Miguel Palau

Miguel Palau is a Venezuelan anthropologist and Principal UX Research Strategist with 10 years of experience leading cross-cultural behavioral research for global digital B2B and B2C products and complex platforms across LATAM, APAC, MENA, and Europe. ORCID: 0009-0004-0608-5073.

Based on users' observations worldwide during product development, he has contributed to explaining behavioral data, applying mixed research methods, and incorporating computer-assisted tools like AI/ML to study human-product behavior interaction. The results, along with anthropological findings and guidelines, support business objectives and their alignment to adjust strategic and tactical product adoption and retention processes. He is a participant in board member sessions and influences the roadmap through a combination of UX research, product direction support, business design planning, and strategic and tactical analysis of product performance.

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Professional Experience

His corporate career progression from ethnographer to manager and Principal spans FMCG, technology, and financial services, at Colgate-Palmolive, PepsiCo, Yara International, and Mashreq Bank, as well as consulting work for clients including Microsoft, Intel, Boeing, Nestlé, Pfizer, Mazda, and Coca-Cola across LATAM, APAC, MENA, and Europe. He has operated within leading regional research and design firms, including Pacific Ethnography USA, Fjord (Insitum) Mexico, GfK Venezuela, Ipsos, and Gamma UX, Spain.

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Academic Background & Education

He completed doctoral coursework in Psychological Anthropology at the Universidad Central de Venezuela under Dr. Samuel Hurtado Salazar, creator of the Matrisocialidad theory, with a complementary Master's Degree focus in Computer Sciences and Human-Computer Interaction under Dr. Vanessa Leguizamo, highly recognized researcher specializing in software engineering at UCV's School of Computing.

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Proprietary Frameworks

His applied frameworks include Rapid Ethnography for new digital product development, AI-driven persona modeling through computational behavioral analysis, and the MELS (Multi-Layer Experience Logic for Strategic UX) decision-making framework.

Miguel Palau is a contributor Anthropology of Design as a formal subdiscipline (2015) and the author of the Dissonant Imagination framework and psychoanthropological concept. This psycho-cultural model studies the symbolic genesis of design from the designer's unconscious desire. Applications from his framework allow companies to predict acceptance, rejection, and retention at foundational research stages, reducing the development risk through alignment between design (as concept) and large-scale cultural meaning across users — in which, according to the framework, Human Centered Design requires also an emotional, symbolic, and cultural frame that creates coherence between design and users.

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Publications & Peer Review

His 2016 paper on Rapid Ethnography, co-authored with Yilber Sisco, is cited in Jangwa Pana (DOI: 10.21676/16574923.3359, Rodríguez-Ortiz & Montoya-Trujillo, 2020) as a methodological foundation for independent peer-reviewed research. He also served as a peer reviewer for EPIC (Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference) in 2018 and 2019.