Caitlin Bowler

Staff UX Researcher

Caitlin Bowler’s human-centered user experience research has shaped business strategy, product design, and program implementation in healthcare, federal agencies, and higher education.

Engaging people in the field and translating those learnings across boundaries is the core of her practice. The context and insights providers, administrators, patients, and others share from their experiences in the field are essential to designing solutions that ultimately work for them. Caitlin excels at communicating those findings to drive alignment within and across teams to deliver tech-enabled experiences in healthcare that work.

In past roles Caitlin has conducted qualitative research to improve customer experience across federal agencies and organizations, planned and lead generative research projects at a healthcare start up with Medicaid beneficiaries and Community Health Workers, and planned and executed a range of usability testing projects, both moderated and unmoderated, to drive user-centered design decisions for mobile-first and desktop systems.

A DESIGN INSPIRATION

As a suburban kid, public transit – specifically the commuter rail that connected my small town to Boston – was a source of freedom and adventure. I first took the train into the city with my family, then began to take it with friends so we could explore the city on our own.

I’ve always loved how the choreography of rails, stations, and trains, time tables, tickets, and conductors coalesced to deliver me from a town with no stoplights to an actual city. The MBTA maps packaged up complex geographic information into artifacts accessible to 13 year olds.  (Cambridge Seven Associates designed the original “spider map” in 1965.) Colorful, iconic station signage called out to people up on the street (like me and my friends) and guided us down through otherwise unnavigable passageways to platforms below. These large scale physical and communication systems made different adventures possible. Using design to communicate complex information and make systems legible and accessible to regular people has captured my imagination since.