Who We Are

CompassXD was founded with the goal of offering strategically-scoped experience research & design services to clients across industries, without the overhead of large consulting firms. This is rooted in the belief that all product, service, and experience design—no matter how big the company or budget—should be human-centered and benefit from qualitative research & strategy!

CompassXD expands beyond the traditional fields of UX and CX (supporting product and service design), to include designing for meaningful human experiences; such as outdoor recreation, nature immersion, travel, entertainment, conferences, hospitality, education, civic design & more.

Benjamin Basseches

Benjamin is an Experience Researcher and Designer with over 10 years of broad-ranging experience, and a passion for improving our designed world through understanding people. Prior to founding CompassXD, Benjamin worked at Emergo/UL-Wiklund, a premier human factors consulting firm, where he led and supported user research for a wide variety of medical devices. He has also spent time as a Sr. Experience Researcher at Workiva, helping simplify complex enterprise reporting and GRC software.

Benjamin is well-versed in the spectrum of qualitative and quantitative research methods including interviews, usability testing, contextual inquiry, mobile ethnography, card sorting, and surveys. He has spoken at UX conferences on topics including ethnographic diary studies, immersive research, and gamified methods. Benjamin holds an engineering degree from Brown University and UX certification from Bentley University.

In recent years, Benjamin has incorporated professional outdoor guiding into his career, bridging his loves for the great outdoors and experience design, to create transformative nature experiences for guests.

Benjamin is a design thinker, team player, strong communicator, and champion for creativecollaboration. In his free time, you’ll find him snowboarding in the mountains, traveling the world, making art, or floating rivers!

Eileen Walz

Eileen is a UX Researcher and content strategist with a background in human-centered design, engineering, education and facilitation. She has a broad range of experience helping organizations improve the usability and overall efficiency of systems. She brings a strategic mind and deep understanding of human behavior to design interfaces, assess workflows, and map information systems. She’s passionate about discovering elegant solutions to make processes and interfaces that are intuitive and inclusive.

While completing her Master’s in Information Science, Eileen taught Design Thinking and Human-Centered Engineering at the University of Illinois. After working in the alternative education space for several years, she is applying her unique skill set (including instructional design, program management, and systems thinking) to a variety of UX research projects at CompassXD.

Beyond the world of UX, Eileen loves adventuring in nature and is active in the Effective Altruism and Ecoversities communities.

Additional Team Members

If the team members above have limited bandwidth, or your project requires a larger research team, we will work with experienced sub-contractors that have been vetted to provide excellent service.