UX Research · Inclusive Design · AI Product Evaluation

Looking to make your product fit universally?
I'll help you do it.

I find the users your research missed, name the design decisions that pushed them out, and give your team the tools to stop doing it.

I'm Manu Kaligotla. I've spent a decade studying the users who exit silently, the ones who never complain because they never expected to be considered. I turn that into frameworks your team can actually use.

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Manu Kaligotla
"Exclusion hides inside reasonable design decisions."
Research experience at
Meta OpenAI Amazon U.S. Bank McGraw-Hill OneMain Financial Baylor S&W
"This wasn't
made for me." Your users are thinking this right now.

When someone has to work around your product just to use it (translate the language, explain the error, find another way in), that's exclusion. It's costing you retention, trust, and revenue you never tracked.

I call it the Adjustment Tax: the invisible work excluded users do just to get through an experience designed for someone else. Most teams never measure it. Some never even see it.

It shows up as drop-off you can't explain, support tickets that say "I don't understand," and customers who leave without a word.

With AI in every product touchpoint now, the teams who get this right will build things that actually work for more people. The ones who don't will keep wondering why their metrics look fine but growth is stalling.

How to Engage
Four ways to work together, pick what fits your team right now.
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Learn

The Design for Belonging course gives you eight modules of frameworks, toolkits, and decisions you can apply in your next sprint. Not awareness-raising. Actual methods you can run on Monday.

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Advisory

I embed as a fractional research leader and show your team specifically what's being missed, in your product, your research process, or both, and build the systems to fix it.

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Conduct Inclusion Research

I run the research itself, interviews, diary studies, and mixed-methods work designed to surface the users your current process is missing, and turn what I find into decisions your team can act on.

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Speaking

I've spoken at SXSW and AI conferences, and run workshops where teams leave with four frameworks they can apply to live product problems the same week.

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Speaking & Workshops
Talks that give your team a new lens, and workshops where they use it.
SXSW 2025

Not For Me: The Hidden Cost of Exclusionary Design

The talk I gave at SXSW 2025. Covers the Adjustment Tax framework, how exclusion compounds into measurable product failure, and four tools teams can apply immediately after leaving the room.

The AI Conference 2026

Excluded by Design: The Inclusion Gap in AI Evaluation

Inclusion gaps in AI aren't values failures. They're evaluation failures. This talk makes the case for treating inclusion as a technical quality standard, and shows teams what better AI evaluation practice looks like.

Universal Design Summit, Starkloff Disability Institute

Designing for Belonging: Accessibility as a Research Outcome, Not a Checkbox

A talk on treating accessibility as core product intelligence rather than compliance. How teams miss disabled users in research, synthesis, and decision-making, and what it takes to build accessibility into the research process itself.

Available for Booking

Applied Workshops: Diagnosis, Mapping, and Audit for Real Product Teams

Half-day and full-day sessions where your team brings a real product problem and leaves with a completed Adjustment Tax Diagnostic, Exclusion Map, or Belonging Audit, plus a prioritized list of next actions.

Selected Work
A decade of research, turned into things teams actually shipped.

A sample of the research programs I've led, from lifecycle-wide archetype systems to AI governance frameworks to accessibility-first patient research.

Fintech, Digital CX

UX Archetype Library

Built a lifecycle-wide archetype system spanning Acquisition, Origination, Servicing, and Collections, replacing ad hoc personas with a shared model every product team could design and prioritize against.

Outcome: A common language for "who we're building for" across five product lanes.
Healthcare

Patient Experience Research Program

Led interviews, diary studies, and unmoderated testing to build patient archetypes like the Invisible Caregiver and the Exhausted Expert, surfacing where care journeys break down for the people navigating them.

Outcome: Guiding principles adopted across clinical and digital experience teams.
Fintech, Service Design

Branch Appointment Experience Discovery

Ran a mixed-methods discovery across in-branch and digital scheduling, mapping the full service blueprint and prototyping a redesigned scheduler and team-member portal.

Outcome: A validated design direction for both the customer and employee sides of the experience.
Fintech, Research Ops

Research to Experiment Impact Dashboard

Built a dashboard connecting UX findings directly to A/B experiments and business OKRs, so research impact could be tracked in the same terms as everything else on the roadmap.

Outcome: Research reframed as a measurable input to the business, not a report that sits on a shelf.
Cross-Industry

Inclusion Risk Scanner

Developed and WCAG-audited a tool that flags exclusionary patterns in copy, flows, and defaults before launch, turning "inclusion" from a value statement into something a team can actually test for.

Outcome: A practical, repeatable check teams could run pre-launch instead of after complaints came in.
AI Product & Strategy
Where I've applied research to how AI itself gets built, evaluated, and trusted.

Work spanning AI-native research tooling, risk and safety scoring for AI-driven products, and inclusion studies that test whether AI experiences actually work for everyone.

AI Product Strategy

CIA Digital Archetypes

Built a set of archetypes mapping how distinct customer segments engage with, trust, and adopt AI-driven digital experiences, giving product and strategy teams a shared model for where AI should show up and where it shouldn't.

Outcome: A segmentation model used to prioritize where AI investment actually moves the experience forward.
AI Research Operations

UXR Workflow Orchestrator

Designed a six-agent AI system, each agent scoped to a single research task (intake, triage, synthesis, briefing, critique, and reporting), automating the parts of the research pipeline that used to eat the most hours.

Outcome: Cut manually done research operations work by 66%, freeing time for higher-value strategic research.
AI Governance & Safety

Collections Call Bot Speech De-Risking Agent

Built an agent that scores an AI collections call bot's scripts for risk before they go live, grounded in seven industry and regulatory frameworks spanning safety, fairness, and compliance.

Outcome: A single risk score legal, compliance, and product teams could act on before a script ever reached a customer.
Accessibility, AI

OpenAI Inclusion Study with Blind Users

Led a study examining how blind and low-vision users actually experience AI-powered tools, surfacing where interface assumptions break down for non-visual interaction and where AI could meaningfully close the gap instead of widening it.

Outcome: Concrete design recommendations for making AI tools usable by default, not accessible as an afterthought.
Voice AI, Trust

Alexa Inclusion and Trust Assessment

Ran a study assessing how much different user groups trusted Alexa with sensitive tasks, and where that trust broke down along lines of ability, language, and familiarity with voice AI.

Outcome: A trust framework the team used to identify which user groups needed different design and safety guardrails.
Fintech, AI Analytics

OneMain Collections & Digital Hardship Composite Score

Built an end-to-end composite score combining collections behavior and digital hardship signals into a single measure, giving the business one number to track a customer's financial distress across every channel.

Outcome: A unified hardship signal now used to guide when and how the business intervenes.
Core Frameworks
Four frameworks. Each one maps to a decision your team is making right now.

Developed across a decade of practice at Meta, OpenAI, Amazon, and U.S. Bank. Each tool is built to answer a specific question your team is already asking, and produce an output you can act on.

01

Adjustment Tax Diagnostic

Run this before a major release to find where your product is quietly asking non-default users to do extra work just to participate. It surfaces the friction your satisfaction scores will never catch.

02

Experience Exclusion Mapping

A systematic method for identifying the exact moments in your product where specific user populations drop off, give up, or get it wrong. You get a prioritized fix list your team can start on immediately.

03

Dignity Check Protocol

A protocol your team runs before copy goes live, on error messages, onboarding flows, defaults, and labels, to catch the language and logic that signals "this wasn't built for you."

04

Belonging Audit

A pre-launch check that tells you whether your product communicates consideration to users outside your primary persona. Combines behavioral research, accessibility review, and ethnographic insight into one clear answer.

The Course
Eight modules. A framework, a toolkit,
and a decision you can apply
in your next sprint.

This isn't a course about awareness. It's a course about methods. Each module gives you a tool you can run on your actual product, with your actual team, in the next two weeks. Built for researchers, designers, and PMs who are done waiting for inclusion to become someone else's initiative.

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01Why Most Research Programs Miss Half Their Users
02How to Plan a Study That Doesn't Replicate the Same Blind Spots
03Recruiting Beyond the Default Participant
04How to Moderate When You're Not the Same as Your Participant
05Synthesis That Doesn't Flatten Outliers Into Footnotes
06Making Inclusion Land With Stakeholders Who Don't Care Yet
07What Accessibility Research Actually Looks Like in Practice
08Building Systems So Inclusion Doesn't Depend on One Person
10+
Years leading research at organizations including Meta, OpenAI, Amazon, and U.S. Bank
6
Industries: AI, fintech, healthcare, consumer tech, education, enterprise SaaS
"Inclusion isn't a DEI initiative. It's a research quality issue."
About Manu

A decade of research at the organizations that shape what gets built, and what gets left out.

I teach Inclusive UX Research at the graduate level. I spoke at SXSW 2025 on exactly how exclusion shows up in product metrics, and what it costs. I write Adjustment Tax, a Substack newsletter read by researchers and product leaders who want inclusion to be rigorous, not performative.

I built this course because every team I've consulted with already knows inclusion matters. What they don't have is a repeatable method. This course gives you one, module by module, tool by tool.

SXSW 2025 Speaker Inclusive UX Educator AI Research Strategy Accessibility Research Research Operations
Get in Touch

Ready to find out who your product is leaving behind, and what to do about it?

Whether you want the course, an advisory engagement, or a workshop for your team, reach out and we'll scope the right fit. I typically respond within 48 hours.

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