Design Partner at Cisco

Zoe was the research lead on the small but mighty team of designers that I had the pleasure of collaborating with on solutions for the Cisco IT Security / Security Ops organizations. She brought strong research methods and expertise in user interviews, surveys, heuristic analyses, focus groups, and other research techniques. Leveraging her skills across a variety of enterprise IT security experiences, we were able to provide insights that led to key business decisions and design strategies.

More than any of this, however, Zoe brought her whole self to our team even though only part of her time was allocated to our problem space. She generously offered to help wherever she saw a need, and was always respectful of other people's time and energy. Zoe's candor and empathy made our 1:1s something that I always appreciated.

To sum it up, we worked in a challenging technical space with many entrenched rules and practices, and Zoe was there to help us stay focused on the humans and their stories.

It is with great enthusiasm that I recommend Zöe for a position in user research. Having worked alongside her for four years at Cisco in UX Research, I can speak directly to both the quality of her work and the caliber of her professional character.

Zöe is a skilled and versatile UX researcher who brings fluency across a broad range of research methodologies. Whether navigating qualitative discovery work or structured quantitative studies, she approaches each engagement with a focus on how she can make a difference for the users.

During our time working together on internal programs supporting Cisco's employee-facing tools and platforms, Zöe consistently demonstrated an ability to translate research findings into clear, actionable insights that informed product decisions.

One of Zöe's defining strengths is her capacity to manage multiple concurrent projects without sacrificing depth or quality. In an environment where research requests often compete for bandwidth, she remained a steadfast user advocate on each engagement - never allowing timelines or competing priorities to erode the integrity of her work. Her research was always grounded in evidence, and her recommendations carried weight because stakeholders knew the work behind them was thorough.

Beyond her technical capabilities, Zöe is a genuinely collaborative colleague. She builds rapport easily with stakeholders and study participants alike, which consistently yielded richer qualitative data and stronger cross-functional partnerships. She is the kind of researcher who makes her entire team better.

I recommend Zöe without reservation. Any team that brings her on will gain not just a capable researcher, but a thoughtful advocate for the people their products are built to serve.

Senior Product Designer at Cisco

I worked with Zoë for nearly four years on one of our organization's highest-priority initiatives, the Cisco IT Hybrid Worker Bundle. She's exactly the kind of collaborator you hope to have on your most important projects.

Zoë brings a rare combination of research rigor and genuine energy. She's hands-on and able to quickly turn around high-quality research artifacts in a complex, fast-moving enterprise environment without sacrificing depth. Her work was foundational to the product decisions that shaped how Cisco's 80,000+ global employees experience hybrid work; a product that earned several awards internally and externally for innovation in employee experience.

Beyond the work itself, Zoë lifts the culture of a team without even trying. She's enthusiastic and unafraid to advocate for the user in front of executive stakeholders up to the CIO. Over the course of our collaboration I watched her grow exponentially, taking on increasingly ambiguous problem spaces and doing it all with empathy and resilience.

Zoë would thrive in a Senior or Lead UX Researcher role where research is expected to drive real decisions. I recommend her without reservation.

Design Partner at Cisco

I have worked with Zoe for about three years at Cisco, partnering closely on research across a number of employee experience initiatives, and she has been an absolute pleasure to work with.

She brings genuine enthusiasm and a deep passion for improving the user experience to everything she does. She pairs that energy with excellent research methodology, fluency across qualitative and quantitative approaches, and the discipline to match the right method to the right question. Where she really stands out is in diagnosis: rather than stopping at the surface symptom of a usability issue, she works the problem until she understands the underlying cause, and she consistently returns with several thoughtful, practical options for resolving it. That gives product and design teams a clear path forward and makes her insights immediately actionable.

She is also a wonderful collaborator. Zoë works exceptionally well with the user community, creating space for them to share candid feedback. She brings that same openness to her own work, actively seeking input from peers, stakeholders, and partners, and treating feedback as a tool for sharpening the research rather than something to defend against. Any organization would be fortunate to have her, and I recommend her without hesitation.

Survey Product Owner at Cisco

I had the pleasure of working closely with Zoe for nearly three years across a number of research projects including Devices@Cisco, Mac@Cisco, Hybrid Worker Bundle, and IT@Cisco. She is one of the most talented and well-rounded UX researchers I have worked with.

Zoë is the rare combination of sharp, hardworking, and genuinely fun to be around. She digs into the data, asks the right questions, and is not afraid to push back when something is not adding up.

When we saw a double-digit drop in Hybrid Worker Bundle satisfaction one quarter, Zoë quickly tracked down that the bundle had stopped being offered globally on a specific date, giving us a clear, defensible explanation instead of a guess. That is how she works. Curious, fast, and thorough.

She is also incredibly easy to collaborate with. She communicates clearly, gives credit generously, follows through on what she says she will do, and brings a level of humor and humanity to her work that you cannot teach. Stakeholders trusted her, teammates relied on her, and she consistently went out of her way to help others, including pulling more than a few strings on my team's behalf to unblock issues. I lost count of how many times a quick question from Zoe turned into a productive back-and-forth that left both of us with a better answer than we started with.

What stood out most to me is how much she cares. She cares about the quality of the research, she cares about her stakeholders, and she cares about the people she works with. Any team that gets to work with Zoë is lucky. She will make the research stronger, the team tighter, and the day-to-day a whole lot more enjoyable. I cannot recommend her highly enough.

Zoë is a brilliant design researcher. We collaborated on design thinking workshops and client-facing presentations during our shared time in IBM. I was also lucky enough to see Zoë in a leadership position during a design conference she helped pull together.

Design Researcher at IBM