Daniel Farooqi Staff UX Researcher

Selected Work · UX Research

Research that takes the risk out of the decisions that matter.

For ten years I've led mixed methods research at Apple: 70+ studies across 15+ enterprise employee experience products, from early strategy through evaluative testing. What keeps me in the work is seeing research influence a decision, a leader's strategy, or a team's roadmap, so the end user is better off, whether they realize it or not.

See the work

Tap a tile to see the number it encodes.

70+
Studies led
15+
Products supported
10 yrs
Of research at Apple
Mixed Methods · GenAI · Research Ops & Strategy
Focus areas

Case Studies

01

AI & Trust Research · 2025

Gauging trust in AI support for sensitive HR topics

A five study program that took a generative AI employee support experience from concept to global launch, mapping the exact boundaries of employee trust in AI with sensitive HR data.

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AI assistant
Handoff
Live specialist
Employees forgave the AI when a human was reachable
~80k
Interactions · 7 countries
88%
Positive/neutral vs 85% goal
5
Studies, generative → pilot
02

Enterprise Research · 2023–2024

Measuring a major HR platform migration before anyone felt it

Migrations only hurt after launch, when fixes cost the most. We benchmarked the old tools against the new one before launch, found the tasks it made harder, and got them fixed while there was still time.

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82%
54%
PerceivedActual
Perceived vs. actual task success
543
Employees surveyed globally
20+
Usability fixes tracked into the vendor's roadmap
8
Critical issues resolved across releases
03

Research Operations · 2026–Present

Building a governed AI research platform

A platform that lets any researcher author and publish their own AI research skills, with quality and compliance built into the template, so the team moves faster without giving up the rigor its work depends on.

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TEMPLATE
AI + HUMAN
GATE
TEAM
Guardrails in the template · one gate
85%
Less study planning time
60–75%
Less synthesis time
8/8
Researchers adopted
04

Research Enablement · 2026

Standing up a research practice on Apple TV

Four designers were already doing their own research, with limited shared framework or common tools. I built those, along with a process they could keep using, and proved it on a concept test that ran synthetic users before real ones.

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CONFIRMED DID NOT HOLD
22 synthetic findings · six confirmed
6
Key findings
10
Recommendations
4
Designers in the program

About

Daniel Farooqi, Staff UX Researcher
Daniel Farooqi · San Diego, CA

I work where people and technology meet, turning messy human behavior into evidence someone can act on.

Over the past decade at Apple I've led research across enterprise and employee experience, most recently on generative AI and how it's changing the way people work.

I've always been fascinated by how technology and community shape each other. By closely understanding a community, whether local, regional, or global, we can see how a new technology will ripple through it. Technology should enrich people's lives, and when it doesn't, knowing the people it affects is how we catch that early and respond.

Get in touch.