Laurel Komos🇺🇸

About Laurel Komos

Associate Director of User Research and Design at Juxtapose

Hi! I'm Laurel. I'm a design researcher, strategist, and visual designer who is currently working as an Associate Director of Concept development (User Research and Design) at Juxtapose. I formerly worked at Chime and Salesforce in User Research roles.

I studied Marketing and Visual Communication Design in undergrad and always saw the synergies between business thinking/strategy and design—together, they elevate each other! After 3 years of growing in the branding and advertising field, I felt an itch to do something more with design and went back to school to pursue my Master of Design (MDes) at the IIT Institute of Design in Chicago. There, I dove headfirst into the world of research and synthesis, complex visualizations and diagramming, service design, and enterprising/educating design thinking. This experience really connected the dots between my love of people, my strategic mindset, and my creative outlets and truly made my whole life "make sense."

Expertise

What mentees say

“Laurel has a natural talent for being a mentor! I am new to user research and felt so welcomed and supported during our session. She shared an enormous amount of useful tips and tricks about user research, cross teams collaboration, and measuring research outcomes. I definitely recommend her as an extremely talented user research and knowledgable mentor!”

“Laurel was SO generous and friendly. She made me feel comfortable and gave me valuable tips on how to transition to UX research. I have a better idea of how to do it thanks to her. I would most definitely recommend her as a mentor!”

“I am so grateful to Laurel for helping me to think through some interview strategies and just reframe my relationship to research in general! I really enjoyed our chat and I so appreciated the pep talk : ) Thanks Laurel!!”