Building and scaling global design research
In 2004, First Data hired me to solve a problem that had no template: how to build a design research capability strong enough to guide Western Union through aggressive international expansion. The company was moving into markets around the world, but its understanding of customers was still largely one-size-fits-all. My charge was to change that — to stand up research from scratch, scale it globally, and turn cultural insight into experiences people across dozens of countries could trust with their money.
The stakes were high. Money transfer is personal, emotional, and often urgent. If customers didn't understand or trust the service, they simply walked away. My job was to make sure they understood, and stayed.
At a Glance
- Business problem: Support Western Union's rapid international expansion with research that could decode customer behavior across very different cultures
- My role: Founded and scaled the design research function; set research strategy and secured funding for global studies
- Strategic move: Introduced Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions as a framework to organize research across markets
- Approach: Combined quantitative transactional data, brand tracking, and regional qualitative fieldwork to find and close experience gaps
- Key insights: Agent network misunderstanding, regional marketing confusion, and security mental-model mismatch
- Design responses: A mnemonic "gold arc" graphic, tighter global marketing guidelines, and clearer security explanations
- Scale of impact: Improvements deployed across Western Union's global omnichannel experience during a period when its agent network grew from 300K to 400K locations
The Challenge
Western Union was expanding fast, but growth exposed a gap. Customers in different countries didn't behave the same way, didn't trust the same things, and didn't interpret the same messages the same way. A campaign that worked in one market fell flat in another. A feature that felt reassuring to one customer felt confusing to the next.
The company needed more than isolated studies. It needed a repeatable way to understand "fuzzy" global experience problems — the kind where the real issue hides beneath the surface and shifts from one culture to the next. There was no existing research capability to lean on. I had to build one, and build it in a way that could scale with the business.
EXPERIENCE DESIGN RESPONSE
Insight only matters if it changes the experience. For each finding, we designed, tested, and deployed a response.
A visual language for how money moves. To fix the agent network confusion, we developed a mnemonic graphic built around a gold arc that showed, simply and clearly, how money traveled through the transfer system — and that it could be picked up anywhere in the destination city. We tested the approach and rolled it out across countries with mid-to-high uncertainty avoidance, exactly where the reassurance mattered most.
2. Regional marketing was creating confusion
The global studies exposed real problems in local marketing materials. In the EU alone, more than a dozen different German words were being used to describe money transfer — fragmenting the message and eroding clarity. In other markets, marketing imagery didn't match the seriousness people felt about handling their money, creating a subtle but damaging tone mismatch.
Why It Mattered
This work reflects how I lead. I take an ambiguous, high-stakes problem — one that spans culture, behavior, and business strategy — and turn it into a capability the organization can rely on long after any single project ends.
At Western Union, that meant more than a few smart studies. It meant founding a research function, giving the company a shared framework for thinking globally, and proving that cultural insight could drive measurable improvements to a worldwide omnichannel experience. It also meant securing the funding and executive confidence to do research at that scale.
The conviction underneath it all is simple: money is deeply human, and people won't use what they don't understand or trust. My role was to close that gap — market by market, insight by insight — and to build the team and the thinking that could keep closing it as the business grew.
All materials used with permission of Western Union (WU).