About Julie A. Vera

I’m a product/UX research leader and HCI researcher working across industry and academic research.

In my academic work, I study collective sensemaking and trust in fast-moving, high-stakes information environments. My primary empirical setting is severe-weather livestreaming and the emerging ecosystem of weatherfluencers. I examine how people make sense of events while they are still unfolding, how creators make their evidence and reasoning inspectable, and how audiences use livestream chat to question, corroborate, and continuously evaluate those interpretations. I’m especially interested in what happens when a creator’s authority itself is contested and audiences must decide whether an interpreter is credible enough to keep relying on.

In industry, much of my work sits upstream of feature design. I shape research agendas, build 0→1 research capabilities, and design foundational mixed-methods programs that combine qualitative research, surveys, behavioral and product data, and analytics. I use that evidence to build durable models and decision frameworks that can inform product strategy and research roadmaps beyond a single release.

I’m particularly interested in environments where product research, HCI, and applied research sit close together, so practical product questions can develop into longer-term research agendas.

Methods: qualitative interviews • ethnography/contextual inquiry • usability testing • survey research • thematic analysis & qualitative coding • digital trace & behavioral data • statistical analysis • data visualization • computational text analysis