About Me

User Experience is my life and a fundamental part of my professional and personal philosophy. I have over 20 years of professional experience with research, design, and usability testing. I believe that design must not be absent of user input and requires ethnography and validation if it is meant to be successful for a given audience.  Beyond my experience as an individual contributor I have spent the past few years in the role of technical leader and coach, allowing me to mentor colleagues and build from-scratch UE programs where none previously existed; including developing standardized research, design, and testing methodologies and defining automated UX infrastructure.  I seek to continue to evolve my leadership and coaching abilities, as well as expand my experience and skills injecting machine learning, AI, and automation into UX process. When spare time avails I like to spend it with my family, racing cars and motorcycles at the track, as well as coordinating community and charity events.

Contact Details

Dave Marcus
davemarcus@ux.expert
Cell: 337-298-1370

Download Resume

Education

New Mexico State University

Master of Arts •  Cognitive Psychology•May 2000

Emphasis in applied end-to-end usability practice, thesis focus on web search design

Louisiana State University

Bachelor of Science •  Psychology• December 2006

Emphasis in machine and human cognition

Work

IBM

Senior UX Researcher • April 2014 - Present

Provided long-term usability research and design consulting services on contract from IBM to Google for nine years including work on Google Domains, Onboarding, Headcount Manager, GBus, Ariane Project Launch Manager, Launch, EasyOKRs, Snippets, Legal Removals, Legal Contracts, and other assorted internal tools. I delivered client engagement management, ethnographic research, foundational research, persona and use-case definitions, surveys, interviews, user journeys, and UI testing. 

I have also provided research consulting services from IBM to AT&T to help them design and user-test field deployment tools for fiber technicians.  

For IBM I worked to develop internal tooling and templates for a UX research toolkit that would improve researcher efficiency and consistency within the testing group. I provide support to my internal UX team to review and manage contract bids and proposals. I am one of the leading experts in Generative AI in UX research on our team, focused on evolving UX research automation and assistance, with applied skills in WatsonX, Bard, and OpenAI. I am also an IBM Coach, cultivating the careers of my direct reports.  

Cisco Systems, Inc.

Senior UX Technical Leader • May 2000 - October 2013

My formal career began at Cisco. Starting as an intern in May 2000 then began a steady progression through the ranks to Technical Leader by 2010. Defined and led multi-project roadmaps to improve the user experience for several simultaneous projects at Cisco including voice technology, security routing, intellectual capital reuse, technical support, green power management, as well as process, infrastructure development, cloud service deployment automation, and mentoring and training new hires.   


Thoughtware Solutions

Intern, Individual Contributor • January 1998 - May 2000

Led the planning and analysis of data collection for retail consumer buying habits of business- and consumer-class printers.  Discovered how consumer browsing patterns impacted buying habits. Related data to shelf-layout strategy for different printer product tiers. 





Skills


  • AI
  • Adobe
  • Agile
  • Axure
  • Balsamiq
  • CSS
  • Figma
  • HTML5
  • Javascript
  • LeanUX
  • PHP

Client Testimonials

  • The flavor of articulations Dave brings to every discussion is out of mind and I can't describe how many great ideas and solutions he comes up with on the spot, his out of the box thinking is incredible."
    Ido Ohad, Google Domains UI Design Lead



  • Dave has been so incredibly valuable to helping the Google Domains product improve - from his work on usability tests to the monthly quality surveys to the frequent in-product surveys to design improvements on the UI. He's multi-talented: a professional wordsmith, data analyst, survey junkie, and research expert and in all of this, he's always user-first focused. Thanks Dave for making the Product better, and for being awesome to work with." Chad Lancaster, Google Domains Marketing Lead

  • I'll be honest, I've run user studies before and I never was able to run them with the level of organization and insight as Dave does. He is an indispensible part of the team."
    Kevin Cheek, Google Domains Documentation Lead



  • Dave carefully listens to the team’s needs and responds with thoughtful research designs. He is not shy of pushing back on requests if feasibility and / or value of requested research is questionable which is an often undervalued part of expert advice a team needs from their UXR. Being the professional UXR powerhouse he is Dave just always delivers the insights the team needs on time (often earlier)." Johannes Behrisch, Google Ariane/EasyOKRs Design Lead

  • Dave has done a wonderful job for the past year in Corp Eng, covering multiple products as a lead UX researcher. He completed extensive foundational research on headcount management, full-lifecycle research on our new On-boarding system, and heuristic reviews, usability studies, and surveys for the gBus transportation app used by employees in California. Dave is a veteran consultant, and he's been great at managing his customers and even mentoring junior researchers. Dave's been great -- thank you, Dave!" Phil Chung, PhD, Google Onboarding/gbus UX Manager

Let's talk UX!

Interested in working together to create innovative UX solutions,
bringing even the most complex tools within reach of interested users?
Or maybe you just want to find out how to make your users happier?
Let's connect and create a solution!