Not many have turned user research around and focused it not on customers, but on the designers themselves who craft the user experience. Vivianne Castillo is one of the first to challenging areas in the User Experience industry. She discovered two large challenge areas; the first being that many designers experience Compassion Fatigue and burnout without even realizing it, the second is that many designers fail to acknowledge their own privilege and perspective or the resulting global impact.
Castillo grew up in Chicago and worked as a trained therapist specializing in Trauma and Addiction counseling. Although she loved working with people, a mentor encouraged Castillo to find a hobby that had an end or final destination that was missing for her in counseling. She wanted to learn how to code, and while researching about it she discovered User Experience Design and Research. She saw it as an opportunity to bridge her love for people with technology and business. Ultimately deciding to make a career switch, she started off small and ended up working for Google and Weight Watchers.
While talking with UX designers at conferences, Castillo discovered that many of them were experiencing compassion fatigue and burnout without even realizing. This inspired her to go on as a guide and advocate for the self care of user experience designers themselves. She noticed that often the focus is always on the users and the designer can actually take a toll. This paved the way for her to build an online course and community helping UX profs lean into new convos around deeper human centered issues to understand crafting equitable inclusive experiences.
Currently, Castillo is working as the Senior Design Researcher and Innovation Consultant for Salesforce. There, she helps executives think about their own approach technology through new lenses such as inclusivity and privilege. She also has an active social media presence where she writes about her work with UX designers.
Throughout her career, Castillo has oftentimes been in spaces where she is the only black woman there. She has had people tell her she doesn’t know enough or don’t listen to her, however she has only found strength through these experiences and uses them to guide other underrepresented designers into the scene.
Ultimately, Castillo has paved the way for a new approach to design. One that embraces the challenges of being a designer and responds to them with care. Her work gives all designers new expectations for how design should be approached through methods of inclusivity, equity, and diversity.
Theiowaidea. The Iowa Idea, 19 Oct. 2020, www.theiowaidea.com/2020/10/19/45-vivianne-castillo/.
Twitter, Twitter, twitter.com/vcastillo630?lang=en.
Boyd, Carrie. “Self Care As A UX Researcher with Vivianne Castillo.” RSS, 13 Oct. 2020, www.userinterviews.com/blog/self-care-as-a-ux-researcher-with-vivianne-castillo.
Castillo, Vivianne. “Working in Tech: Advice from Black Women to Black Women.” Medium, FreeCodeCamp.org, 21 Mar. 2019, medium.com/free-code-camp/working-in-tech-advice-from-black-women-to-black-women-d1319e7899aa.
“Vivianne Castillo.” Women Talk Design, womentalkdesign.com/speakers/vivianne-castillo/.
