Elizabeth McRae
Elizabeth McRae
UX Researcher @ UNC Health
Elizabeth McRae is the UX Researcher at UNC Health focused on understanding how people make sense of complex decisions, especially when they’re uncertain or overwhelmed. Her work explores what happens when real human behavior doesn’t follow the plan.
She is particularly interested in helping teams move beyond optimizing systems to actually understanding the people they’re designing for.
The Map Is Not the Experience
We set out to map how people “research care” so we could design better experiences that would get users to the care they needed. What we found didn’t fit into any kind of journey map, design flow, or other logical pattern.
People didn’t start with clear intent or follow a predictable path. They looped, paused, changed their minds, and redefined what they needed along the way. They defined "success" in completely different ways. The more we tried to map it, the less it behaved like a map.
This talk explores the gap between the models we design—journey maps, funnels, even synthetic data—and the lived reality of human experience. Because the map is not the experience, and designing as if it is might be why there can feel like a disconnect between humans and design.