Join me for a tour of tamed complexity and happy customers.

I’m Cheryl Platz, a design leader, author, teacher, and innovator with a unique career that spans enterprise productivity, information technology, consumer products, next-generation experiences like multimodal and conversational UI, and video game design and production. My avocational work in design education and improvisational theater means I also bring significant strength in storytelling, process innovation, facilitation, and organizational influence to all of my work.

Browse the menu categories or the highlighted posts to review some selections from my past work; additional detail and projects are available for portfolio reviews. For a more complete look at all of my many sides, see my personal website.

Most Recent Case Studies

Riot + Xbox Game Pass: Design Project Leadership
Riot + Xbox Game Pass: Design Project Leadership
October 1, 2023
Project Brief In less than 6 months, create a seamless service connection between Riot Games and Xbox ...
A marketing image of the Riot Affiliate collections page, showing Star Guardians content.
Riot Games Affiliate Program
July 30, 2022
When I became Director of User Experience for the Player Platform at Riot Games, one of my team members was s...
Gates Foundation Knowledge Management
Gates Foundation Knowledge Management
October 30, 2021
How might we create a single front door through which Gates Foundation employees can search and browse information from at least 5 different data sources by product-agnostic concepts like person, partner, and topic?
Microsoft Teams Enablement
Microsoft Teams Enablement
March 4, 2021
The Teams Enablement project at the Gates Foundation was a yearlong effort to support the deployment of Teams...
Visitor Management System
Visitor Management System
March 3, 2021
The aging visitor management system (VMS) at the Foundation had hit end of life. Rather than just s...
A journey map of the onboarding experience at the Gates Foundation.
Employee Experience 2019
March 3, 2021
My first challenge at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was to identify the greatest areas of potential...

Cheryl is a pioneer at the leading edge of design.

Multimodal Design

Cheryl is the author of Design Beyond Devices: Creating Multimodal, Cross-Device Experiences, published by Rosenfeld Media in 2020. Her considerable experience in multimodal design dates all the way back to her work on a launch title for the Nintendo DS. Learn more about her experience as the author of this groundbreaking work, or browse case studies from this category using the menu.

Writing "Design Beyond Devices"
Conversational Design

Cheryl is widely regarded throughout the industry as a pioneer in conversational UI - many voice and conversational designers started their journey watching her talks and reading her Medium posts. Learn more about Cheryl's extensive design education work in the conversational UI space, or browse case studies from this category using the menu.

Conversational UI: Design Education
Cloud Services

Cheryl worked on the early waves of Windows Intune back at the beginning of the cloud revolution, and came back to Microsoft as Design Lead for Microsoft Azure, the Azure Marketplace, and the Power Platform Admin Center. Learn more about the complexity she's tamed at all stages of her enterprise design career.

Cloud service design case studies

Cheryl's Past & Present Employers