By Barbara Niveyro
Grace Zec is a strategically driven researcher and a volunteer at U.S. Digital Response (USDR) with over 15 years of international experience in industries spanning life sciences, non-profit, financial services, and healthcare. Her experiences living abroad help her become aware of cultural differences at a young age, which is a key skill for her work. Nowadays, she helps forward-thinking leaders find new opportunities and improve products and services through strategic planning and insights-driven research.
We had the following conversation to learn about her role as a USDR volunteer and understand the impact that volunteers have on creating new technologies for public service.
Barbara Niveyro, USDR: Hi Grace! How was the beginning of your career?
Grace Zec: Since the beginning of my career, I’ve worked in market and design research. Growing up and living abroad gave me an expanded awareness of cultural differences at a young age, so while I didn’t necessarily know about research as a career path, it really made sense for me based on my natural disposition and interests. I’ve also become passionate about including the perspectives of a diverse range of people for any research study.
BN: How would you define yourself as a researcher and creative?
GZ: I lead with empathy and curiosity. This helps me get up to speed quickly to understand and identify problems and helps me to quickly comprehend a person’s experience and how a product or service could potentially make it better.
BN: For those that are not familiar with the term, what is the role of a design researcher? What are your tasks and tools?
GZ: The role of a design researcher is to understand the human experience for a particular product, end-to-end service, or within a broader system — and then use the insights from that research to inspire design teams, build toward better prototypes, and help others to elevate their understanding of their end users.
BN: What’s a key learning from your profession?
GZ: One thing I’ve learned is that the ability to identify the insight is just as important as the ability to tell a story — ultimately I’m not the person building the product or the system experience. So it’s really critical that I’m making the research insights (and the design recommendations that stem from them) easy to understand and implement.
“One thing I’ve learned is that the ability to identify the insight is just as important as the ability to tell a story”.
BN: How did you connect with USDR? What made you want to volunteer?
GZ: I’ve always been passionate about making government services work better for the people they’re supposed to serve. The pandemic made it painfully obvious that there were big gaps in government service, and I was looking for an opportunity to use my skills in research to help uncover those gaps so we can help government agencies make better and more equitable digital technology. If there was anything positive in the pandemic, one of them was that with my work suddenly becoming 100% remote, I had extra time on my hands that I wanted to put towards something that felt constructive and needed.
“The pandemic made it painfully obvious that there were big gaps in government service, and I was looking for an opportunity to use my skills in research to help uncover those gaps”
BN: What is your role as a volunteer for USDR?
GZ: My role as a volunteer is first to understand the problem that our partners want USDR’s help with and then to conduct the research and report on it in a comprehensible way. We work in a fully distributed team, so all of our communications with the partner are done over email and Zoom calls.
BN: You supported a broadband equity project conducting a pricing study for a state partner with rural populations. Did the team face any challenges? How was your experience collaborating with the partner & their residents to deliver the study?
GZ: For the Broadband Pricing Study, our partner and their relevant stakeholders were all in Alaska, which meant a lot of late-night phone calls. I think one of the challenges is that you’ll never fully understand the full breadth and depth of a problem until you start asking questions and begin to broaden your own understanding — and if you have a curious mindset, it’s very easy to get carried away, which isn’t always necessary for the original problem we’re seeking to address.
“Volunteering for me is something that helps me feel connected to the world around me.”
BN: Why is volunteering important for you and how was your experience doing so through USDR?
GZ: Volunteering for me is something that helps me feel connected to the world around me. I like to think that I’m being useful with the work that I’m putting out, which can be used to both inform better design as well as new research studies. I’m so grateful that USDR as an organization exists because it’s helped to create an entire ecosystem of volunteers like me so that we can work as one big team to begin to address these big problems.
Interested in using your skills to help people in your community?
From design researchers to software engineers, there’s a spot for your skills at USDR. Learn more about USDR or sign up to volunteer your time at www.usdigitalresponse.org/volunteers.
Have more questions? Watch a recording of a past Volunteer Info Session or register to attend an upcoming session.
