Hello there! You've reached the portfolio-ish site of Ben Leduc-Mills. I like making, in many forms -- through music, woodworking, lasers, electronics, code, Lego, 3d printing, e-textiles, you name it. This website captures some of my career from interaction design, rapid prototyping & digital fabrication, open source hardware, software engineering, user research, and of course, AI.
Yes, I use AI everyday. For code, for design, and for research. No, I didn't use it for this website.
About
I’m currently a Staff User Experience Researcher at GitLab, on the Experience Research team. I think what sets my background apart is that I’ve spent my career sitting right at the intersection of research, design, and code, which means I don’t just study problems, I often build the designs, tools or prototypes needed to solve them myself. I’ve written and shipped production code alongside my research and design work more than once, which gives me a level of technical fluency most don’t have, and lets me have real, credible conversations with engineers about tradeoffs and feasibility.
I’ve also spent a lot of my career building research practice itself, not just running individual studies. I’ve been the person a team turns to when research is scattered, informal, or inconsistent, and I’ve built the processes, standards, and tooling that turn that chaos into something repeatable and trusted. That’s a different skill than being a great interviewer or a great synthesizer, though I’d like to think I’m decent at both of those too.
My experience spans developer tools, enterprise B2B software, consumer hardware, and academic HCI research, which means I’ve learned to translate research for very different audiences. Engineers, executives, small hardware startups, and PhD committees all need the story told differently. I like to use mixed methods research, qualitative and quantitative both, because I’ve found that backing up a good story with real data produces the greatest impact and influence.
Before GitLab, I was a senior researcher at Autodesk’s Platform Services and Components group working developer experience, a senior experience engineer on Autodesk EAGLE at Pier 9 in SF, a software engineer and prototyper on Project Soli at the Google Advanced Technologies and Projects group (ATAP), and a “R&D Swiss Army Knife” at SparkFun Electronics (yes, that was my real job title).
I have a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Colorado, Boulder, where I built toys to get kids into 3D design. Before that I lived in New York, working at Eyebeam and earning a Master’s at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (imagine art + electrical engineering + coding + design). I’ve taught and published widely on bringing emerging tech into classrooms, hackerspaces, and Maker Faires.