Cheryl Platz

Cheryl Platz has probably designed, supported, or inspired something in your life: a game you've played, your favorite voice assistant, the photo app you used on vacation, or even the cloud infrastructure powering your work computer. As a world-renowned designer, professor, game developer, keynote speaker, writer, author, and actor, her design career spans multiple industries including video gaming, consumer AI technology, cloud platforms, philanthropy, automotive technology, information technology, and theme parks. Ms. Platz is an adjunct faculty member at Carnegie Mellon University's Hollywood campus teaching the craft of video game development, and Creative Director for the Game Studio at The Pokémon Company International (her writing, teaching, and speaking is unaffiliated with TPCi and her opinions are her own). In her free time, she writes, streams for her Twitch community, and travels the world (virtually, when pandemics are in play) with her design education company Ideaplatz, LLC to share her work, frameworks, and tools with the broader design community.

Cheryl's latest book The Game Development Strategy Guide has been hailed as "an amazingly broad and contemporary take on our industry" by game design pioneer Will Wright. Her first book, Design Beyond Devices: Creating Multimodal, Cross Device Experiences, is the design manual for people who aspire to design the starship bridge of their dreams - or just want to make their responsive websites or apps better and more accessible, no matter what your job title. Between books, you can catch Cheryl's latest thoughts at her Medium blog - a frequent Editor's Choice and republished by Katie Couric Media.

Ms. Platz boasts a diverse resume including over two years as Director of UX for the Player Platform at Riot Games (home of League of Legends, VALORANT, and Arcane); three years helping the Gates Foundation scale and ultimately respond to the COVID-19 pandemic as Principal UX Designer for Productivity and Collaboration; nine years at Microsoft including time as Principal Design Lead for the Azure platform and the Power Platform Admin Center; and two years as Senior UX Designer on the Echo Look, Echo Show, and the Alexa Voice UI team. Cheryl's video game industry experience also includes time as Director of Experience Design for MARVEL Strike Force at Scopely, Inc, and time with Electronic Arts/Maxis and Griptonite Games in support of Disney Interactive Studios. She was also one of the first developers on the Disney PhotoPass system for Disney Parks & Resorts.

Fun fact: Cheryl's first published writing was actually catalog text for the final expansion of the original Sims game, The Sims Makin' Magic! She also contributed significantly to the catalog and career text for the bestselling sequel, The Sims 2.

Cheryl's keynotes and workshops on a variety of cutting edge technology topics are in demand worldwide, and she's delivered her content on 5 continents in over a dozen countries on topics including ethics in technology, the future of voice user interfaces, improv as a tool for collaborative creativity, the power of ethnographic user research in innovation, and design education as a STEM outreach tool. Highlights include speaking at Interaction Latin America 2019 (keynote), UX Scotland 2019 (keynote), Design Matters DK 2017 (keynote), TEDx Seattle Women 2019, UX Lisbon, UX London, UX Days Tokyo and Seoul 2019, and the IxDA Interaction Week conferences in 2011, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, and 2022.

When she's not writing or designing, Cheryl is probably performing. She's a professional stage and video actress with credits in Internet TV, video game voice-overs, musical theater, and improvisational theater. She is a 13-year veteran of the professional performing ensemble, improv instructor, and Artistic Associate of Digital Productions at Seattle's historic Unexpected Productions, home of Seattle TheatreSports. She's also well-known for several Internet TV shows, most notably "Shadowrun: Corporate SINs" with Twitch channel HyperRPG.