UX Research for Amazon Echo and Sonos Play:5, Concurrent With a PhD

Situation

Two hardware platforms, Amazon's Echo and Sonos's Play:5, needed real usability research across Windows and Android. I was deep in PhD research at Virginia Tech at the same time. Nothing about either schedule was going to move.

What I Built

• UX research and usability testing for the Amazon Echo platform, focused on cross-device usability between Windows and Android at a moment when voice-first hardware was still an open question, not a category.
• UX research and usability testing for Sonos's Play:5 platform, partnering directly with product and engineering to refine hardware and software integration and improve adoption.
• Design recommendations that fed directly into product iteration on both platforms. This wasn't research that got filed away after the readout.
• A research practice that held up under a genuinely brutal schedule, running two concurrent industry engagements against full-time doctoral research without cutting corners on either.

The Hardest Problem

Cross-device usability research is hard enough when hardware, software, and platform teams are three different groups with three different priorities. Doing it for two companies at once, on two unrelated products, while carrying a full academic research load, meant the research method itself had to be efficient enough to survive the schedule without losing rigor.

Outcome

Both engagements delivered design recommendations that shaped real product iterations, on platforms that went on to define their categories. The research discipline built here was rigorous, fast, and resistant to schedule pressure. That's the same discipline I later applied to enterprise AI and governance work.

Skills Demonstrated

Cross-device usability research, consumer hardware UX, research operations under real time constraints, product-embedded research partnership.