Cheryl Platz
As a world-class interaction designer, Cheryl’s professional passions include natural user interfaces, design for scale and complexity, system design, and storytelling for product design. She is best known for her work on cutting-edge products including Amazon’s Alexa, the Echo Look, Cortana, and Microsoft’s Azure platform. Past employers include Microsoft, Amazon, Electronic Arts, Griptonite Games, MAYA Design, and Disney Parks. Ms. Platz holds a degree in Computer Science and Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University.
Ms. Platz is also founder and owner of Ideaplatz, a design education company through which she offers her well-received interaction design talks and workshops at major conferences and companies around the world. In her free time, Cheryl develops her own voice skills and conversational interfaces.
Her extensive professional experience in the performing arts also makes Ms. Platz a uniquely engaging speaker. She has performed improvisational theater, scripted theater, voice-over, livestreams, and video professionally for over a decade in Seattle - and she teaches as part of the widely renowned Unexpected Productions improv school faculty.
Opti-pessimism - Design for the best case, build for the worst
How can we design for the promise of the future AND build for the reality of today, all while in an Agile environment? Cheryl Platz turns her experience designing for products like Azure and Alexa into survival strategies for products at the cutting edge. From information architecture and accessibility to emerging tech like AI and conversational UI - we'll take a whirlwind tour to build a roadmap for "opti-pessimistic" product design.