lateral · stories

Raffaella Roviglioni Agronomist to Design Strategist

Profile

Journey

  • Agronomist
  • Web editor
  • UX Designer
  • Design Researcher
  • Strategist

Socials

What did you do before moving into Design?

I graduated from college in Agricultural Sciences with a specialisation in plant genetics. It was very, very specific like that. Then for 10 years I worked as an agronomist. Moving into UX was not something that I decided to switch into right away. For a long while, I was in the practice of what I studied.

During those 10 years I gained a lot of experience in research programs and in one of my roles eventually I was expected to take care of communication as well, which was pretty interesting to me. Even though I studied sciences, I always had an interest in how to communicate science to non-scientists, how to simplify information or make it more understandable.

Then for a year I was an editor in chief of a printed scientific publication. It was there that I first began working on websites and I immediately started asking myself: “If the web doesn’t have the same spatial concepts as a physical page, how do we let people find and organise stuff in a virtual space?”

This is how Information Architecture became one of the first fields of design that I entered into. I was really curious about it, and wanted to study more. In science I already studied a lot of taxonomy, and IA is basically taxonomy, right? Categorising, organising stuff. So for me, it was pretty natural to get into IA.

So what drew you to design at these early stages?

I didn’t necessarily realise this early on, but Design is great because it actually merges humanities and science. This is one of the things that I most love about it. I came from my background of analysis, rigour and experiment, not so much the human side of it, which I discovered later on. One of the main things that I brought with me was a scientific mindset, and I found this incredibly useful when working in design. It gives you a specific point of view (or perspective) on things that are more analytical, I would say.

Tell me about how you eventually transitioned into Design roles.

Not long after that editor role, I was ready to change jobs and noticed an opportunity: an international biodiversity research institute was looking for a web editor. I figured I could put myself forward since I had a uniquely relevant background combining biodiversity, content and the web. Very few people would have had that combined experience at the time. The people with web skills were all webmasters, coders; and those with content skills came from journalism or the press, but had no knowledge of technology.

I was given the title of Web editor and I actually worked on the website and intranet. We didn’t have the resources or knowledge in house to fix our intranet so I proposed that we hire someone external and that’s how I first came in contact with people with the job titles of “UX Designer”.

We ended up hiring an agency (Doralab) who appointed Cristiano Siri, an amazing UX/Service Designer who became one of my biggest early mentors. I ended up working very closely with him, being his internal point of contact on this project. He was wonderful, he didn’t just go away and do the job in isolation as a service provider and brought me into the activities from day one, introducing me to the basics of user research for example, while interviewing our employees.

We lived close by so we ended up commuting together, which gave me the opportunity to ask all sorts of questions about UX and design. I just outright asked him: “What is this job that you’re doing? And how can I do it too? Because I absolutely love this approach.”

He invited me to join the community that existed back then in Rome and I started attending the local UX Book Club, which was one of the bigger UX communities at the time there.

How did you build up your knowledge at the beginning?

From the beginning, I studied a lot by myself, discovering things like human-centered design and Information Architecture. It was clear to me that I needed to fill all my knowledge gaps about this new discipline. The more I would dig into my books and resources, the more I realised how much there was that I didn’t know.

I was studying by myself at night as I was working during the day and I realised how much more I needed to learn. I understood that I didn’t know all this stuff so I started looking for courses and asking: “What can I study? Where can I go?”

At an early stage like that, some focus helps to figure out where to start, otherwise, you will be overwhelmed by the things that you don’t know. So I followed my gut and focussed on my own perception of what I liked, what I felt curious about.

Joining the Rome UX Book Club is how I really started my design training though — essentially by joining the community. I no longer had to read all the books by myself, I actually had the opportunity to discuss things with other people with much more experience than me.

How did being part of the community help you?

Oh, in so many ways! Most, if not all of my opportunities came through people from the community. If any of us landed a big project, we would call each other, the other freelancers at the book club, and ask to do it together.

There were people in that community that I really came to respect, already with a lot of experience at that early stage of the industry, really leading the way by constantly doing user research for example.

There was one particular practitioner who specialised in intranets (mostly the IA, organisational and internal comms side of it), and I ended up working a lot with him on many different intranet projects. Things just sort of started rolling after that. I ended up having to manage my time and say no to people, even pick between projects, as I no longer had time to do them all.

It sounds like mentorship is a recurring theme in your journey. Tell me more about that?

Mentorship was incredibly important for me. When I started in UX, I was desperately looking for a mentor. I went to one of the service design jams, again, because the community was organising it. My expectation was that I would definitely find somebody there who could become a mentor for me, and that I will learn a lot at the jam. Then groups were formed based on skills and experience and such, and in my group suddenly everybody was looking at me as a mentor.

That was a big lesson. We have this idea of mentors being somebody really completely distant and perfect, and in fact it’s not like that at all.

I feel like the concept of mentorship is really misrepresented compared to how those relationships actually develop. We put mentors up on a pedestal when actually in practice, like you’re describing, it happens a lot more organically.

That’s right. So what I learned from this service jam experience is that even I could be the mentor for somebody at a different stage of their journey, why not? It made me realise that yes, maybe I was a junior in some things in design, but I had those 10 years of previous experience in different fields, in client negotiation, stakeholder management, probably even project planning and product management, that counted for a lot. There are so many skills you can reuse from your previous fields. It even made a big difference that I was a 30-something, close to 40 I would say, rather than 25. Even so, after all these years, frankly I still feel embarrassed mentoring people. I have younger designers in my team that actually look up to me, and they ask me for advice… and you know, you learn a lot from being on the other side too, being a mentor. You always bring something different to the table and we can all become mentors of each other at different stages of our career.

How did you end up zoning in on Design Research as your niche?

At first I did everything of course, including interaction design, though never the visuals. I would always work in a team with visual designers anyway so it wasn’t a problem. I would do the research and interaction design, and then hand it over to visual and development.

Pretty soon I understood that research was the thing I really wanted to go in on. As it very often happens in my life, at first it was a gut feeling. Learning about the idea of flow states, I quickly realised that it happened for me when I was listening and talking to people. That’s when I could really lose track of time. Unsurprisingly, even back when I was an agronomist I grabbed any opportunity to do it.

An early example that is really meaningful to me was a research fellowship project I did, researching old fruit tree varieties in my region. A big part of that project was interviewing 80-90 year old farmers. I absolutely loved it.

I only realised later on that besides going out and driving around to these remote farms, the real point for me was getting to talk to these people and ask them things like “What do you remember about this tree? Why did you preserve this particular tree for your family? What is it called? What are the traits?” Of course, besides the biodiversity learnings, out came a lot of personal stories too. Stories about the war, about their family.

In retrospect, I now realise that without even being aware of it, I learned a lot about interviewing already despite having no training at all, simply because it was something that I really, really loved doing.

Once I fully committed to go in on user research, I found another incredible mentor, an author of several books on user research: Steve Portigal. I had the chance to attend a training course with him where I met him in person and we stayed in touch ever since.

At first, I just studied his books, then obviously I attended his workshop. After that, I invited him a couple of times to participate in our Rome UX Book Club discussions. We also went to some of the same conferences and so we had the chance to discuss things. After that, we knew each other well enough that I could ask him for advice on how to continue expanding my skills.

Where are you now, and what are you learning about these days?

I’ve been at ThoughtWorks for almost two years now. I felt the need to go beyond the borders of Italy so the real reason I chose this company, one of my biggest expectations out of the role here I’d say was that I wanted to have the opportunity to be in touch with a lot of great people in a global company.

In an international company this size, I have the opportunity to interact and actually learn from and be mentored by a lot of great professionals across the globe. I’m talking to Australia, I’m talking to Brazil. I have a mentor who is in Germany, and she’s just amazing.

I’m not just looking for user research mentors nowadays, it’s actually much more about learning about product, product thinking, which complements what I do really well. I’m getting inspired by product people who have a very different mindset and we’re learning from each other.

What advice do you have for people looking to move into Design these days?

Firstly, try finding things you can do in your current job, problems you can solve with design. That will take you in the direction you want to move. Even just find voluntary internal side projects where you can say: “I know there are no resources for doing interviews so I will do them in my free time and bring back what I learn.” That way you will be able to practice and demonstrate these new skills by solving tangible problems, and you will gain real experience.

My other piece of advice is to follow your gut in your learning. This was expressed really well by the physicist Richard Feynman. He would tell his students to follow their hunger for knowledge, and not to worry about the order in which they read stuff or study. There is no structure needed — the best approach is to follow what your mind asks you to learn, because doing so helps fill up the gaps based on your own internal brain structure. He taught people to follow their gut on what to learn about, and stop whenever they feel it’s enough.