Hi, I’m Taryn.

UX researcher, culture nerd, collector of languages and passport stamps. The case studies show the work — this page shows the person.

🌍 Global by upbringing 🔍 Curious on purpose ✏️ Design thinking evangelist ✨ Joy included

The origin story

A wildly not-to-scale map of how I got here

1Trinidad & Tobago — my parents’ home: a mix of cultures that taught me identity rarely fits a checkbox.

2College Park + Greenbelt, MD — hometown, plus a French immersion school. Bonjour by age five.

3The francophone world — that childhood French became a lifelong tie to every place the language is spoken.

430 countries before 30 — and every single one made the world feel bigger, not smaller.

5Seattle, WA — a PhD asking whether Wikipedia is one community or 312. My whole background, tied into one research question.

6Microsoft — helping product teams feel their products the way their customers do.

How I work

Four things I believe

🫱

Feel the product

A finding you read is information; a finding you felt is conviction. I put teams in the room with their customers — live, monthly, no slides required.

🌱

Research from day one

The best research doesn’t audit a product — it shapes one. Brought in at the end, research sands the edges; present at the start, it decides where the edges are.

🔓

Empower, don’t gatekeep

I’d rather teach a team to sit with a customer than hand them another deck. I taught design thinking to 10-year-olds; now I teach PMs and engineers to be Designers with a capital D.

🎈

Joy is a working condition

Curiosity is the engine; joy keeps it running. If research never surprises you, you’re doing it wrong — and if it’s never fun, nobody will protect it.

Quick facts

True things about me

🌍 30 countries before 30 🗣️ English · Français · Español ✏️ Taught 10-year-olds design thinking 📖 Read 312 Wikipedias so you don’t have to 🎨 Turns PMs into big-D Designers

If we end up working together: expect to meet your customers early and often, to feel your own product the way they do, and to have more fun doing it than you thought research allowed.