UX Consultant
Qualitative methods
Garrett Romero
"The power of statistics and the clean lines of quantitative research appealed to me, but I fell in love with the richness and depth of qualitative research.” - Brené Brown
About me
In 2016, I took a tour of the Twitter HQ building with my wife’s childhood friend, Jesar, who worked there at the time. Her boyfriend (now husband), Daniel, also worked for Twitter and he accompanied us on the tour. During the tour, we came across an automated piano programmed to play any song when you sent a tweet to its user handle. Well, we tried tweeting a song request to the piano but it remained silent. We were disappointed and felt like we didn't send the song request to the piano correctly! When Daniel asked us what we did specifically, we gave our input and he told us, "This is great feedback!" My curiosity got the better of me and I asked him what his role was at Twitter. He said he was a UX Researcher and told me what he did on a day-to-day basis. I was instantly hooked when I found out that he studied people interacting with technology. It was my lightbulb moment and I knew I wanted to be a UX researcher.
Since then, my choice to become a UX researcher was the right one and has only strengthened over time. Conducting research and being able to go down the rabbit hole with impromptu questions to find the “why” to improve product experiences is an awesome feeling. In my experience, product teams (and myself) carry assumptions into research studies. During research, you get to see assumptions get dismantled by an “ah-ha” moment because the user had a totally different view you didn’t anticipate. This aspect of research, especially when it’s rich data that you can use to drive major impact with product design and direction, is what drives me as a researcher.
What I Do
Recommendations
Garrett excels at establishing stakeholder rapport and shows up as a leader when collaborating with cross functional partners. He brings his research expertise to help educate his partners on good research practice and works to scope projects effectively given his team’s research questions and time constraints.
Garrett is a skilled researcher who excels at delivering meaningful insights on a tight timeline. He is organized and efficient, always asking the right questions to empower product teams to move fast and ship with confidence.
In our time together, Garrett has managed stakeholders skillfully, engaging them with thoughtful questions and actively addressing their concerns. He has always delivered his quality findings in a timely manner despite the quick turn around time our team faced, which has helped our product teams make quick but informed decisions. His attention to detail, research expertise, and ability to manage deadlines make him an incredible asset to any team.
Garrett is an outstanding user researcher who specializes in information architecture. He recently conducted user research on the website I manage. I was thoroughly impressed with his professionalism and deep insights.
Garrett added immense value to our team. From planning to presenting, Garrett showed impressive initiative, collaborative skills, and professionalism. His ability to synthesize large, qualitative datasets and extract meaningful insights helped build a foundation for human-centered design at our early stage startup