UX and Product Design – Cheryl Platz

Visitor Management System

Enterprise Experiences, Research, Touch & Tablet UI, UX and Product Design

The aging visitor management system (VMS) at the Foundation had hit end of life. Rather than just simply starting from scratch, the product team wanted to learn from the current system’s strengths and weaknesses to ensure the replacement system has parity and perhaps exceeds prior standards. However, the need to complete a requirements document for the vendor was urgent due to continuing issues with the current system. Project Team I was the sole user experience design resource on this project, and I was only allocated on a temporary basis. I engaged deeply during the discovery phase (3-4 weeks), intermittently during business requirements,…

Dynamics 365 settings IA: Power platform admin center

Cloud Services, Enterprise Experiences, Information Architecture, Leadership, UX and Product Design

As part of my role as the Design Lead for the launch of Microsoft's ambitious Power platform admin center, I took on several complex individual contributor projects. The largest of these projects was the migration of Dynamics app settings from the Dynamics 365 app on a legacy web client to the new Power platform admin center site, using a new information architecture and a new UI stack. Further complicating the assignment was the timeline presented for the work. Originally, the team had planned on migrating the old settings pages directly to the Dynamics UI stack, the Unified Client. This original…

Design leadership: Power platform admin center

Cloud Services, Enterprise Experiences, Leadership, Management, UX and Product Design

On November 1, 2017, I took on a new role at Microsoft as the Design Lead for a new and ambitious cross-product initiative, which 10 months later was released as the Power platform admin center. Read more about the site in Microsoft's words at the official press release. Problem Statement Unify four different admin centers - Dynamics 365 instance administration, Dynamics 365 app administration, admin.powerapps.com, and admin.flow.com - into a single experience on a new UI framework. 10 months later, the site moved out of private preview and into public release. The Team MY ROLE: Principal Designer and Design Lead…

Echo Look (Product and VUI Design)

Consumer Products, Conversational UI, Information Architecture, Leadership, Multimodal Interfaces, Prototyping + Development, Research, Touch & Tablet UI, UX and Product Design, Voice Interfaces

I was hired to help a fledgling product team transform their initial concept lab pitch into a production-worthy multimodal design for an entirely new hardware product category at Amazon. Problem statement How might we create a completely new experience that helps customers manage their wardrobes, combining natural user interfaces with traditional user interfaces and Amazon shopping technology? At the time I was hired, a concept lab team had identified a product opportunity combining fashion with natural user interfaces, and had received funding for a small pod of full time employees to work on the concept as a secretive, "tented" project team.…

Azure Marketplace Gallery Filter

E-commerce, Enterprise Experiences, Information Architecture, Leadership, UX and Product Design

When we launched the new Azure Marketplace in January of 2017, we initially adopted the category control from AppSource.com, both for consistency and expediency on our tight timeline. After launch, however, customer feedback via verbatims and quantitative data began to suggest that our customers had a problem with wayfinding. The issue largely stemmed from the difference in information architecture between the sites. AppSource categories correspond to products and were more rigidly hierarchical, while Azure Marketplace categories had overlap and a less rigid hierarchy. I proposed to the team that we begin an exploration of alternate filtering models, and the team…

Azure Partner UX Guidelines

Cloud Services, Enterprise Experiences, Information Architecture, Leadership, UX and Product Design

When I returned to Microsoft in August 2016, I joined as the Design Lead for the Azure Framework. Our team of 4 full-time designers, 2 researchers, and a content writer - along with our studio head, who worked closely with us - were responsible for improving the user experience of the entire Azure platform in two primary ways. Our first role was to work directly with developers on key features or controls. Our second role was a broader, less direct influence over the rest of the 70+ partner teams we could not work with directly. Upon joining, I immediately saw…

Alexa Skill: My Countdown

Cloud Services, Consumer Products, Prototyping + Development, UX and Product Design, Voice Interfaces

My second published Alexa skill was born from a request from a dear friend. We were planning a joint family trip to Disney World, and my goddaughter wanted to know how long until the big day. Wouldn't it be nice to have a skill to make it easier for her mom to answer that question? Have an Alexa device? Enable the My Countdown skill for free today! The design process for this skill was somewhat unique. I initially designed the skill as the core example around which I built the sample deliverables for my now world-renowned voice design workshop, Giving…

Marketplace Landing Pages

E-commerce, Enterprise Experiences, UX and Product Design

In early 2017, analysis of the AppSource.com telemetry revealed a potentially significant problem with the landing experience on AppSource.com, which was launched prior to my time partnering with the team. In partnership with our marketing and merchandising product managers, I worked to help both the AppSource and Azure Marketplace teams develop a roadmap for improving the landing experience. Problem Statement Since both AppSource.com and Azure Marketplace are driven by the same underlying marketplace framework, problems from both sites are indicated below. Customer satisfaction as measured from the home page on AppSource.com was extremely low Azure Marketplace lacked a home page,…

Alexa Notifications and Interruption Model

Chatbots, Cloud Services, Consumer Products, Conversational UI, Information Architecture, Leadership, Multimodal Interfaces, Service Design, Touch & Tablet UI, UX and Product Design, Voice Interfaces

Upon joining the central Alexa Voice Design team in late 2015, my first order of business was to tackle a complicated systems design problem: how could we adapt a primarily single-threaded, voice-forward, reactive experience to allow proactive notifications? There was a great deal of caution surrounding the effort, as our product has been invited into homes, and we did not want to violate that trust. Further complicating matters was the as-then-unannounced Echo Show, which completely changed the interaction paradigm. While Echo had not supported large-scale multitasking, the Echo Show introduced the concept of navigation and a sort of back stack.…

Azure Marketplace 2.0

Cloud Services, E-commerce, Enterprise Experiences, UX and Product Design

In the fall of 2016, my responsibilities as the Azure Framework Design Lead expanded to include direct responsibility for our pro developer marketplaces. When we began, the only active marketplace in our purview was AppSource.com, but there was an immediate need to take the lessons learned on AppSource and apply them to a completely new approach to the existing Azure Marketplace. Role and Team For the 2.0 version of the Azure Marketplace, I was the sole designer, working with 3-4 program manager partners and several UI developers on a daily basis. In addition, I partnered with our team's content designer…