Headshot of Mariya Vizireanu

Mariya Vizireanu, PhD

Instructor, UXR Institute · Senior Research Consultant

The research that ends up anchoring a roadmap rarely starts at kickoff. It starts months earlier, in the stakeholder conversations everyone treats as a formality.

About

Mariya has spent eight years turning player, market, and user data into decisions that product and design teams actually act on, most of it inside gaming, where what counts as a usability problem and what’s just the intended friction of a hard level can be genuinely hard to tell apart. Her training is anthropology, and it shows in how she works: she treats players and users as people embedded in a culture and a context, not just behaviors to log, an instinct she built running a research lab that tracked health attitudes and values across 58 countries.

She currently consults independently through Vibe Insights Lab, running multi-country studies on brand health and growth opportunities for gaming, tech, and B2B clients, after two and a half years at Rec Room, first as Senior Researcher and then as Research Manager leading 50+ quant and qual studies across UGC, AI, economy, and safety work. Earlier in her career she led concept testing and portfolio strategy for Jam City’s mobile game slate, ran large-scale civic and policy research at the Center for the Study of LA, and built a cross-cultural health research lab at Arizona State University. She also teaches game user research as a lecturer at Northern Arizona University, alongside the course she teaches at the UXR Institute on the same subject, and holds a PhD in anthropology with a focus on global health.

Industry Research Experience

  • Vibe Insights Lab, Senior Research Consultant
    • Conducts multi-country studies on user attitudes, franchise and brand health, and growth opportunities for clients across gaming, tech, and B2B
    • Leads rapid audience segmentation and opportunity analysis across multiple concurrent client engagements
  • Rec Room, Research Manager
    • Led cross-functional product research (50+ quant and qual studies) across UGC, AI, economy, communications, and safety, including the AI Companion work that lifted engagement 9% (DAU) and day-7 retention 6% while easing monetization friction
  • Rec Room, Senior Researcher
    • Designed quantitative studies (CSAT, CES, NPS, SUS) and built motivational audience segmentation archetypes that guided marketing, product strategy, and roadmap prioritization across mobile, PC, VR, and console
  • Jam City, Senior Research Analyst
    • Led concept testing, opportunity sizing, and competitor analysis that supported greenlight decisions for 10+ live and in-development mobile titles
  • Center for the Study of LA, Research Analyst
    • Designed and ran 15+ large-scale civic and policy studies, authoring 40+ public reports and training and managing field research teams of up to 200
  • Arizona State University, Research Lab Manager
    • Built a research lab studying cross-cultural health attitudes across a 58-country, 25-year dataset, authoring 6 journal articles and 4 book chapters

How I think about stakeholder partnership

Before every stakeholder catch-up, I bring two things: one thing about their world I don’t fully understand, and one useful thing to give back, a finding, a study I’m running, or a question I could add to a survey. Telling someone how you see their problem and asking if you’ve got it right feels uncomfortable, and you do it anyway, because it turns the meeting into a partnership instead of an interview. By the time a formal study starts, I usually already know the design vision, the risks, and the open questions, because months of those small conversations built that picture first.

Areas of expertise

Game and player research Player and audience segmentation Mixed-methods UX research Quantitative and survey research methods Stakeholder research strategy AI-assisted research methods

Courses Mariya teaches

Credentials & Education

  • PhD, Anthropology / Global Health
    Arizona State University
    Interdisciplinary
  • MS, Public Health
    Indiana University
  • BA, Business
    Goshen College

Honors & training

  • AI for UX Research Certificate
    UXR Institute, 2026
  • Accelerating Research with AI Certificate
    Nielsen Norman Group, 2025

Body of work

Also on Spotify · Apple Podcasts

Articles by Mariya Vizireanu

New writing publishes here.
Mariya’s first articles are publishing soon: writing on game and player research, stakeholder partnership, and AI-assisted research methods.

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