About

The strategy comes first —
built to survive regulatory review.

Experience design leadership in regulated environments. 15+ years diagnosing structural failures upstream and designing the experience architecture that holds through MLR and Health Canada review — across healthcare, pharma, and regulated enterprise.

Regulated environments require a different kind of fluency — not just in UX, but in the clinical, legal, and brand disciplines that review it. I've spent 15 years operating at that intersection: translating UX rationale into the vocabulary that moves work forward across medical, regulatory, and creative stakeholders without a separate document for each audience.

Open to

Director · Lead · Head of UX Healthcare · Pharma · Health Tech · Regulated Enterprise Agency · In-House · Full-Time · Freelance / Fractional New York City Metropolitan Area · Remote · Hybrid

Current perspective

What I keep returning to

Enterprise UX still confuses information with understanding.

Users aren't failing because they lack information. They're failing because the experience doesn't meet them where they are — cognitively, emotionally, or operationally. Adding content is rarely the answer. Rethinking the architecture almost always is.

AI accelerates synthesis. It doesn't replace the judgment about which signal matters.

AI compresses research timelines genuinely. But knowing what to do with the finding, and how to frame it for a clinical or regulatory stakeholder, is still a judgment call. Faster synthesis isn't deeper insight.

In regulated environments, the stakeholder alignment problem is a UX problem.

Work that can't survive medical, legal, and brand review simultaneously doesn't ship. Getting UX decisions through that gauntlet isn't a political skill — it's a design skill. The rationale has to be built into the architecture from the start, not retrofitted into a compliance document at the end.

Career arc

From financial services to pharma — compliance was always the constant.

Through Luria Digital, the boutique UX studio I founded, I spent 15 years building experience design for wealth management, capital markets, and insurance clients — establishing the compliance-aware discipline that now defines the regulated pharma practice. That foundation carried directly into UBM Life Sciences, where I led UX strategy, information architecture, and digital experience across a regulated B2B healthcare media and events portfolio.

The shift into pharma deepened the practice in ways that general UX work doesn't replicate. I've led journey architecture, defined experience frameworks, and translated findings into recommendations that move through clinical, regulatory, brand, and creative review — in agency staffing models where clean boundaries don't exist. The practice spans Abbott, Eli Lilly, Amgen, AstraZeneca, GSK, Pfizer, Sanofi, and Otsuka. AI is now integrated into the research and synthesis layer — competitive analysis, usability signal extraction, cross-market gap identification — at a speed not viable three years ago.

Now

Luria Advisory

Fractional UX strategy & CI — regulated environments, active practice while open to Director/Lead roles, full-time or freelance.

2020–25

Agency UX Strategy Lead

Healthcare & pharma — Abbott, Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca, GSK, Pfizer, Amgen. Grey, Arnold, Digitas Health, Havas.

2015–20

UBM Life Sciences

UX Practice Lead — team of 5. Full product design function for regulated B2B healthcare media & events portfolio.

2000–15

Luria Digital

Founder — boutique UX studio. Financial services & enterprise UX. Team of 10. Compliance-aware practice from the start.

Peer & manager feedback

"Rob is the complete package when it comes to UX strategy and leadership. He brings unique, holistic thinking to each project and has an exceptional ability to communicate and collaborate across cross-functional teams to drive best-in-class outcomes. He excels in both client-facing sessions and internal working sessions and leads teams of all sizes with confidence and clarity."

Caine Fair Group Strategy Director · Grey Health
Direct Manager · August 2025

"Rob is a true team player and an asset to both Arnold and its clients. His UX expertise helped guide critical decision-making, simplifying complex information so it was accessible to both internal and client teams. He consistently went beyond the task, worked seamlessly across disciplines, and remained steady under pressure. Rob was a joy to work with and a trusted strategic thought partner."

Connie Bazos VP, Customer Experience & Engagement Strategy · Arnold Worldwide
Direct Manager · March 2022

"Rob is a fantastic UX Strategy expert with extensive experience in health and consumer brands. He is skilled in visual best practice principles, accessibility-inclusive design, and educating colleagues and clients on how to navigate complex industry change. His professionalism, attention to detail, and high quality work would make him a great fit with any team."

Muzammil Taj Associate Director, Data Strategy · Tech / Analytics / Health
Colleague · June 2026

How I engage

Built to start immediately.

Audit

A focused diagnostic. Often solo — I go in, isolate the structural cause, and hand stakeholders a set of recommendations they can act on directly, without needing a team built around me first. This is how the Enbrel CRM audit worked.

Embedded

Other engagements need the opposite: a hand inside an existing team, remote or on-premise, working through their process rather than around it. This is how Verzenio worked.

Full-Time Fit

Both are the same instinct — diagnose fast, integrate fully — and it's the one I want to bring to a full-time team. The freelance work I'm doing now is how I'm keeping that instinct sharp while I find the right fit.

The strategy comes first —built to survive regulatory review.