My UX Journey, Vol 05: Meet Toni Rosati
In this series, leads from Hexagon’s chapters around the world share key events from their careers, and things they’ve learned along the way. UX Researcher Toni Rosati, Denver’s chapter lead, believes firmly in coaching authenticity and open communication.
Interview by Laura Palotie
Toni Rosati works as Lead UX Researcher at Gloo, a company creating cloud-based software for people development. Her fondest memory of Hexagon to date has been the September, 2017 meeting of the organization’s senior co-mentoring cohort. “There were 40+ amazing UX women under one roof,” she recalls.
Q: How did you get started in the User Experience space?
Even though I didn’t know it at the time, my college thesis — studying the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s TsunamiReady program — was a UX research project. The organization had put up a number of traffic and road signs that told people where to go, and when they’d be safe, if a tsunami occurred. My project investigated whether education such as this was having its intended impact in various California neighborhoods, and why it worked in some places better than in others.
I officially started down the UX path a couple years later, when my supervisor was about to launch a dataset search app and didn’t want it to bomb. She asked me to do my “people-magic” to make sure we were building the right thing. I fell in love with the process, and the rest is history.
Q: How would you describe the UX community in your area?
It’s designer-focused. Denver and Boulder comprise a young tech hub, and we are influenced by what happens in San Francisco, Seattle and New York. When my grant with the National Snow and Ice Data Center (and the National Center for Atmospheric Research) came to an end in 2015, I moved from the science sector to the public sector. At this time there were only a handful of UX research roles available, so I was overjoyed to snag one, as a Research Analyst at food delivery service Door to Door Organics.
More roles are finally starting to become available in 2018, as more companies are seeing the the value of UX research.
Q: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve gotten about working in UX?
Communication is key — it’s something lots of people have told me. And although it comes up a lot, it’s hard to master!
Q: What’s a typical day like for you?
I do research on a business development team at Gloo, working as a team lead, and often it’s either boom or bust. Some months I’m traveling 100% of the time, conducting interviews and having stakeholder meetings. Other times, we are waiting for pivot approval decisions from the powers that be.
Our team is in two different time zones, working on two different products and audiences, so our mornings start with a Zoom call standup. By 10 am, we’ll often have our first research participant. My teammate and I conduct interviews together. We use various methods, from Journey mapping and Jobs To Be Done to Contextual inquiry and Usability labs.
These past two weeks in particular have been fun! We have a big deadline coming up, and took the risk to divert from a prototype we had spent several weeks on. In the mad dash to deliver, I got to teach our team the RITE method, get a secondary designer/developer up to speed, and get my hands dirty with more high fidelity sketching and copywriting than I normally do. It’s definitely been a booming sprint.
In my personal life, I’m a foster home for cats, kittens and sometimes dogs. Right now I have four tiny kittens that are hilarious bundles of joy. I run two meetups in town — Hexagon Denver and Analyze Boulder. On the weekends, I’ve been working on earning my credentials as an International Coaching Federation leadership and career coach. My current clients, most of whom are UXers or data analysts, are helping me earn my practice hours. I focus on women across tech — especially those dealing with confidence, uncertainty or imposter syndrome. I’d love to meet new people too, so get in touch. Each session costs only $10, and it’s a donation to RezdawgRescue.org.
Q: What’s something you wish you had been told when you started your career?
Even though I knew (and had seen) that women are often treated differently, I didn’t think it could affect my employment stability. I wish I knew more corporate rules and how to navigate them before being rejected for being too forward. For example, while working for a startup whose client was a big, international accounting firm, the culture I encountered at the client meeting was very traditional. I certainly wasn’t acting as if I was at our startup office, but expected them to understand who we were, and spoke in an easygoing way.
They said, with some laughter, that my prototype test wasn’t “real-world narrative” enough (I thought they were just having a good time) and I was surprised by some of their Excel functionality questions. A week or so later, they began lobbying to get me removed from the company I worked for, which was too small to have my back in the face of this big client. I was heartbroken because I loved my team and what we were trying to solve — but I now know that you don’t drop in a casual curse word at a traditional company’s board room table, and that some cultures are more about appearances than others.
Q: What was the most valuable or enlightening mistake you ever made?
I think it was trying to please people so that I could feel more safe or secure. I spent too much time focusing on the minutiae of relationships, instead of feeling confident in my abilities and communicating with others empathetically.
Q: What gives you professional inspiration?
My mission is to coach people to live authentically, and to be more than they thought they could be. Sometimes this means coaching myself too.
I’ve always been an advocate for the underdog, and the user is the underdog in too many cases. I’m always motivated to protect those who aren’t being considered or treated fairly.
Special thanks to Laura Palotie, Fiona Yeung, and Toni Rosati.
