver, Colorado. My work is foundational \u2014 I go into ambiguous problem spaces, understand how people actually experience complex systems, and produce the durable artifacts that product organizations build against across planning cycles: archetypes, mental models, behavioral frameworks, journey maps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The deliverables don’t just answer the immediate research question. They become the shared vocabulary.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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How I got here<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Before I was a researcher, I was a film student. Not because I wanted to make movies \u2014 though I did that briefly, in Los Angeles \u2014 but because film theory gave me a precise vocabulary for how people construct meaning from sensory experience. That turned out to be the most useful thing I’ve ever studied.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From there: music composition, physical anthropology, social science, data structures, Japanese history. Two years at New College of Florida doing self-directed interdisciplinary work. An undergraduate degree at CU Boulder. A master’s at Georgia Tech bridging computer science, engineering psychology, and the study of culture and technology. A PhD at Simon Fraser University in Interactive Arts and Technology, where my dissertation examined how skilled movers translate visual experience into embodied expression \u2014 what meaning-making looks like when it happens through the body rather than through language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That formation \u2014 film theory, movement analysis, cultural history, physical anthropology \u2014 trained a way of reading human behavior that I’d describe as perceptual rather than procedural. I’m not looking for patterns in click data. I’m looking for what people’s actions reveal about what they’re actually trying to accomplish.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The work<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

At Scotiabank<\/strong>, that meant spending time in people’s homes \u2014 20 in-home interviews across four Canadian cities \u2014 watching how insurance actually enters a family’s life. The kitchen table conversations, the paperwork, the moments of anxiety and relief. That fieldwork produced the Behavioural Framework for Insurance: three customer archetypes with 360\u00b0 journey maps that became the strategic foundation for the division’s digital transformation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At PagerDuty<\/strong>, it meant building a research function from scratch across a multi-product operations platform serving 1.3M+ users. Over six years, I led foundational research that identified four distinct user archetypes \u2014 Responders, Managers, Administrators, Stakeholders \u2014 that resolved conflicting mental models across product areas and became the shared vocabulary for multi-quarter planning. I drove a global navigation redesign through progressive mixed methods: card sorting, concept testing, tree testing, a 15,000-user A\/B test. The research influenced $2.3M in ARR. I also built the infrastructure that made ongoing research sustainable: a 1,500+ participant panel, an insights repository, continuous feedback programs that increased NPS verbatim volume 24x.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Currently, I’m embedded at Chick-fil-A<\/strong> through CGI Consulting, leading generative discovery research supporting a 2030 vision initiative across 3,000+ franchise locations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Outside work<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

My wife, two kids, two cats, one dog, and a fish-shaped gap in the family where a fish used to be. I play drums. I paint. I read hard sci-fi and ski when the snow cooperates.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Looking for<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I’m currently open to Principal, Staff, and Director-level UX research roles \u2014 particularly in organizations where research is foundational to product strategy, not a downstream validation step.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

alevisohn@gmail.com<\/a> \u00b7 Resume<\/a> \u00b7 LinkedIn<\/a> \u00b7 Publications<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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