Meet Your Guide

Curious by nature. Careful by training.

I'm Mhaire. I study how people think, decide, adapt, and make sense of complexity, then help teams turn that understanding into better products, services, and business decisions. Someone has to translate "the users are confused" into a roadmap item. I build and lead teams using empathy, humor, and the best people for the job I can find, in roughly that order, though on hard weeks, humor moves up to first..

How I think about the work

Behavior makes sense in context.

People's lives have enough friction in them already. Reducing it, even just a little, through the technology they use every day, is my actual life goal. I have others. This is the professional one. Wellness and coffee are the other ones, and I will not be ranking them..

I'm a UX Research and Experience Strategy leader with a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology: a nerdy way of saying I have spent my entire life obsessively curious about why people do what they do. Not just what they do. But why they do it. Frankly,that's the interesting part. Anyone can watch a click happen.

I look at human behavior in context, using a mixed methods approach to uncover what people actually do, and not just what they say they do. I look for the patterns that explain decisions, build trust, and create change.

Watercolor illustration of a research library and working desk.

Where I’ve been. What I’ve done.

A career spent clearing up the question

I have spent my career helping organizations understand people more deeply, and then act on what they learn. I have led and built research practices, designed experience strategies, coached junior team members, and partnered with product, design, engineering, data, marketing, and business leaders..

My work spans AI, financial services, wealth management, enterprise technology, developer platforms, and emerging products. Different domains, same underlying question every time. Across all of it, the goal has stayed remarkably consistent. Make the evidence useful enough to change a decision, move the business forward, and actually respect the people on the other end of it..

Watercolor illustration of Mhaire presenting research.

She brings clarity, curiosity, and calm to the hardest questions we face.
— H. Shuller, VP Product

Leadership

Leadership Philosophy.

In one sentence. I build the conditions where teams do good work to actually change something, instead of dying quietly in a slide deck called "Final_Final_v3."

It means challenging assumptions, including my own, which is harder than challenging everyone else's.

I am equally at home elbows deep in the work, leading the team, or stepping back to tell leadership what it all means. Same brain, different altitude, different outfit

I care enormously about rigor. I also care enormously about people, which seems a contradiction. It is not. Kindness and clarity are not the soft skills you tolerate on the way to the real work. They are the real work. Turns out being decent to humans makes the research better. Groundbreaking stuff, I know.

Watercolor illustration of Mhaire observing and taking field notes.

What matters to me

Humans ARE the experience

I was born in Scotland, which means I have opinions about weather, whisky, and whether a "wee" anything is ever actually wee (it is not). These days I split my loyalty between that grey, stubborn place and San Francisco, a city that somehow makes chaos feel like a design choice. I understand both. I love both. I have complicated feelings about both, which is probably the most Scottish sentence I could write..

I have two real addictions. Ideas, and understanding people. Neither one has ever let me down, though both have occasionally kept me up past a reasonable hour.

Here is the part I do not skip in bios, because skipping it wouldn't tell you about me. I used to be a jerk. I told myself that being a woman in tech required sharp edges just to be taken seriously. I did the work to find out I was wrong about that. Self awareness is not a one time event. It is a rigorous practice, and I am still in it.

What I bring now is the same rigor, minus the armor. And very dry jokes, because if you cannot laugh at the absurdity of human behavior, including your own, you are doing this job wrong.

Watercolor illustration of the Edinburgh skyline.

Keep exploring

Come see how I work.

Explore the Case Studies to see the stories behind the research and the impact it created. Visit the Methods page to understand how I investigate, synthesize, and turn insight into action.