About me

Hello, I'm Ciara Atkinson, a Senior User Researcher and Service Designer specialising in complex, regulated public sector services. For the past five years I've led mixed-methods research programmes that help organisations like HMRC, the Ministry of Justice, NHS England and the Department for Business and Trade make decisions they can defend with evidence.

I own research end-to-end: scoping the questions that matter, designing programmes that combine interviews, usability testing, surveys, ethnography and behavioural analytics, and presenting findings that senior stakeholders act on. On the HMRC App I lead research across onboarding, payments, security and AI-enabled experiences, line managing and mentoring junior researchers along the way.

I'm at my best in the messy, high-stakes situations where research leadership really counts. At the Ministry of Justice I took on a national police reporting platform with no clear stakeholder direction, a team sceptical of research and 45+ forces who didn't trust the service. I built the alignment, ran the field visits and earned the trust: 70% of officers came to prefer the new system, the project secured additional funding and time, and the work earned me a promotion to Senior.

My background in the performing arts shapes how I run workshops and playbacks: I can hold a room, read it, and draw out the people who would otherwise stay quiet. Much of my craft goes into the conditions for honest feedback: designing research around psychological safety and confidentiality so the people closest to a service can say what's really happening.

I also work hands-on with AI in research: supporting the HMRC App's AI digital assistant work and using AI-assisted synthesis in my own workflows. I take the ethics seriously. I trained in Operationalising Ethics in AI at the Alan Turing Institute in 2025.

If you need a researcher who can take ownership of a difficult problem and lead a team through it, get in touch.