About

Admiring the outside of The Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca

I’m a UX researcher who loves making complex digital experiences more usable across cultures. Check out some UX research projects I’ve worked on in my portfolio and get in touch—you can reach me at marygrace@berkeley.edu or on LinkedIn.

Why

“Aaayy, Madam Grace, you like to ask a lot of questions!” my colleague teased as we sat in the sand at Nyondo Combined School taking in the milky way across the Namibian night sky after a long day. I joined the Peace Corps skeptical of the global development industry and finished my 27 months with more questions than answers. But I saw glimpses of the transformative potential of technology in Nyondo. And so, people’s interaction with technology became the topic of my career and questions became my method.

Who

 

The Cross-cultural Researcher

Cross-cultural learning lights my flame. In my undergraduate degree in Culture & Politics, I discovered that flame in long nights in the library and a semester at the University of Ghana. In the Peace Corps, I practiced questioning my assumptions and reactions daily as I attempted to integrate into my community. Over the course of my career, my fuel has been connecting with people from all around the world—meeting and strategizing with librarians from Sokoto, Nigeria to Sadmeli in the Republic of Georgia, earning the trust of digital security activists worldwide as a coordinator for the Internet Freedom Festival in Spain, partnering with a Yemeni woman to achieve equal gender representation in our survey data collection for UNDP, and, most recently, advocating for users’ experiences from Kenya, Colombia, and Fiji to Japan and Jordan.

 

The Cross-functional Collaborator

When I moved into the technology sector, I realized that the cross-cultural exchange that’s lit me up since I was a kid translated to working with stakeholders with different skills and styles of work. In overseeing global mobile user support, I learned to problem solve with engineers. In launching a mobile app in 30+ new countries, I learned to coordinate with Product Managers. In running usability tests, I learned to gauge what level of specificity an individual designer needs. In interviewing Machine Learning Practitioners, I learned the context I needed to understand their work. I love to learn to speak the language and build consensus across disciplines.

 

The Organizer

I excel in organization, and I enjoy it. Every team needs someone at least a little bit passionate about a beautiful spreadsheet or effective naming conventions (and also humble enough to realize it’s on them when others do not use their beautiful spreadsheet or naming conventions), and I am that person. My program management and operations background shines through in my research project management and ops approach and seeps into my analysis, synthesis, and communication of findings. For example, as a new researcher, I developed a research project tracker that my manager adopted for keeping all of the ducks in a row on research projects.

How

I’ve adopted two mantras that shape my work as a UX Researcher—

  1. What decision will this research help make? I am endlessly curious but satisfying curiosity doesn’t always generate business value. The business and I are both most satisfied when research has an impact on products. From scoping to presenting and advocating for findings, this question is my constant reminder to identify and align with opportunity for impact.

  2. There’s no place I’d rather be. Before I start a research session, I take a deep breath and repeat this to myself. As much as I love research, there have been some 6:30am and 10:30pm sessions tagged onto long days before which this was a particularly poignant reminder. Regardless of what is going on outside of a participant or stakeholder session, when they share time with me, there’s no place I’d rather be. In reflecting upon that, I aim to radiate how important their perspective is and so create space for sharing their authentic experience and ideas.

P.S. When I’m not doing research, you’ll find me running along the San Francisco Bay and between redwoods, probing the world’s challenges with friends, and listening to audiobooks and podcasts (talk The Ezra Klein Show or On Being to me!) while washing my dishes.