I’m sharing this news with you, first, because you’re among a small group of people who’ve been part of my journey over the past decade or more. The work we’ve done together has been exceptionally meaningful and important to me - both professionally and personally.

When I started Chamjari 13 years ago - on September 9th, 2011, to be exact - I did so with a very particular mission: I wanted to help as many people as possible to “see the label of the jar they’re in.”

The name Chamjari (soft-ch | am-like-Amadeus | jar-as-in-pickle-jar | eeee) was meant to evoke a jar of jam - it’s right there in our logo. Out of that jar, you’ll see two insects escaping. They are dragonflies, once trapped, now free to see what they’ve been labeled as; free to accept or reject its implications; free in any case to find a new path.

If you’ve been kind enough to stick around for the last 13 years, now you know what that name really means.

Chamjari is also the anglicization of the Korean word for dragonfly (잠자리), and Chamjari was birthed just a few days shy of my son’s third birthday. He was born in Korea, and though I’m a bit of a dilettante when it comes to Korean culture, this tiny bit stuck with me.

All of which is to say: this company, and its mission, have always been deeply personal. I “grew up” in the Digital Agency world. From 2000 through 2011, I worked in two agencies on the outskirts of Philadelphia, enjoying a front-row view of - well, not the birth, but certainly the raucous teenage years - of the Internet. I am old enough to have browsed Yahoo! when it was a hand-crafted index, and to have designed mobile applications… for the Palm Pilot VII. I’ve built a lot wireframes… in Visio.

That journey usually began with a serious inquiry into what those apps and websites ought to do, and how they ought to do it. That inquiry was typified by a day or two of meetings with the client who’d hired us, immersing ourselves in answers to important questions like, “what would you like this website to do?”

Around 2002, a colleague turned to me one afternoon while we were working on wireframes (again, in Visio) for a client’s website, and said, “maybe we ought to test this with people before we build it?”

And that was my entrée into UX Research. I cobbled together my first lab, then designed and built another, and then another. Bundling UX Research into design projects, and then building UX Research teams, became an unexpected calling. It is derigueur now to incorporate some kind of design research into most serious projects, but at the time it was still a hard sell. It took the work of many dedicated practitioners to inculcate a research-based design practice into companies large and small.

I would be remiss if I did not point out that many practitioners before me, and many more afterwards, came into the field of UX Research with much more formal training than I had. Mine was almost all on-the-job, and I’ve been remarkably lucky to have stumbled into a practice that I find both deeply enjoyable, and constantly surprising.

That good fortune continued when, In 2011, my very first client as an independent business owner was Capital One (start small? No thanks.)

Tasked with designing and overseeing the build of their first in-house usability lab, I hung around and helped conduct user research for…. 9 years. Along the way I’ve had a fascinating view on the evolution of UX Research, and the privilege of working with exceptionally talented people at Volkswagen, Disney, and many other companies. All were tasked with tackling difficult, interesting problems, often for audiences numbering in the tens- or hundreds-of-millions. All of them were spectacularly dedicated, and very much up to the challenge.

I love working with clients. I love diving into a new project, awash in a firehose of data about a company and their products and their customers and their teams and their processes. I love trying to make sense of it all, and helping other people do the same. I love guiding research, and design teams, and working with clients on Customer Strategy and helping them make sense of their own place in the world; to help them see outside the jar they’re in.

I have in the past few years run into a somewhat vexing challenge. I have long been convinced of, and seen first-hand, the immensely positive impact clients experience when they invest in UX broadly, and in UX Research specifically.

There are many ways this has manifest, but one is a growing realization among organizations of all sizes that deep qualitative customer research is an operating imperative. While Quantitative UX Research has, concurrently, grown into a robust practice of its own, 100% of the data available for analysis concerns the past.

If you’re interested in forging a better future, you need to talk to people, one-on-one.

Lately, the conversation with prospective clients is rarely about convincing them to invest in UX Research. More often, the questions are:

• How will you do this at the scale and pace we need?

• How will you be able to ensure that the knowledge we gather is put to good use?

These are big challenges. I created a tool to help people visualize and communicate around Strategic UX Research, and to plan for a future based on a solid understanding of what was known and unknown about their Customer Experience.

But: scaling a UX Research and Design team is tough. There has been a certain “building the airplane while it was in flight” quality to the whole endeavor, and plenty of curveballs. I am a firm believer in applying a rigorous process to every challenge, even when the path forward is not obvious. Part of that process is sometimes giving a problem the space to breathe. A “routine clearing of the baffles,” so to speak.

Which is not easy, either: in our corner of the world, with deadlines and project plans and we-can’t-move-when-the-awards-show-airs dates, it is nefariously difficult to do the hard work of going for a walk in the woods, and clearing off a space where a solution can present itself.

But then, as so often happens - remember, this is a process - a solution appeared. A friend and former colleague made an introduction. Conversations ensued. Then a small project, some more collaboration, and deeper conversations.

I’m positively giddy to announce that I have taken on the role of Senior Director of Experience Design for DX-ROI, a digital transformation consultancy focused on delivering exceptional value to clients who recognize that extraordinary things can be accomplished when you’re willing to focus on the Customer Experience. We are particularly focused on The Power of Process - the idea that hard problems require a carefully-crafted, expertly-executed, precision-tuned approach.

I’m delighted to be part of an exceptionally talented, time-tested team with over a 100 years of combined experience among us.

I’m also intensely grateful for the opportunity to build out a full service XD team that will bring User Research, Content Strategy, UX Architecture and Design to bear in a truly integrated and unique way. And we’ll do this for clients who are ready to experience the outsized-benefits of a process-driven, methodical approach.

Which is a lot of buzzwords, so more simply: I’m going to be building awesome stuff with great people for wonderful clients. And I hope you’ll continue to be a part of that picture.

Chamjari will continue to host a number of projects and endeavors, and at least some of my writing and (half baked?) ideas. I hope you will keep in touch and stay involved, and reach out whenever you need help.

I am excited about the years and the mission ahead, and I invite you to be part of it.

Hello, again.

- Ben

Managing Partner, Chamjari
Senior Director - XD, DX-ROI