Andrew Hay

“To develop great user experiences you must know your target user well, but more than that, you must involve them in every step of your product development cycle.”

UX/CX Research

Andrew Hay is a user experience (UX) research leader, responsible for helping clients build user experience research programs and delivering insightful and impactful research. Based in Redmond, WA, Andrew has worked with an extremely broad range of product teams across a broad range of industries, platforms and products for clients that include Microsoft, Google, Amazon, JP Morgan Chase, Facebook, Expedia, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Samsung.

EXPERTISE

Establishing and planning entire research programs for clients
Strategic customer research and customer modeling
International qualitative and quantitative research
Competitive product testing and analysis
Product Benchmarking
Accessibility

INDUSTRIES WITH DEEP EXPERIENCE

Cloud platforms, particularly Infrastructure as a service (IaaS)
Online Travel Agencies (OTAs)
Developer and IT Professional platforms, products, and tools
Mobile platforms and devices
Consumer banking

8 years of operating experience • 10 years consulting experience

Operator Spotlight

MICROSOFT:

As lead UX Researcher for Microsoft.com from 2002 to 2006 while Microsoft.com was consistently the 3^rd most visited website in the world by traffic, Andrew led a large scale online benchmarking program across Microsoft’s product websites including Windows and technical audience websites such as TechNet and MSDN, responsible for maintaining consistent levels of user experience for core customer tasks.

As a lead UX research in the Windows Server group, Andrew developed the IT Pro customer model which was used by technical teams across the Windows Server group to inform product planning and design decisions, and also to better target customers for products. Andrew also worked as the lead and sole UX researcher on the v1 product Windows Server Essentials. As a v1 product, Andrew designed and executed an end-to-end research plan which helped deliver an on-time release which met with rave customer feedback. In addition, Andrew was instrumental in developing the design platform for Windows Server Essentials which was adopted by multiple enterprise operations management tools in the Systems Center suite including Operations Manager and Configuration Manager due to its intuitive layout and workflow.

Andrew held Senior Operating roles for these brands:

Microsoft

Consulting Spotlight

Andrew and his two business partners at URI have built state of the art research facilities in Redmond, WA. At URI, Andrew has worked on the development of robust research programs for clients that deliver insights that no other agency can provide, in some of the most technical spaces and on the most cutting edge technologies. Andrew has particular expertise in working with clients to prioritize the development of product features that drive satisfaction and minimize dissatisfaction, as well as product benchmarking which helps product teams determine their current strengths and weaknesses, compare themselves to their competition, and ensure their user experience tracks along a positive trajectory as features are delivered and multiple iterations of the products go live (which is ever more frequent in the world of PaaS, SaaS, and IaaS)

A few of the brands that Andrew has served in a Consulting role:

Microsoft, Google, JP Morgan Chase, Facebook, Coca Cola, Amazon, Expedia, AT&T, Samsung, Nordstrom, Indeed