John Pagonis
Principal UX Researcher (qual & Quant) at Zanshin Labs
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolJohn Pagonis is an NNG-certified Principal UX Researcher with 14 years of multidisciplinary experience blending qualitative and quantitative methods to embed evidence-driven UX into product teams and agile delivery. He leads research for platform engineering, observability, and developer productivity—recently steering work on an open-source agentic AI observability agent—while also advising on generative and evaluative studies for commercial and public-sector products. With a PhD in recommender systems and hands-on software background (including contributions to the ruby-readability project and founding CTO roles), he bridges machine learning, back-end engineering and human-centred design. Known for coaching organisations through Scrum and UX measurement programs, he consistently turns complex sociotechnical systems into actionable product backlogs. Based in London, he pairs academic rigor with practical delivery and a systemic perspective that anticipates cross-team interactions and unintended consequences.
14 years of coding experience
21 years of employment as a software developer
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Content recommender systems, genetic algorithms, machine learning, Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Content recommender systems, genetic algorithms, machine learning at University of Essex
English, Greek
Github Skills (5)
testing10
html-parsing10
ruby10
api-design8
regular-expression7
Programming languages (3)
Github contributions (5)
cantino/ruby-readability
Apr 2012 - Aug 2014
Port of arc90's readability project to Ruby
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 commits in 2 years 4 months
Contributions summary:John primarily focused on improving the functionality of the readability library. Their commits addressed critical issues such as side effects in the `content()` method, fixed incorrect candidate removal, and corrected double counting errors when processing HTML with images inside `<noscript>` tags. The user also added tests to ensure that the library worked correctly. Furthermore, the user introduced an API feature to transform image URIs to FQDNs.
ruby
Athens/rb
Mar 2012 - Jun 2017
Athens Ruby Meetups
Contributions:9 commits, 3 pushes in 5 years 3 months
ruby
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