I haven’t spoken about it formally here, but I’m honored to be part of one of the featured mentorship pairings in the Huffington Post’s women in STEM mentoring initiative. As part of that relationship, we were asked to provide an intro to user experience design for folks following the program.

“We are the people working feverishly behind the scenes to make sure you don’t want to throw your computer across the room. When we do our work right, software seems easy, effortless, even magical. A sign of our success is your happiness. Very few people know that user experience designers even exist, much less what the career entails. But everyone can empathize with the experience of having a computer, phone or other device behaving in a way that was never expected. Yet sadly many people have convinced themselves that it’s their fault when software problems occur.”

The rest of my article, “What is UX Design?”, can be found on the Huffington Post website here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cheryl-platz/what-is-ux-design_b_2831908.html

Thanks again to Brittany and the folks at HuffPo for making this program happen! My mentee Janet and I are discussing a project we can collaborate on for the upcoming months and I’ll be sure to post back here as more of our pairing is chronicled.