Design Research & Strategy

I design by listening first — especially to the people products usually overlook.

Leela Rao is a design researcher and strategist who spends most of her time with people navigating high-stakes, overlooked moments — from opening a first bank account to navigating the early stages of an early-onset dementia diagnosis. She specializes in building experiences that help real people trust the systems they're often overlooked by.

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Portrait of Leela Rao

About

A decade of research, most of it with people who don't usually get asked.

Leela started as an IRB-approved clinical researcher, working with patients navigating primary progressive aphasia and atypical dementia — people who were, quite literally, losing the words to describe what they needed. That work taught her that rigor and empathy aren't in tension. They're the same discipline.

She's since brought that discipline into consumer fintech and enterprise product research at Citi, leading mixed-methods research programs that reach executive and clinical stakeholders alike — always looking for the person the system was least built for, and starting there.

Then IRB-approved clinical researcher — PPA & dementia care
Now Design research & strategy — enterprise fintech
Always Bilingual, English & Spanish — Brooklyn, NY

Selected Work

Three ways of asking who's been left out of the room.

Citi Financial Pathways

Lead Design Researcher & Strategist · Citi

Why it's gated

This work is live on Citi.com and covered under confidentiality. The full case study — including outcomes, recruitment strategy, and how findings became design decisions — is available with the password below. The finished page itself is public and linked here either way.

View the live site ↗

This case study is password protected. Ask Leela for access, or enter the password if you already have it.

30KVisits, 2024
27.5KNew-to-bank prospects

The short version

One of Citi's top-performing marketing sites, built and tested around a first-of-its-kind recruiting effort to bring unbanked and underbanked Black and Latinx clients directly into the research. Every design decision on the page traces back to an actual interview, from the hero image to the Commitment to Progress.

The problem

Citi.com's marketing pages for new-to-bank consumers were built the way most financial marketing is built: for someone who already trusts banks. Unbanked and underbanked consumers — disproportionately Black and Latinx households — don't start from that trust, and the page wasn't earning it.

What I did

I led the research and design strategy end to end — recruiting, moderating, and synthesizing qualitative interviews specifically with unbanked and underbanked Black and Latinx consumers, then translating those findings into a strategy I socialized directly with executive stakeholders.

Why the recruiting mattered

This was the first time Citi recruited specifically for this population in a research program — not as a segment of a broader study, but as the primary audience the entire experience was built around. That changed who was in the room, and it changed what the research surfaced.

Field note

"I want a place where I can explore what's possible, without feeling like I'm being sold the first thing that the bank wants me to buy."

— Research Participant

The result

The page became one of Citi.com's top-performing marketing sites for new-to-bank consumers — 30K visits in 2024, 27.5K of them new-to-bank prospects — and set a recruiting model the team has since reused for other underrepresented-audience research.

Building the Infrastructure That Wasn't There

Lead Design Researcher & Strategist · Citi

Bringing Disability Into the Research Process

1stRecurring disability-inclusion cohort at Citi
90%JD Power pain points later addressed

The problem

Citi's research programs didn't have a standing way to include people with disabilities — accessibility got addressed project by project, if at all, which meant the same gaps kept resurfacing across different teams.

What I did

I built Citi's first ongoing pipeline for recruiting and including people with disabilities in recurring UX research — not a single study, but a standing practice other research engagements could plug into. Getting there wasn't just a research design problem: it took working through legal and compliance review, coordinating with our research vendors, and aligning internal stakeholders before a single session could be scheduled.

How it connected

The recurring cohort later fed into a fielded NPS program for the Citi Mobile App, which surfaced further pain points and shaped a full information-architecture overhaul.

The result

That redesigned IA addressed 90% of the pain points identified in the 2025 J.D. Power banking report — and the inclusive-recruitment pipeline is now a standing practice used across Citi's research engagements, not a one-time project.

Building a Recurring Research Panel, Three Years Later

1stInternal research panel for banker tools
MonthlyQualitative testing cadence

The problem

The internal banker tools ecosystem had no standing research infrastructure — every study started from zero, and findings from one quarter rarely carried into the next.

What I did

Three years after the disability-inclusion pipeline, I built Citi's first internal research panel for the banker tools ecosystem: a recurring monthly qualitative testing cadence with an integrated feedback loop, backed by an AI-powered insight repository so findings compounded instead of resetting each quarter.

The result

Research on the banker tools ecosystem became a continuous practice rather than a series of one-off studies — the same infrastructure-first instinct behind the disability-inclusion pipeline, applied to a very different part of the organization.

Teaching it forward

Interviewing someone navigating disability, illness, or financial precarity takes a different kind of care than a standard usability session — so I built a 6-week internal training program on interviewing vulnerable populations, completed by 10 Citi UX researchers, to make that rigor repeatable beyond just my own studies.

Listening at the Edge of Language

Clinical Research Associate, SLP · Northwestern Feinberg School of Medicine

The work

Before product research, I spent three years as an IRB-approved clinical researcher on a NIA-funded study for patients with primary progressive aphasia and atypical dementia — a population that was, by definition, losing the ability to self-report. I evaluated and treated patients and their care partners using the Communication Bridge Care Model, incorporating breathwork- and meditation-based interventions alongside standard-of-care protocols, and planned Northwestern's first virtual PPA conference for patients, families, and clinicians.

Why it still shapes my research

Designing research protocols for people who can't always find the words taught me to design for signal in places most researchers don't think to look — behavior, hesitation, what someone's care partner says on their behalf. That instinct hasn't left me; it's the same one that shaped the recruiting and qualitative research strategy behind Financial Pathways.

Approach

How the research actually gets done.

Start specific

Recruit for the person the product currently fails, not the person it currently works for. The gap only shows up if they're in the room.

Build infrastructure, not events

A single study answers one question. A standing panel, repository, or recruitment pipeline keeps answering new ones — long after the original project ships.

Trace every decision back

If a design choice can't be traced to something a real person said or did, it's an assumption, not a finding — and it gets labeled that way.

Mixed-Methods Research NPS & Attitudinal Research Statistical Analysis ResearchOps & Insight Repositories Qualtrics DScout User Interviews UserTesting Miro Figma IRB-Adjacent & Vulnerable-Population Research AI-Augmented Research Workflows

Speaking

QuantUXCon, 2024 — "Inclusivity and Quant Research: Using Data to Spark Uncomfortable Conversations Around Bias"