My child, Brisket ❤️
Doing what I love, observational research
User testing our mobile experience of the SXSW Cognitive Brews experience.
hi! 🙋🏻♀️
I'm Becca and I'm from just outside of Boston, MA. I graduated from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis and am currently living in Austin, TX. I have a passion for design research and making complicated experiences easier to use, especially in public safety. In addition to research, I spend my free time trying out new breweries 🍻 (I'm a hazy IPA kinda gal), co-running my embroidery business Betches Who Stetch 🧵, and hanging out with my dog, Brisket 🐶.
I’m currently a Lead UX Researcher at Motorola Solutions.
Check out my resume here or catch me at beccalzapata@gmail.com
MOTOROLA SOLUTIONS | 2022–PRESENT
I’m currently the UX Research Lead, Command Room & Community at MSI. I lead all research activities for products within 911 call centers (call handling, CAD, etc.) and any community-facing product. My favorite part of my job is doing sit-alongs with 911 call takers and dispatchers. Their ability to multitask and get their jobs done quickly is astonishing.
RapidDeploy | 2021
I took a leap to join RapidDeploy at the beginning of 2021 and I am so glad I did. RapidDeploy provides a Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD), mapping, and analytics platform for 9-1-1 call centers. I was the first Design Researcher to join the company, so I spent a lot of time educating co-workers what the value of Design Research is. I set up processes with other teams to best work together, conducted generative and evaluative research on our CAD, mapping, and analytics products, and visited various customer sites for observational research (my favorite part). I’m so grateful for RD taking a risk and hiring me, as I learned a ton and I hope they learned a ton from me.
A brainstorming session with the design team
IBM | 2015-2020
I started my career at IBM as a UX designer. I was lucky enough to join the Mobile Innovation Lab where I designed mobile apps for sales teams, VR experiences, and innovative in-person shopping experiences.
I then moved to the Watson team (AI/ML) where I conducted research on IBM’s chatbot offering, Watson Assistant, and Watson Discovery, ML for extracting and analyzing text from documents. I am so grateful for my time at IBM as it’s where I started my Design Research career and planted roots in Austin.
What it’s like to work with me
“Working with Becca is one of the best experiences in my career. Her dedication to her work and ensuring that we are building the right thing for our users is fantastic and she consistently brings useful insights to the design team. She does an amazing job of bringing designs, product managers, and others along in her process and her user interviews, and enables them to ask questions, run interviews, and more when needed. Becca also has a strong eye to the culture of a team and a company and always strives to make the workplace an environment that is healthy and welcoming to everyone involved. I would work with Becca for the rest of my career if it were possible. ”
“I was lucky enough to hire, manage, and be eventually be a co-worker of Becca over 3 years at IBM. I enjoyed working with her and it was great to see her career grow over as she took on more responsibility and learned how to be the great user researcher that she is today. During this time I found Becca to be a dedicated hard worker with a great attitude and a quick learner that is willing to selflessly take on tasks outside of her own role to just get the work done or improve the team. I look forward to seeing what else Becca will accomplish in her career!”
“I just wanted to say congratulations on Employee of the Month! It has been such a pleasure working with you more this year. I’m happy that Design and Customer Success have been able to partner on customer feedback. I think what you and the rest of the Design team are doing is invaluable, and have gotten many positive comments on it from my customers in California. It’s really important to me that they know we are taking their feedback seriously, and it’s not just disappearing into a black hole. I’m grateful for all your hard work and wanted to say thank you.”
“Turning the page on this year, I want to make sure I say thanks, Becca: You always bring curiosity, enthusiasm, patience, and diligence to the work you do, with an eye for details and good questions ... and I couldn’t be more grateful for that. Because of people like you, I feel very lucky to have joined IBM this year. ”
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Please do not reproduce without the expressed written consent of Becca Zapata.