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Role
UX Researcher
Methods
Semi-structured interviews, Usability testing, Focus groups, Co-design sessions, Competitive analysis, Diary studies
Type
Exploratory
Timeline
2021 - 2022
Kumu is a social entertainment application that aims to provide a stage for and connect Filipinos from across the world.
From 2021 to 2022, I led qualitative research for the Content Creator Pod (Vertical), a cross-functional team focused on improving creator acquisition, engagement, and retention on the platform.
In this role, I was responsible for shaping the qualitative research strategy for creators, partnering closely with product managers, designers, engineers, and analytics teams to ensure creator needs and motivations were consistently represented in product decisions.
Methods I used include semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, co-design sessions, competitive analyses, and diary studies. While I mainly did qualitative research, I often collaborated with our quantitative researchers and business intelligence analysts to bring quantitative insights into the projects.
Leading qualitative research for creator-focused initiatives
As the lead qualitative researcher for the pod, I owned the planning and execution of research efforts aimed at understanding creators’ goals, workflows, challenges, and long-term motivations. I conducted semi-structured interviews, focus group discussions, diary studies, and usability testing to capture both in-the-moment behaviors and longer-term patterns of creator engagement.
Because creators’ experiences evolve over time, I selected methods that allowed us to observe not only isolated interactions but also sustained behaviors, expectations, and pain points. This helped the team reason about creator retention beyond surface-level usability issues.
Understanding mental models to inform early product direction
Many of the initiatives I supported were early-stage or exploratory, requiring research that could inform direction rather than validate existing designs. I facilitated co-design sessions with creators to surface mental models, feature expectations, and unmet needs, and complemented this work with competitive analyses to understand how similar platforms supported creator growth and monetization.
These methods allowed the team to explore opportunity spaces without prematurely narrowing solutions, grounding early ideation in real creator perspectives.
Collaborating across qualitative, quantitative, and business teams
While I served as the lead researcher for the Content Creator Pod, research at Kumu was highly collaborative across verticals. Researchers from different pods frequently partnered to ensure that insights reflected the interconnected nature of the platform. I worked especially closely with the Viewer Pod, as creator and viewer experiences were deeply interdependent.
Through regular collaboration, we aligned research questions, shared findings, and coordinated study timing to avoid siloed insights. This cross-pod partnership helped us examine how changes for creators affected viewer engagement and vice versa, allowing teams to reason about the platform as a holistic ecosystem rather than a set of isolated features.
In addition to pod-level collaboration, I regularly partnered with quantitative researchers and business intelligence analysts to contextualize qualitative insights with behavioral data. This collaboration helped validate emerging themes, prioritize areas of focus, and align research findings with broader business metrics.
Across this multi-year engagement, my research informed product exploration, design decisions, and strategic discussions related to creator growth and retention. While specific findings are confidential, my work consistently helped teams build a shared understanding of creator needs and tradeoffs. This role strengthened my ability to lead exploratory research, select methods intentionally, and collaborate across disciplines to support complex product ecosystems.
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