UX research and content development at MD Anderson

DIG leadership at MD Anderson decided to build a data literacy certification course from scratch to comply with the Texas DRI initiatives — an ambitious proposal for an institution of 25,000+ staff: professors, oncologists, public policy experts, nurses, security personnel, IT, roboticists, student liaisons, university administration, hospital management, and more. To create meaningful, engaging content for such a broad workforce, our team first needed learner personas. Following UX testing best practices combined with principles of andragogy, we built a nine-part placement matrix and a fifteen-question self-assessment tool mapped to data literacy core competencies.

Beyond meeting state certification requirements, executive leadership saw the bespoke program as a way to lead in the medical-research training space — an innovative, gamified, and original program positioned to attract grant funding and eventually generate revenue by being packaged for similar organizations across Texas.

Five rounds of alpha testing followed by four rounds of beta testing. I designed the strategy for each testing round and collaborated with the Innovation and Technology team on focus group design, statistical significance methods, and survey design. Each round went through executive review — at one point tested by the President of the institution.

Keeping the assessment tool, personas, and learner journey as non-hierarchical as possible. Biased language too often seeps into persona development around technology adoption — and we were already starting from "literacy" framing that implies a deficit. My solution was to gamify certification: invent characters with neutral names, position the learner journey as a "quest" rather than a linear achievement path, generate word-of-mouth, and inspire joy and play. Additional challenges came from operating inside a massive government-academic-medical-nonprofit infrastructure where every pitch and testing approval had to be robust enough to survive endless review.

• Defined nine unique learner personas and mapped them to the core competency framework.
• Designed and iterated the fifteen-question self-assessment and nine-part placement matrix across nine total testing rounds.
• Built a gamified certification structure with neutral-named robot characters (Giga, Vector, Nano) to keep the journey engaging and non-hierarchical.
• Authored the learner journey map and connected personas to the certification path.
• Designed assessment tools, dashboards, and copy to guide users through self-paced learning and gamified progress tracking.
• Created consistent LX patterns and messaging templates for modules, best practices, and inclusion.
• Authored the cross-functional content style guide adopted across teams.
• Wireframed the AI microsite with a focus on UX flow, CTAs, and information architecture.
• Sat on the AI in cancer research taskforce, helping shape campaign identity and branding for AI education projects.