research – Cheryl Platz

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

Gates Foundation Knowledge Management

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…

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

Microsoft Teams Enablement

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,…

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

Visitor Management System

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…

Enterprise Experiences, Research, Service Design

Employee Experience 2019

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…

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

Echo Look (Product and VUI Design)

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…

Enterprise Experiences, Information Architecture, UX and Product Design

SCCM 2012: Information Architecture

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…