research – Cheryl Platz

Gates Foundation Knowledge Management

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

Brief -- Customers -- Phase 1: Discovery -- Phase 2: Ideation -- Phase 3: Design -- Phase 4: Evaluation + Iteration Project Brief Despite its worldwide reputation as a philanthropic leader in several fields, the Gates Foundation still loses valuable information due to lack of governance, employee turnover, and tool limitations. Discovery efforts from my past work in productivity and collaboration, along with discovery from my colleagues in investment management, revealed the siloed state for knowledge management, with employees visiting a variety of different tools, often without knowing whether the information existed at all. Our cross-functional partnership between the IT…

Microsoft Teams Enablement

Cross-Channel Experiences, Enterprise Experiences, Leadership, Research, Service Design

The Teams Enablement project at the Gates Foundation was a yearlong effort to support the deployment of Teams to the foundation in a manner that minimized disruption and maximized employee success, launched over a year early in response to the findings from my earlier Employee Experience discovery project. I (and eventually, a Senior vendor designer on my team) embedded on the Teams Enablement project for 9 months to ensure that our delivery of Teams exceeded expectations without adding to employee stress. Our work resulted in a seamlessly successful rollout adopting new techniques that yielded high employee satisfaction and left our entire…

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,…

Employee Experience 2019

Enterprise Experiences, Research, Service Design

My first challenge at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was to identify the greatest areas of potential impact for the Information Technology department to invest in with regard to employee productivity and collaboration in 2019, using human centered design and research techniques over a 6 month period. By the end of this period, the work encompassed: 29 1:1 interviews Multiple observation sessions: job shadows, meeting observation sessions, IT Office Hours, etc.Direct experiences as a new employeeParticipatory journey mapping sessions with stakeholdersDiary studies and surveys Project Team I was the sole design and research resource on this project; I conducted…

Echo Look (Product and VUI Design)

Consumer Products, Conversational UI, Cross-Channel Experiences, 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.…

SCCM 2012: Information Architecture

Enterprise Experiences, Information Architecture, UX and Product Design

My time on System Center Configuration Manager 2012 spanned four years of design and hundreds of UI surfaces. Perhaps our most important task was redefining the information architecture of the product - and to do so, we had to drive years of detailed user research and iterative design experimentation. Problem Statement SCCM 2007 was largely produced without UX consultation until the endgame. As a result, the product’s IA was a single, massive tree that represented every object type - and every individual object - in one long branched list. For large companies, expanding the wrong node could grind the whole…