Meet the gazelle cx TEAM 

Ellen Goldstein

Chief Customer Experience Strategist

Ellen Goldstein leads the Gazelle CX team, and has decades of experience improving how organizations serve their customers. Ellen is a champion for customer centricity: Doing the right things for customers, because it drives business results.

She is a Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP), and Lean Six Sigma professional, with more than 20 years’ experience in marketing strategy and communications, innovation and user experience for Fortune 500 companies, scientific government organizations, associations and start-ups. Our projects with these organizations range from quick evaluations to multi-year engagements in user experience design and implementation:

Ellen’s Broad User and Customer Experience

Ellen is a trusted partner for organizations seeking to deliver world-class customer and user experiences. Since 2019, she has led the user experience efforts for the SPARC portal. Gazelle CX evaluated prior communications and set the user experience strategy for future initiatives by reflecting stakeholder and user-informed recommendations, and develops personas, wireframes and prototypes for a new scientific portal to ensure the portal adapts to the needs of the autonomic nervous system scientific community. Our team of user experience consultants weaves digital transformation into our projects by listening, observing and determining key user wants and needs. We facilitate user research to determine key “jobs-to-be-done” and redesign websites to boost intuitive experiences, to leave a long-lasting positive impression.

Representative projects in the ‘active aging community’ included directing communications for Women's long-term care, supporting the AARP Staying Sharp brain-health pilot, and directing AARP's volunteering portal and Caregiving initiatives to engage active seniors. We have trained hundreds of employees and executives in increasing engagement and customer satisfaction. Skill sets span the qualitative and quantitative: user experience strategy and design; analyzing metrics that matter, digital strategy; product and service launches; facilitation and training; direction of multimillion-dollar research efforts. Our work has led to double-digit, year-over-year increases in engagement and sales. We connect people with people - to improve the lifetime value of each customer.

Ellen’s Credentials

CCXP Certification, Customer Experience Professionals Association

• UVA Darden School Graduate Certificate Candidate in Service Design

• SAP Certifications in Customer Journey Mapping and Customer Experience Mastery,

• Certification in Transforming Customer Culture, Zappo’s Insights

• Six Sigma Green Belt Certification, George Washington University

• Toastmasters Competent Communicator,Leadership and Storytelling

Stacy Surla

User Experience Director

Stacy provides user research and user experience design services for the SPARC Portal (NIH Common Fund's Stimulating Peripheral Activity to Relieve Conditions (SPARC) program). She integrates design thinking, Lean UX, and user experience methods to understand how researchers can find relevant information on the Portal to help them with their research - and translates those needs into strategies to optimize the services on the SPARC Portal.

Stacy’s expertise includes user research, workshop facilitation, and team building. Her career spans more than 30 years, with a concentration on not-for-profit and government programming. 

Stacy has a master’s degree in literature and teaches User Centered Design, user research, and Information Architecture at both undergraduate and graduate levels.

Dominic Rogers

Senior User Experience Manager

Dominic crafts the SPARC design system, optimizing the user interface for 3D scaffolds and maps, and designs clickable prototypes and wireframes to reflect user requirements for the SPARC Portal. He has extensive consulting experience working as a UX designer and business analyst for many businesses around the world.

Dominic has a BSc honours degree in Mathematics and Computing from University College Chester and carries certifications in graphic design from the California Institute of Arts, AGILE development from the University of Virginia, Foundations of Everyday Leadership from the University of Illinois, Model Thinking from the University of Michigan, and Combinatorial Game Theory from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Janice Chan

Content Strategist and Information Architect

Janice conducts primary user research with academic and industry research scientists in the autonomic nervous system community to make the SPARC Portal as useful as possible. Through developing and maintaining a content strategy to facilitate interconnectivity across the Portal, she works to improve the usability and accessibility of data and knowledge from the SPARC program.

Her expertise includes user research, information architecture, project management with cross-functional teams, data and knowledge management, process development, instructional design, and community building. 

Janice has a master’s degree in information management from the University of Maryland and is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP).