UX For All: Making Design a Public Utility - April Starr -S2 Ep.1

S2 Episode 1 - UX for All – Making Design a Public Utility - April Starr

April Starr, the Director of Experience Research at Motorola Solutions, is creating an impact on public safety with her insight-driven designs. A faculty at the Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design, April has developed cancerworksheets.com to help cancer patients deal with their medical conditions. An altruist at heart, April is a problem-solver who loves to take complex challenges to come up with exciting and efficient design solutions.

Discussion Points

1. How did you become a designer, and what were the choices that you made? 01:25
2. What does the role of a day-to-day researcher look like? 04:45
3. Rapid fire questions 12:54
4. About the website that you created about the cancer care cards: how do those worksheets come to be? And what was the thought behind creating that website? 18:04
5. Do you want to give any suggestions to those starting off in the UX industry or something that you wish you knew before you started your journey as a UX professional? 23:56
6. So you also said that you are still looking for people to hire? 26:07

Show Notes

1. I didn't really realize that I loved problem-solving until I got into design. 02:05
2. In the beginning, I just loved really hard problems. And then I think that's sort of evolved over time to systemic problems that really impact society in some way. 02:49
3. We work on great problems trying to utilize AI to help support our users, we always believe in keeping humans in the loop. 07:06
4. We always want to assist people so that we can help them make the best decisions in those really critical moments in these really tough incidents that they work in. And help them with mental health as well. 07:22
5. I had time to reflect on our experience, um, I was just really angry and frustrated with the healthcare system, for many reasons. As I reflected on our experience, you know, I looked back and I was like, what a messed up experience. It occurred to me that we didn't get the right information at the beginning of the experience. 19:19
6. I thought, Hey, you don't know how you're gonna get there. But you know what, you want to go, you want to get rid of cancer. And you know, generally kind of the steps that you're going to need to get there, you're, there's a treatment plan, there's going to be some milestones of diagnostic tests. 20:35
7. Find a place where the people are supportive, and they're people that are going to inspire you, you know, find a place where the content itself is going to be something that is exciting for you. 25:03
8. We have a number of people, and a number of positions open on both the research team and the UX design team. On the UX design side, we're looking for UX designers and UI visual design. And so, you know, we have positions open globally. 26:10

Contact

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aprilstarr/
• Portfolio: https://about.me/aprilstarr
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aprilstarr/

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