Hi, I'm Elijah.

I'm a UX researcher based in San Francisco. I lead generative and evaluative studies end to end, from screener to synthesis, and I usually end up building the research operations underneath them. My recent work spans a nonprofit's website redesign, a college-savings platform for low-income families, and a two-sided marketplace for the food industry.

Portrait of Elijah-Justin Leano

Featured work

Foundation for Intentional Community website research
Lead UX Researcher Discovery Card Sorting Usability Testing

Rebuilding the research foundation for FIC's website redesign

Led mixed-methods research for the Foundation for Intentional Community: discovery interviews, card sorting, and accessibility and usability evaluation that shaped the redesign of a 35-year-old organization's digital home.

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Life Beautified 529 savings research
Apprentice → Lead UXR Interviews Usability Testing ResearchOps

From apprentice to lead, building the research practice behind Life Beautified

Led a team of five researchers through 8+ in-depth interviews and 5 usability tests for a platform helping low-income students fund college, and built the recruitment-to-incentive pipeline the whole team ran on.

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Ruminate two-sided marketplace product strategy
Lead Product Strategist Discovery Friction Analysis

Connecting food producers with the evaluators who shape their products

Led discovery and strategy for a two-sided platform connecting food producers to the evaluators who decide whether a product is ready for market, identifying the friction points most likely to block a paid, matched evaluation.

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About

I came to research through data work, not design.

Before UX, I spent a year at Accenture evaluating 200+ content items a day to train ML classifiers for major social platforms, work that taught me to find patterns in messy, high-volume human signal and to hold a 95%+ quality bar while doing it.

Since then I've led research teams across discovery and evaluative cycles at Tech Fleet, built research operations from scratch, and co-led the IxDF San Francisco chapter, where I program events for the local UX community.

Qualitative

In-depth interviews, usability testing, card sorting, concept testing, thematic analysis, heuristic evaluation, persona development, field studies.

Quantitative

Surveys, A/B testing, desirability studies, clustering qualitative comments.

Tools

Figma, Miro, UserInterviews.com, UXTweak, Lucidchart, Notion, Google Workspace.

Have a research problem worth digging into? Let's talk.

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