Michael Sinanian

Quick Snapshot

Role: UX Researcher supporting the Velop whole-home mesh Wi-Fi portfolio
Team: Embedded with hardware, software, design, and product management stakeholders
Customers: Households seeking reliable, high-performance Wi-Fi with intuitive remote management

Linksys Velop mesh Wi-Fi towers arranged on a tabletop. — Velop’s modular mesh system promised whole-home coverage that needed to be intuitive to deploy and manage.

Mandate / Opportunity / Problem Scope

Velop delivered seamless mesh coverage and app-based control, but the team needed a continuous stream of user insight to prioritize features, improve setup journeys, and maintain Linksys’s premium positioning among reviewers and retail partners such as Apple.

Screens from the Linksys app guiding mesh system setup. — Setup research focused on how quickly households could bring new nodes online without expert support.

Linksys mobile app dashboard showing connected devices and parental controls. — Mobile app studies informed the prioritization of parental controls, device prioritization, and scheduling flows.

Lineup of Linksys Velop mesh hardware products. — Hardware evaluations kept industrial design, packaging, and retail experiences aligned with premium expectations.

What I Led / Delivered / Highlights

Ran mixed-methods research programs — surveys, interviews, focus groups, competitive studies, and analytics — to surface customer needs across hardware and mobile app touchpoints.
Operated the in-house usability lab, facilitating weekly rapid tests as well as larger summative and benchmark studies that informed agile design iteration.
Produced end-to-end research deliverables and recommendations that fed directly into product roadmaps and long-term UX research planning.
Authored an internal study on software development process improvements to strengthen collaboration between product, design, and engineering.

Impact / Lasting Value / Takeaway

The research practice grounded product decisions in real customer behavior, helping Velop maintain accolades such as PCMag’s Editor’s Choice and Wirecutter’s endorsement while scaling new experiences like parental controls, scheduling, and remote management in the Linksys app.