A restaurant at dinner is a machine that has learned to sweat. Tickets chatter. Glassware travels. A server stands at a point-of-sale screen with one eye on table twelve and the other on a change that should be obvious but is not. The screen records a tap. It does not record the calculation behind the finger, the practiced shortcut, or the small panic gathering at the edge of a busy shift. Those invisible things are where Brie James begins.
James is SpotOn’s founding UX research strategist. She says she built the company’s research operations from the ground up, creating the scaffolding through which product teams learn from the people who use restaurant and payment technology. Research operations sounds like the least romantic phrase ever committed to a job title. In practice, it is the art of making listening repeatable without turning it into paperwork.
Her public career contains another room. Through Ritual Haus, James works as a designer and professional tarot reader. She grew up with tarot and ceremony, has practiced for nearly three decades, and once described her reading style as a heart-to-heart with a dear friend. The settings look unrelated: a software company with dashboards and roadmaps; a table with cards and candles. Look closer and the same discipline appears in both. Someone arrives with a problem. The first answer is rarely the whole answer. Attention changes what can be said.
I. The room before the question
A good interview has a temperature
In research, method gets most of the ceremony. Teams debate sample size, discussion guides, survey wording, and which flavor of sticky note will survive the workshop wall. James keeps pointing to something less measurable and more decisive: rapport. She has praised the idea of “creating a container and holding space for another human.” The phrase could belong to Ritual Haus. She used it while discussing research.
The distinction is useful. A researcher can follow a flawless script and still make a participant feel like an inconvenience. The participant responds by becoming efficient. Answers shrink. The strange detail that would have changed the product never reaches the transcript. A single genuine moment of connection can do what a paragraph of formal reassurance cannot: give another person permission to stop performing competence.
“The intentions and unconscious rituals behind the why will forever fascinate me.”Brie James
That fascination suits SpotOn’s territory. Restaurant work is rich in ritual because repetition keeps chaos negotiable. A bartender turns, reaches, checks, and pours in an order learned by the body. A manager closes the day through a sequence that makes the numbers feel trustworthy. A guest presses a payment prompt while reading the social weather around a tip. Software enters these rituals at its peril. A technically correct workflow can still be wrong if it asks a busy person to abandon the rhythm that gets the job done.
The researcher’s task is not merely to ask whether the button works. It is to notice the choreography around the button. James’s attention to “the why” pulls product inquiry out of the screen and into the life surrounding it. The question becomes less “Which feature do you want?” and more “What are you actually trying to accomplish?” That shift is small enough to fit on a workshop card and large enough to rescue a team from building the wrong thing beautifully.
Two rooms, one discipline
Observe the workflow. Find the friction. Understand the job behind the requested feature.
Create trust. Attend to the question beneath the question. Offer a map, not a command.
II. An education in side doors
The résumé refuses to march in a straight line
James studied at The Art Institutes from 2011 to 2015. In Portland, she later completed an 800-hour massage-therapy program at East West College of the Healing Arts, receiving her diploma in December 2019. She added coursework in user experience design, Figma, and advanced Excel. The list could be mistaken for indecision. It reads more accurately as a study of interfaces: visual, digital, interpersonal, and physical.
Before San Diego, there were 21 years in Portland. James served as a resident reader at Psychic Sister and as House Witch at Make and Mary, where she hosted tarot pop-ups and celestial events. Her work appeared in Coleman Stevenson’s A Small Collection of Specialized Spreads, Volume 2. She also co-facilitated a workshop about Dovetail, a research repository, with Rill Insights & Design during Design Week. Few careers can place “House Witch” and “research repository” in adjacent paragraphs without embarrassment. James’s can, because both roles concern how knowledge is gathered, held, and returned to people.
- Study at The Art Institutes.
- Tarot residencies, pop-ups, design work, and community events at Psychic Sister and Make and Mary.
- Completion of an 800-hour massage-therapy program at East West College of the Healing Arts.
- Formal coursework in user experience design, advanced Excel, and Figma.
- Founding UX research strategy at SpotOn, alongside Ritual Haus in San Diego.
The connection is not that tarot is secretly user research or that software design is a mystical art. That would cheapen both. Their useful overlap is a stance: people make meaning through patterns, but a pattern is not a verdict. A researcher offers evidence and interpretation. A reader, in James’s account, offers possible maps. Neither should confuse the map with the traveler.
III. The liner-note mind
She reads what other people throw away
There is a clue to James’s temperament in the way she writes about music. As a child, she read every word on every liner note, foldout lyric sheet, and record sleeve. She jokes that Trent Reznor taught her how to spell “naive.” The detail is funny because it is exact. It also reveals a habit: the main event is never the only event. The material around an experience may explain how the experience gets inside you.
She has written about the production-side high that follows a show when something enormous goes exactly right. Now she watches her oldest child flip through crates, play piano and guitar, sing in a band, and discover live music from the side of the stage or the front of the crowd. The inheritance is not simply a taste in bands. It is a way of paying attention to artifacts, process, and the people who keep a culture alive.
That liner-note mind is handy in research. Products have liner notes too: support tickets, workarounds, abandoned steps, repeated navigation, improvised language, the colleague everyone asks because the official documentation lost the plot. A tidy dashboard shows what happened. Context explains why it mattered. James appears drawn to context the way a record collector is drawn to the sleeve, because the packaging is not outside the experience. It teaches you how the maker imagined you would enter.
The tap is data. The hesitation before it is a story. Good research needs both.A principle visible across James’s work
IV. Building the listening machine
Operations is empathy with a calendar
To build research operations from the ground up is to make dozens of unglamorous decisions that determine whether insight survives contact with an organization. Who can request a study? How are participants recruited and treated? Where does prior research live? When should a team interview five people, survey five hundred, or inspect the behavior already visible in analytics? How does a finding travel from a conversation into a roadmap instead of dying in a presentation?
The work asks for governance without bureaucracy and access without chaos. It also asks for memory. When knowledge is scattered across drives and private recollections, a company repeatedly pays to learn what it already knows. A functioning research practice turns isolated interviews into organizational memory. It lets a product manager ask, “What do we know about this?” and receive something sturdier than a link graveyard.
At SpotOn, that memory serves tools for point of sale, online ordering, reservations, labor, marketing, and restaurant management. The users are not abstractions. They are operators making decisions while doors open, ingredients run low, staff call out, and guests wait. Research in that environment must respect urgency without worshiping speed. It must distinguish a genuine shortcut from a workaround forced by poor design.
James’s dual practice offers an appealing corrective to the usual corporate fantasy that more information automatically produces more understanding. Information requires a setting. People require trust. Findings require someone willing to act. Operations builds the setting, but rapport is what makes it breathe.
V. What automation cannot politely do
The future may summarize us perfectly and still miss the point
UX research is absorbing the same automation wave moving through every knowledge profession. Machines can transcribe interviews, tag themes, draft summaries, search archives, and produce plausible sentences about what users want. Much of this is useful. Some of it removes the clerical labor that kept researchers from thinking.
James’s emphasis on rapport identifies the remaining difficulty. A transcript can preserve words while losing the social conditions that produced them. The flat reply, the nervous joke, the answer shortened because the moderator seemed hurried: these are not decorative details. They affect the evidence. The human connection in an interview is not a pleasant extra attached to rigorous method. It is part of the instrument.
This is where her career’s apparent contradiction becomes its clearest argument. James builds systems, studies frameworks, and works inside a technology company. She also protects the parts of understanding that refuse to become a field in a database. Her work does not ask us to choose between rigor and intuition. It asks rigor to remember the room.
In San Diego, the two practices continue. SpotOn research by day. Ritual Haus sessions and design consulting alongside it. One helps teams decide what to build. The other helps people look at the maps they may already carry. In both, James pays attention to the ritual behind the click: the repeated motion, the unspoken intention, the human being deciding what comes next.