When I started my career in user experience, my purpose was to make digital products easier and more pleasurable to use. Interfaces were poorly organized, poorly labeled, and took forever to learn—and I wanted to fix them all. I applied my knowledge of best practices and emerging trends. I used design patterns and standard elements [Keep Reading…]
My Natural Next Step: Becoming a Coach
My life’s mission is to put humanity back into business. As a user experience consultant, guiding technology companies on how to make their products easier and more pleasurable to use, I get to work towards this every day. But I’ve come to realize that user experience is not enough. Designing the product is all for [Keep Reading…]
I’m Going Home
Home. The last year of my life has been an exploration of that word. I came to a point where I finally had to admit that I no longer felt at home, in my home, in my city. And in a search for a new home, I had to admit that I no longer felt [Keep Reading…]
War Stories: Stories of War
[Originally published in the series War Stories on Steve Portigal’s All This Chittah Chattah] I interviewed Holocaust survivors. Four words that still send shivers down my spine. Their stories were meant to shape my research; they ended up shaping me. It was the project of a lifetime. I was asked to conduct user research for [Keep Reading…]
Speak and Be Seen
I’m thrilled to have been invited to contribute a piece to Ladies in Tech, a new site celebrating and supporting female speakers in technology. Published today, Speak and Be Seen is a deeply personal story of how I first got involved in public speaking and the massive fears I’ve had to overcome along the way. [Keep Reading…]
The truth about the presentation process
Having the opportunity to speak to an audience who cares what you have to say and believes they can learn something new from you is a totally surreal experience. Especially when you consider that months of work pours out of you in under an hour. I’ve been speaking at conferences since the fall of 2008. [Keep Reading…]
Four Years of Independence
Exactly four years ago today — Friday, August 22, 2008 — I “left work” for the last time. It was the last day of my last full-time job, and I’ve been independently employed ever since. I choose to say “independently employed” rather than self-employed because over these four years I’ve been forced to accept that [Keep Reading…]
You Are What You Ink
I just turned down a lucrative contract because in my heart I’m ethically opposed to the company’s corporate owners. When I was first contacted by their director of engineering, I had a negative gut feeling that it just “wasn’t me,” but I put off the concern in an effort to challenge my assumptions. I wanted [Keep Reading…]
Doing business as Vicarious Partners
It is with tremendous excitement and huge dreams for the future that I am finally ready to announce that I have formally changed the name of my company to Vicarious Partners™. This new name much better reflects my mission to help organizations build deeper connections amongst colleagues and customers in an effort to deliver the [Keep Reading…]
User Experience is Not Enough
Designing the product is all for naught if you don’t first take the time to design the organization. — Whitney Hess (@whitneyhess) April 20, 2012 I’ve been a user experience designer for the entirety of my career. And in the decade I’ve spent doing this work, I have discovered that there is only one universal [Keep Reading…]
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