Gladys Rosa-Mendoza

How has being curious impacted your life?

Curiosity has impacted my life in every way, shape and form. I like to be curious. I like to understand people. I like to see what their context is. I like to see how they work with our product and services. 

I think it all began when I was very young. My father was in the military. We moved around every two to three years. So every time we got to a new military base I needed to kind of understand the lay of the land and that’s what I like to do now I also like to draw and sketch quite a bit and I think that’s also part of being curious and understanding information in a slightly different way. 

What does curiosity mean to you? 

To me it’s really about understanding the why of why people do things. How they use our product,  how they use our service.  Lots of times I go out into the field—obviously not now with the covid pandemic—but when I used to go out into the field you discover that in Thailand they might use the product slightly differently than they use it in Mexico, Brazil, Norway or Sweden. 

It’s just fascinating all the different layers of usage and what we can do about that it’s also about really digging in deep to that why you know we have all kinds of information on data on usage but why do people do what they do? 

We had one case where a team went out to Nigeria and saw that they were using the the product completely differently than how it had been designed than than anyone had ever even thought of and when they took it back to the company to the research division and we’re presenting people were just blown away by how these people in Nigeria were using the product. Really trying to figure out the why and what we can do with that why in terms of the research and how we can move that product or service further.

What advice would you give designers? 

You really need to think about what is it that you want to discover. Setting up the research plan from beginning to end, really digging in deep to what you want to understand: what the product manager wants, the marketing manager, what everybody on the team and then bring it all together when you’re developing the different phases of your research. Figure out what those are and how you’re going to get people to interact with you. 

When you’re creating the discussion guide, make sure that you run it by all your various stakeholders so that everybody has some input into what it is that everybody wants to understand and they make sure that they do get all their questions asked. 

One of the things that I do since I do a lot of international work, I make sure to bring along people with me so I might ask a product manager, product designer, or marketing manager. I have sign up sheets and you’re only allowed to go to one country. I create what I call Advocates for Research: people that then when they come back they’re really willing to speak to what it was that we understood. Then I have somebody else that I can run ideas by when I’m bringing all the research together. 

One of the big things that I like to do is really create an experience in and of itself when I’m really ready to present all the findings. 

Rather than leaving with Gladys said… I really want them to leave with: Marianne Jose in Peru wasn’t that interesting what she said. And Marcelo in Brazil wasn’t that really fascinating what he said and how he thought about that. And Carlos out of Thailand: wow the way that he used our app—I’ve never seen that before!  and really bring all of those voices of those users to life so that people leave not talking about me but talking about all the users in the room and really feel empowered to do something with that research and want to move it forward. 

Why do you need advocates?

One of the quick things that I wanted to say was about creating advocates. You really need to have people to understand research and want to push it forward and by taking people out with you into the field. They begin to start understanding research and what it’s all about and when they come back to the firm they become your advocates because they saw it firsthand. And they want to move it forward. And the big thing is that by creating these advocates then they start to put things on their roadmap and really move that product or service forward because of the research. 

And that’s really what you want if you don’t create advocates for your research you’ll find that the engineers will go off and do what they want the product managers will go off and keep pushing what they want and the marketing managers will push off what they want. 

And you really always need to keep reminding people of what it was that you learned out in the field what the research said and not forget about those participants and their voices. Buena suerte.