Normally, Girls Like You and Me highlights the diversity of career paths by sharing interviews with women from pretty different professions from week to week. There could be an entrepreneur one week, a writer the next, and a scientist after that. It keeps things interesting.
I'm very excited to announce that we'll be changing things up for the next few weeks and featuring several women who work at the same company and often work together, in different jobs and with different backgrounds.
I recently got in touch with an old friend who knows a lot of cool people, hoping he'd connect me with someone interesting. Instead he immediately responded, "I am sitting in a meeting with two perfect women to feature." That expanded to several other women he works with at Cooper, a user experience design and strategy firm based in San Francisco and New York. They use design to make companies like Google, Starbucks, Task Rabbit, Citibank, and GE, among many others, work better through consulting and through teaching and training. And design can mean anything from product design, to visual design, to user experience design.
I've had a great time learning about user experience design, a field I didn't know anything about, even though every time I use a digital product, I'm using something someone designed, and how people with different skillsets and backgrounds work together to make those user experiences meaningful and positive. Even cooler, some of the women have been designing for the web since everyday people were first getting online in the mid-90s.
[Updated] Check out the first three interviews in the series:
Today, Shannon McGarity is Director of User Experience at Cooper, a user experience design and strategy firm. Her job that lets her be both a coach and a player, managing people and teaching classes and designing client solutions. Shannon's education in interactive telecommunications in the mid-90s gave her the tools she needed to jump into creating “work that people might use and see on the web.”
Jenea Hayes fell in love with cognitive psychology in college, but her interest in technology started even earlier, when she'd take apart (and put back together) her family Mac II in grade school. She got her start as a professional communicator with a high school job at San Francisco's Exploratorium. At Cooper, her's combined those skills as an interaction designer, someone who "uses her obsession for what makes people tick to synthesize key details while keeping the whole system in mind."
Teresa Brazen grew up loving art and feeling confident in her ability to create. After working for several years as a visual artist, she decided to look for a new kind of work where she could continue to be creative. That led her to user experience design. Today, she leads professional education at Cooper and tells us, "Creativity is something that you can bring into any kind of work, and in a large part it’s really up to you to do that."
Shannon McGarity, Director of User Experience with post-it portraits- one of the many tools Cooper uses to help their clients get ready to brainstorm creatively and effectively.
