Heather started her career as a technical writer, editor and then documentation manager for a small multimedia software company. Soon she found her interests broadening beyond manuals and help files to how software user interfaces could be designed so people could accomplish tasks efficiently and enjoyably.
Heather moved on to MDS Sciex (now Sciex), managing the technical writing team responsible for creating a large suite of user and service documentation.
At MDS Sciex, Heather developed a user-centered design approach that quickly became an integral part of the software and hardware development cycles. Customers stopped complaining and started commenting on how excited they were that the software had been designed just for them. Before long Heather was managing both the technical writing and user experience teams and saw how the two disciplines overlap and interrelate.
After that Heather moved to consumer electronics as the Senior Manager, User Experience at Logitech, where she worked on the award-winning Harmony remotes. Here she introduced all levels of the organization to the joys and pains of qualitative design research including ethnographic contextual inquiries, and usability studies.
Heather decided that she had learned a lot over the past couple decades and that she wanted to share that with a wider audience, so she decided to leave the comfort of full-time employment for the joy-ride of consulting.
Consulting was pretty awesome, until one day Intel Security (now McAfee) called looking for a contract UX writer.
Heather fell in love. The people she worked with were awesome. UX writing and content strategy blended her interest in writing and UX perfectly. So when they asked if she’d like to join the team as the Manager of Content Design for UX, the only possible answer was, “Hell, yes!”
At McAfee, she’s developed a content strategy for desktop and mobile apps. She’s also working with an awesome UX team to fully integrate words on the screen with the rest of the UX process.
P.S. Heather finds writing in the third person like this oddly liberating.