Freelance UX Researchers in PittsburghFreelance UX Researchers in Pittsburgh
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Mike Jones's avatar
Mike Jones
Pittsburgh, USA
I design things, solve problems, and skip the fluff.
New to Contra
I design things, solve problems, and skip the fluff.
Cover image for Transform Your Onboarding: Boost Retention with Expert Consu...
A fast-growing tech company's onboarding had worked fine when the founders knew everyone personally. Then they scaled globally, turnover started climbing, and leadership still thought the process was fine. The real problem wasn't the process — it was that no one had ever seen the full experience from the new hire's perspective. Founders, managers, and HR each had a completely different mental model of what onboarding was supposed to accomplish. None of them were wrong. None of them were talking to each other. I facilitated cross-functional workshops to surface those gaps, then used journey mapping to make the end-to-end experience visible in a way leadership had never seen it. That visibility shifted the conversation faster than any slide deck could have. The output was a phased 90-day framework — Pre-Boarding, Lift Off, Reaching Altitude, Continued Exploration — built around what new hires actually needed, not what was convenient for the org chart. More importantly, it gave the team a shared language they didn't have before. Leadership aligned. HR got the cross-functional momentum to move. Full implementation moved into the next funded planning cycle. Services: Performance Consulting, Workshop Facilitation, Stakeholder Alignment, Learning Experience Mapping
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Cover image for A rooster. A mountain road.
A rooster. A mountain road. An attitude. Not Today Clucker is an original apparel concept built around a single image doing all the work — minimal copy, maximum energy. Part motivational poster, part unexplained backstory. Designed for print on demand via Cotton Bureau. No brief. No explanation. That's the point.
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Cover image for A deadpan natural history chart
A deadpan natural history chart for a subject nobody asked about. Types of Ice is an original illustration concept treating frozen water with the same curatorial gravity as a field guide — dry taxonomy, detailed rendering, completely unnecessary. Designed for print on demand via Cotton Bureau. No client brief. The premise was too specific not to exist.
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Cover image for A fake taco chain that
A fake taco chain that takes itself exactly as seriously as it should. Tiny Hands Taqueria is an original brand concept — logo, type treatment, and illustration — built around a very specific energy: confident, slightly unhinged, and funnier the longer you look at it. Designed for print on demand via Cotton Bureau. No client brief. Just a premise that insisted on becoming a thing.
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UX Researcher(1)