Before Vivianne Castillo was one of the leading User Experience Research Speakers, she was a Counseling and Human Services professional for six years. Castillo concentrated her psychological expertise in battling shame, empathy, vulnerability, and compassion. Although she loved her job and loved helping people, she wanted a change in the profession and that is when she found out about UX Research. Castillo jumped to the new opportunity with excitement. Her mother, her role model, as she recalls, had always instilled in her to take risks, to pursue what she is passionate about.
Castillo recalls going to her first UX conference. She was excited to meet other UX Researchers and Designers, listen to executives talk, and get to know how they use human-centered design in their work. She quickly found out that their human-centered design is not the human-centered design psychologists and other human service professionals learned about. For example, she noticed that there was a shortcoming of empathy, bias, and disregard for the power dynamics within their culture. Castillo also noticed that there was also a disregard for the emotional taxation of the job. For human service professionals, it is not uncommon for there to be compassion fatigue and trauma, so it is encouraged for them to take time off to take care of themselves—this is not the case in the UX profession. They see it as part of their jobs.
Vivianne Castillo uses her more than eight years of psychology, research skills, and her multi-cultural upbringing to help UX professionals learn more about empathy in design and at home, with her talks and her company, HmntyCntrd. Her work and ideas have also been written about in Slate, Fortune, The Huffington Post, and in ELLE Magazine. At the moment, Castillo is working for Salesforce, where she helps senior executives from Fortune 500 companies communicate what is actually important for their internal and external users—in a human-centered way.
As a human, Vivianne Castillo has accomplished so much in her life, but as a black woman, she has faced so much adversity in the tech industry, as she and other black women have stated in her Medium post, “Working in Tech: Advice from Black Women to Black Women.” They talk about how people question their expertise based on some standard too high for even themselves to understand. They say that it is important for young black women to surround themselves with other black women in the industry to help each other out in difficult moments. A contributor talks about working for a large tech-company with thousands of employees but being the only black woman—because of this, she faces many microaggressions. They urge black women to apply for positions they believe are out of their realm. Only by this will there be more inclusion and representation in the workplace and in the products these companies throw into the world.
Work Cited
Arnold, Matt. “The Iowa Idea: Vivianne Castillo.” The Iowa Idea, WordPress, 19 Oct. 2020, www.theiowaidea.com/2020/10/19/45-vivianne-castillo/.
Boyd, Carrie. “Self Care As A UX Researcher with Vivianne Castillo.” User Interviews, User Interviews Inc., 13 Oct. 2020, www.userinterviews.com/blog/self-care-as-a-ux-researcher-with-vivianne-castillo.
Castillo, Vivianne. “Vivianne Castillo.” LinkedIn, LinkedIn Corporation, www.linkedin.com/in/vccastillo/.
Castillo, Vivianne. “Working in Tech: Advice from Black Women to Black Women.” Medium, Medium Corporation, 21 Mar. 2019, medium.com/free-code-camp/working-in-tech-advice-from-black-women-to-black-women-d1319e7899aa.
“Vivianne Castillo.” Radical Research Summit, Radical Research Summit, 2018.radicalresearchsummit.com/vivianne-castillo/.
Since I wrote about her in my last bibliography, I’m so excited to see yours from a different angle. I like how you introduce the fact that she sees her mother as her role model. This shared affection really helps me see her not just as a black woman “warrior figure” in the design industry but also as a daughter.