I’m Clayton, a senior user experience researcher

With a decade of experience in UX, I’ve most recently been working on federal government contracts for the VA. I have a particular interest in accessible and trauma-informed research and in research ops. In my current recent role, I regularly plan and conduct usability sessions with veterans. I keep up with survey data and analytics to inform product direction and uncover otherwise hidden issues. I’m often incorporating many other research methods, both qualitative and quantitative including user interviews, heuristic evaluations, discovery research, and card sorting. I work with the VA Design System when designing solutions, and have a strong understanding of each step in the Collaboration Cycle process.

I’m currently the lead researcher on the VA Identity team where I lead a team of UX researchers working across several products. One of my major successes includes the years long effort to deprecate and removed older, unsecure and burdensome sign-in methods that didn’t comply with NIST standards. This effort included researching the best way to communicate changes and to design and usability iterative changes to the sign in page. My team also developed a unified terms of use page for use across VA. I led interviews and usability research to ensure our multiple-stakeholder-developed page met the needs of veterans, who mostly just wanted to click past to get into their account. During this research, I piloted, the first time on any VA OCTO research, using Figma accessibility features with screen reader participants and shared what we learned with VA’s UX community of practice to help other researchers understand the tradeoffs and pitfalls.

I previously spent time on the VA Platform contract where I held a research ops role that included reviewing other’s research, and developing and updating research guidance for researchers across VA’s digital ecosystem to follow. I worked on advancing already established research practices by focusing on enhancing accessibility and trauma informed research. The guidelines I wrote are still in use today by the many researchers across VA digital products.

My interest in folks who sometimes get left behind in the digitally world started early in my career. When I was earning a Masters to learn more about this field, I was honored to work with participants with low-literacy to learn how they interact with online voter guides. This early work sparked my interest in researching and designing for folks of all needs. I’m proud to put my knowledge and skills to work to help veterans access more easily access the benefits they have earned. It’s a mission close to me, having a family full of veterans.