Don Duprez, PhD

About

I am a Senior UX Researcher and Strategist currently designing and leading foundational and evaluative research programs for internal tools, support systems, and workflows at Apple, Inc., with study cycles ranging from two-week rapid tests to six-month-plus longitudinal efforts. My throughline across every role is the same: turn scattered, ambiguous research needs into durable programs, reusable infrastructure, and stronger relationships, rather than one-off reports. That's meant building reusable research frameworks (archetypes, recruitment tooling), standing up a repeatable pilot and proof-of-concept methodology for evaluating new tools before they reach an organization, and applying AI to make years of research findings searchable and actionable at scale, all while mentoring early-career researchers along the way.

I approach research as a program, not a project: framing work in terms of outcomes for users, product teams, engineering, and leadership, and treating strategic and tactical needs as distinct problems that call for different methods, timelines, and levels of investment. That same focus on outcomes and business impact carries into advocacy: democratizing access to research findings, scaling synthesis across programs, and presenting to teams and senior leadership alike, including localization considerations for research and support work across global geographies.

Before turning to industry focused UX work, I trained as a cultural/social anthropologist, earning a PhD from the University of Edinburgh focused on reproductive medical traditions and healing practices among the Hmong, with fieldwork inside the Denver Hmong community, and have conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the US, UK, China, and the Caribbean. I combine that ethnographic rigor with a pragmatic, business-outcome focus, equally comfortable running a stakeholder readout, a Six Sigma process analysis, or a semester of graduate teaching.