Hello! I’m Laura
I'm a Staff-level UX Researcher with 15+ years of experience helping teams make sense of complex customer behavior and turn research into better product decisions.
My work aims to build explanations, not just findings. I turn evidence across studies into models and frameworks that explain the underlying phenomenon — giving teams a shared way to reason about it and make decisions long after individual studies are over.
I've led research across AI, marketplaces, e-commerce and EdTech, working internationally and conducting research in four languages.
Over the past 15+ years, I've worked across multinational organizations and early-stage companies, researching products and services.
Much of my work has focused on complex, ambiguous problems where the answer isn't contained in a single study — connecting evidence across research, behavioral data and existing knowledge to build a clearer picture of what's happening and what teams should do about it.
What do you need?
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Make sense of a complex customer problem
You know what customers are doing. You may even have plenty of research and data. But you still don't have a convincing explanation for what’s driving it.
You need to connect the dots — uncover the motivations, conditions and mechanisms behind the behavior, and turn scattered evidence into a shared explanation your team can use across products, problems and future decisions.
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Make a difficult product decision with confidence
You have an important decision ahead, but the evidence is incomplete, contradictory or simply not strong enough to choose a direction.
You need to separate what you know from what you assume, identify the uncertainties that actually matter, and gather the right evidence to evaluate your options and move forward with confidence.
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Make research more valuable across your organization
You’re doing research, but its value isn’t compounding. Knowledge gets lost between projects, teams work in isolation, or research struggles to influence the decisions that matter.
You need the right research strategy, practices, frameworks and capabilities so knowledge accumulates over time — and becomes something teams can consistently use to make better decisions.
Some of my work
I helped IKEA understand what was really stopping customers from hiring home-service professionals.
I led the strategic research agenda for a new two-sided services marketplace, combining qualitative research, large-scale surveys, and behavioral data to explain why customers who showed interest often didn't convert.
The research revealed different levels of customer intention and the conditions required for someone to be ready to hire, giving teams a shared framework for distinguishing genuine demand from exploration. It informed changes across the marketplace experience that helped triple conversion and reduce low-intent demand by up to 27%.
I helped Storio identify what it couldn't afford to lose during a major platform migration.
As Storio prepared to migrate several of their European brands to a new e-commerce platform and streamline its product portfolio, I led research to understand which features and product capabilities customers genuinely depended on — and what could safely be simplified or removed.
The research uncovered customer behaviors and needs that the planned changes would have disrupted. Based on these findings, the Finance team estimated that deprioritizing those capabilities could put €3.4M in customer revenue at risk.
This gave the organization evidence to make deliberate trade-offs during the migration and preserve the experiences that mattered to valuable customer segments.
I helped Brainly understand its role in students’ broader learning ecosystem.
As Brainly expanded its product with new features, the team needed to understand how students actually navigated the experience, where Brainly fit into their broader learning journeys, and whether the product reflected how they really learned — particularly as learning behaviors had shifted following COVID.
Across three international markets, I led foundational research mapping students’ end-to-end learning ecosystems: how different learning needs emerged, how they moved between Brainly and other resources, and how they navigated Brainly itself.
The resulting frameworks and customer journeys became shared organizational references for understanding student behavior and informed more than 45 product initiatives. Alongside this work, I built Brainly’s UX Research function from the ground up, helping scale research from 10 to 75 studies in one year.
I helped Wallapop understand what needed to change before entering a new market.
Before Wallapop launched in Italy, I designed mixed-methods research to understand whether the assumptions behind its existing marketplace experience would hold in a different cultural and competitive context.
The research identified which parts of the experience needed to change, which could remain, and where the greatest risks to adoption were. I translated the findings into product decisions through co-creation with the teams. Following the launch, Wallapop became Italy's most downloaded marketplace app in 2022, with 2.4 million downloads.
Ask me anything.
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I’m based in Madrid, Spain but I’m open to remote collaborations (or hybrid in Madrid).
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I do my best work through close, continuous collaboration. My ideal engagements are either fully embedded within a product team or structured so that we work closely throughout the project, with regular alignment, access to the right stakeholders, and opportunities to share and discuss work in progress.
I don't believe in disappearing with a brief and returning weeks later with a polished deck. Research gets stronger when the people who will use it are part of the thinking along the way — shaping the questions, making sense of emerging evidence, challenging interpretations and connecting what we're learning to the decisions ahead.
By the time the research is finished, there should be few surprises in the final presentation. The knowledge has already started becoming part of how the team thinks..
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Yes, just email me at and request it. It’s that easy. I will be happy to share more detailed information about the projects I have participated in. Do let me know what type of challenge you have in your hands or what kind of output are you looking for so I can show you relevant projects.
We can also pop on a call and I’ll be happy to learn more about your needs and discuss how my experience could help you. -
I can conduct research in Spanish, English, Italian and Brazilian Portuguese. If you need me to coordinate a multi-language study including languages I don’t speak I can help you do that as well. I can coordinate with other freelancers or agencies to cover the other markets and work with them to conduct the research in multiple countries ensuring coherence and rigor and creating the workflows necessary to analyze data in multiple languages. I have done it for Twitter in Japan, for Fiat in Turkey and for the Adeo group in Poland and Russia.
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Yes. I can design and analyze surveys and generate cross tabs and charts. I can analyze the data and synthesize it with qualitative data as well. However, if you need an advanced statistical analysis (ie. conjoint analysis, MaxDiff, etc) then I would not be the right collaborator for you.
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I’ve had the privilege of partnering with global brands such as BBVA, IKEA, Fiat, Piaggio, Santander, Inditex, Iberdrola, Deoleo, Wallapop, ServiceNow, Brainly, The Storio Group, and Twitter (now X) as well as with top agencies like Designit, Tribal Worldwide, Garaje de Ideas, Stigia Studio and Nadie.
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Most recently, my work has focused on AI, marketplaces, e-commerce and retail, with earlier deep experience in EdTech.
In AI, I’ve researched how people understand and respond to AI-powered product experiences — including trust, privacy, control, willingness to use AI assistance, and where people want automation versus where they want to remain actively involved.
In marketplaces, I’ve worked on both sides of the experience, studying the dynamics between customers and service providers: intention, trust, matching, pricing, communication, commitment and what ultimately drives or prevents a transaction.
My e-commerce and retail work has included understanding complex purchase journeys, customer retention, platform migrations and the consequences of changing or removing product capabilities across international markets.
And in EdTech, I’ve studied how students learn across digital and offline ecosystems, how learning behaviors vary across markets, and how products can better fit the way people actually learn.
I’ve also worked across financial services, mobility, energy and other service experiences, so I’m comfortable entering unfamiliar domains and getting up to speed quickly.
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My core expertise is foundational and strategic research — particularly complex, ambiguous problems where teams need more than individual findings to understand what’s happening and decide what to do next.
I specialize in turning evidence into explanatory models and frameworks that connect behaviors, motivations, contexts and conditions, creating knowledge that can be applied beyond a single study or product decision.
Methodologically, I work across qualitative and mixed-methods research, combining in-depth research with surveys, behavioral data and existing evidence when the problem calls for it.
I also bring deep expertise in cross-cultural research, having led international studies across multiple markets and conducted research directly in four languages, as well as in research strategy and capability building — from establishing research functions to creating practices that help organizations accumulate and use customer knowledge over time.
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I'm originally from Mexico, but I've been living across the pond for over 20 years now. Prior to moving to Spain, I lived in Italy for 10 years where I worked and studied Therefore, I'm fully fluent in Italian and I love Italian cooking as well. My star dish is tiramisù. I'm also into a few creative hobbies such as drawing, painting, makeup and fashion in general. After work, you'll find me at the gym and taking long walks in nature with my partner and our three dogs.