Mar 8, 2018 | Rob Andrews
Today is International Women's Day, and here at ProjectUX we'd like to honor the achievements of women in the fields we are passionate about, that of User Experience, Design and Entrepreneurship. We have had the honor of working with dozens of talented women during the course of the production of our web series, and today is a perfect day to showcase a few highlights and delve into our history a little bit.
First though, let us set the context for today in case you don't know. International Women's Day is a worldwide celebration of the impact and achievement of women across the social, political, economic and cultural spectrums. The history of international Women's Day dates back 110 years ago, and we encourage our readers to learn more by visiting the IWD website.
With all that has transpired over the past year it is reasonable to acknowledge that this International Women's Day may carry the most weight of any in my lifetime. On this forum we are going to focus in our niche, but an acknowledgement must be given to the #MeToo movement that is sweeping across the globe. We support women's rights and contributions across all facets of society, and here at ProjectUX we take immense joy in featuring the talents and contributions of women designers and entrepreneurs.
San Francisco UXpert panel Pabini Gabriel-Petit, Kate Rutter & Indi Young (L to R)
ProjectUX is a web show dedicated to bringing the practice of UX to startups. We have a panel of User Experience experts (we call them UXperts) perform a heuristic evaluation of a startup's product and offer insights on how to fix their biggest UX problems. Throughout the course of this journey (in true startup fashion it has been a twisty one) a startup worth twisty one) we have had the privilege of working with over 45 UXperts and 40 startups across the country. Today we'd like to feature a couple of interviews we shot at Big Design conference last year with some incredible women in the field of UX.
In this first video we talk design leadership and community building with Mariah Hay (@mariahhay), VP of Product at Pluralsight. UX has made great strides over the past few decades thanks to movers and shakers bent on pioneering user-centered design in large organizations. A big part of that is building a community around UX. Mariah shares her experiences in:
- Implementing user-centered design at scale in large companies (philosophy, practices, organizational design)
- Being a good steward of culture and design
- Bridging communication between product and other parts of the business (marketing, sales, partnerships, legal, etc)
- Creating communities for underrepresented genders and minorities in tech
- What new designers need to know: industry context. Understand what the companies around you are doing, how they're structured, and how your skills and interests fit in
In this next video we interviewed Sophi Marass, User Experience Designer at Sabre Corporation. She designs for developers in the world of Application Programming Interfaces, or APIs. Sophi talks shop on:
- Re-crafting content to meet developer needs: it's about functionality
- Conducting user research by observing API developers at hackathons
- Dancing to designing: her UX origin story
Most of our episodes exist in our legacy format (Expose UX for those that remember) before we rebranded, but we are in process of rereleasing them from the vault. Several of our episodes featuring female founders, so this Sunday we will be releasing one from the vault with a female entrepreneur at the helm, and we will be releasing many more in the months to come!
For now though you can watch our two female UXperts Bibiana Nunes and Debra Gelman in our latest episode that came out this week. Both these woman hold high level UX jobs at major companies (Adidas and AT&T, you might have heard of them), and they drop some serious knowledge on startup Noise Aware.
For instance, Bibiana references previous work she did at Adidas when talking about the information arcitcure of their mobile app, calling them out to make sure they "have the right information at the appropriate moment." Debra Gelamn dives into their design as it relates to the personas Noise Aware has created for their users to "they understand the implications of what they're seeing [in the app] so that value can be communicated."
In closing I must give thanks to the many women who have been a part of this journey. I have learned so much from the, throughouth the course of this show, including of course my co-producer Teresa Nguyen. I look forward to the journey ahead as I am sure I will be able to gain even more knowledge and wisdeom from the female perspective of designers and entrepreneurs. This article is a small token of my appreciation for those who I have worked with and those who I will in the future. On this International Women's Day I salute you!