Shannon L. Coleman

Independent consulting practice focused on mixed methods UX research and product strategy for early-stage HealthTech and FinTech platforms in regulated markets, working directly with founders and executive teams.

• Grew an AI-powered health platform from users in the hundreds to 16,000+ and contributed to their first six-figure service agreement by surfacing the "Not for Me" Paradox and a trust gap at onboarding; the resulting Trust-Transfer Model reoriented channel strategy toward self-funded employers, unions, and advocacy organizations
• Accelerated compliance approval cycles by 3 weeks and eliminated late-stage engineering rework by reframing UX and compliance as a single workstream across a Web3 FinTech engagement, aligning onboarding and transaction flows with regulatory risk from the start
• Prevented approximately 2 sprints of misaligned engineering work and improved task completion confidence by 35% by catching a churn-driving score-first UX pattern in a 6-user prototype test before development began

Principal researcher and strategist for two large-scale DoD programs serving a combined 900,000+ users and personnel.

• Established the evidentiary foundation for all subsequent platform and roadmap recommendations through a mixed methods research program across 1,382 enterprise users, spanning survey, interview, card sort, tree test, and two rounds of usability testing
• Directly informed a DoD-level development pause for infrastructure improvements by surfacing six simultaneous failure modes and reframing discrete issues as a structural challenge on a platform that had scaled faster than its architecture, its UX, and its organizational support model
• Diagnosed a content-findability crisis affecting 36% of users as an information architecture failure rather than a user education problem, delivering the sitemap, navigation redesign, and content model to resolve it
• Contributed to the $15B multi-vendor recompete and two product roadmaps by delivering findings and strategic recommendations directly to the Chief Experience Architect and Chief Product Officer

• Drove 84% faster system startup, 59% faster data transfer, and 92% reduction in security event workload by developing a persona and workflow research framework across nine deployment sites, establishing the segmentation foundation that enabled XLA standard definition
• Institutionalized UX performance expectations for 800,000+ personnel by defining and operationalizing Experience Level Agreement (XLA) standards embedded into $5.7B vendor contracts
• Validated the program model before the Air Force committed to scaling by measuring IT satisfaction rising to 74/100 against a baseline of 44 at comparable pre-transition bases, with speed satisfaction at 73 versus mid-40s elsewhere
• Awarded U.S. Air Force Commander's Challenge Coin for shifting IT modernization to a user-centric service model, setting foundational standards for DAF digital transformation

• Reduced external recruitment spend to $0 and cut study recruitment timelines by at least 2 weeks per study by building and scaling a 950+ participant research panel from zero under HIPAA-adjacent and FDIC-regulated constraints
• Increased trial recruitment signups for F500 pharmaceutical clients including Pfizer, Eli Lilly, Merck, J&J, and AbbVie by conducting qualitative interviews, large-scale surveys, social listening, and patient experience research that directly informed site selection adjustments and messaging changes
• Improved recruitment conversion across concurrent multi-million-dollar Phase II/III campaigns by applying quantitative analysis to real-time performance insights, driving site selection adjustments, messaging changes, and budget reallocation
• Reduced overall project timelines by 2–4 days per study and eliminated redundant overhead by managing research operations for a 7–10 person team and standardizing recruitment workflows across concurrent client programs

• Led multi-year mixed methods longitudinal research integrating qualitative and advanced quantitative modeling to identify dropout risk patterns in digital learning environments; applied survival analysis and logistic regression to high-dimensional behavioral datasets
• Managed a 25+ person research operations team, improving interrater reliability by 60%+, reducing costly re-coding cycles, producing consistently defensible findings, and strengthening the evidentiary basis for policy recommendations presented at the White House

• Fisher-Price: Informed a 4-product category launch and evaluated 100+ concepts and prototypes across multiple product lines by leading usability and developmental research in partnership with Product, Engineering, and Design
• Segmedica, Inc.: Designed and analyzed a 35,000+ response national survey across 30+ pharmaceutical brands, packaged into a proprietary strategic research product