About

I'm Chris Andrews — a senior UX researcher with a PhD in learning sciences from Indiana University Bloomington. Across ten years of applied research and four years in industry UX, I've focused on one question in different forms: how do people actually use, learn, and adopt the things we build for them?

The arc

I started as a high school CTE teacher and then a teacher educator, which is where the underlying interest came from: I wanted to understand learning well enough to design for it. The PhD turned that interest into a research practice — mixed-methods, grounded in evidence, willing to live with uncertainty long enough to surface real patterns.

From there I moved into industry as the first UX researcher embedded in Cisco Meraki's Product Enablement team, where the brief was to build a research function from scratch. Over three years I shipped end-to-end studies, built mixed-methods practice into the team, scaled research infrastructure so non-researchers could run their own studies, and increasingly used AI to extend what one researcher could cover.

Now I'm exploring what UX research looks like in an AI-augmented practice — both as a researcher who uses AI in the research workflow, and (volunteering at Empowered.Vote) as someone who actually ships product features built with AI as my primary development partner. The two angles inform each other.

What I care about

Research that actually changes decisions. I'd rather deliver one study that shifts a real choice than five that decorate the slides for a choice that was already made. Methods serve the question; the question serves the decision. Honest framing of what evidence supports and what it doesn't is non-negotiable.

Outside the technical craft, I care about whether the products and systems we build actually improve human experiences — and about the ethics of how AI gets folded into that. The Foundations of Humane Technology framing has been a useful anchor.

More

Selected work · Resume · Publications and talks (academic side; mostly relevant for research-leadership contexts)

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