Carmen Broomes is a User Experience (UX) Research Lead & Head of UX Research at Handshake. She has practiced UX for 20 years at companies such as Indeed, Motorola, Whirlpool, Humana, and Rackspace. She has a Master’s degree in Computer Science from Michigan State where she specialized in Human-Computer Interaction and a bachelor’s degree in Computer Information Systems from Florida A&M University. She is co-founder and leader of Black UX Austin. Black UX Austin is a non-profit organization in Austin, Texas providing support and mentorship to people who are of African ancestry (who may identify as Black) and are in the field of user experience or looking to enter the field. During her spare time, she loves taking care of her two kids and helping the Austin community thrive by supporting better diversity, inclusion, and equity within the field of UX.
Past Talks
17 February 2022
This interactive session will look at how to place the user at the heart of team and product decisions. Each panelist will share their view on how to better align your teams objectives by using UX strategies, through a shared language and common goals.
- User centricity as a culture and not just a role: Creating user-centric thinking throughout the organization
- How to put UX practices in place: From continuous user testing, user journeys and measuring user behavior
- Improving the consistency of interfaces in a complex application landscape
- Key ways to increase design maturity as an organization.
17 February 2022
Join the conversation! Share your insights and probe Carmen & Mackenzie on the elements of their on-demand talk on building a UX team from scratch that left you wanting more.
16 February 2022
Biased is inherent and as with designs UX research can also fall into this corner. Although data driven, how it is interpreted and presented is where bias usually appears. So how can you avoid this quandary and create a culture of conscious researchers?
In this session, Carmen & Mackenzie will talk through their journey as they build an inclusive and conscious UX team at Handshake. From their past experiences, they will touch on:
- Techniques on how to mitigate bias in your research data;
- How to present conscious research readouts to a room of your stakeholders; and
- Their best practices on how to build a UX team from scratch that is inclusive, conscious and effective