I’ve spent the last 18+ years working for design studios, digital agencies, and software teams to create experiences across all media, from paper to screen, mobile phones to point-of-sales, and everything in between.
Clover Feedback App
product design
POETRY iPhone app
ia, design, content strategy
NYU Langone Experience Map
research, strategy
Comcast Publishing Strategy
content strategy, diagramming
Comcast Billing Concepts
strategy, ux
Council on Foreign Relations
ux, ia, content strategy
Who, me?
Hi. I'm Cheryl Berkowitz. I'm a UX designer with a traditional graphic design background and a love/love relationship with technology. Want to see a resumé? Just reach out to me through LinkedIn.
1995–1999
SUNY Binghamton
BA in Anthropology; concentration in socio-cultural anthropology; minor in fine arts. I spent most of my time at Pipedream, the school newspaper, where I was a graphic designer, illustrator, and photo editor; and at the campus radio station, WHRW, where I had an oldies show called "Late Night Cheesecake". The campus was shaped like a brain.
2003–2006
NC State University College of Design
Earned a Master of Graphic Design degree through an intensive, three-year program. Included course work in design research, cross-cultural design, advanced typography, narrative, cognition, culture of technology, and linguistics. Thesis work explored the use of kinesthetics in print materials.
July–September 2006
Srishti College of Art, Design & Technology
Visting instructor in graphic design at a leading university in Bangalore, India. Taught core courses in typography and interaction design. Developed culturally relevant projects, lessons, and assessment methods. Advised graduating students in final projects.
2006–2009
Freelance Graphic Designer
Designed web sites, magazines, books, email newsletters, identity systems, information graphics, web and print forms, and packaging for clients including Citibank, Au Bon Pain, and Princeton University.
2009–2012
Tierra Innovation
As a senior designer, I worked on a team that designed an award-winning poetry app for Poetry Foundation. Designed marketing sites supporting early social campaigns for The CW and NFL Network. Redesigned a site for Council on Foreign Relations to support new multimedia initiatives.
March 2011-July 2014
Huge
As an Experiece Lead, I collaborated with engineers, content strategists and visual designers in agile environments to create useful, results-oriented digital experiences. Focused on creative leadership, mentorship, collaboration, participatory design, lean user research, innovation, long-term strategy and account growth.
As an Associate Experience Lead, I designed a responsive customer support site used by 24 million Comcast customers. Delivered strategic vision for the United States Patent & Trademark Office's site redesign. Designed a site for The Jewish Agency’s global community of 800,000 members.
As a Senior Interaction Designer, I collaborated on a long-term vision that grew a new client into one of our largest multi-year agency-of-record accounts. Designed a customer support site that effectively reduced call center load and empowered customers with self-service troubleshooting & installation tools.
August 2014 – today
Clover (formerly Perka)
I'm a Director of Design at Clover, a cloud based point-of-sale platform for small businesses. I run an efficient design team in New York City that focuses on the consumer experience. We plan and conduct our own lean user research, and design interfaces for point-of-sale touch devices, responsive web dashboards, print, and everything in between. Did I mention that we're hiring?
The simplest, most passive way to connect with customers.
With the team at Perka, I've been designing easy-to-use products that help small business owners connect with their customers. Built for the Clover Point-of-Sale platform, the Feedback app lets merchants hear from their customers, and redirect negative feedback from public sites like Yelp, in the simplest way possible.
Once the app is installed, absolutely no set-up is required. There's nothing else a merchant has to do to start receiving feedback from their customers—the invitation to provide feedback is printed on every receipt, using a unique identifier so our system can connect feedback with a particular transaction.
We also made it easy for customers. The system accepts Feedback that is as simple as a heart rating, but also invites text feedback, and contact information should the customer expect a reply. The business owner then receives a responsive email with the complete rating and message.
Finally, the business owner can reply, or go to the web to see details about the transaction such as the shift or employee, so that they can address issues or reward employees and ultimately improve their business.
A first-generation iPhone app that exposed regular Joes to serious poetry.
Designed and built in 2010, POETRY was the first mobile app to deliver serious poetry to people's pockets. At a time when mobile apps were considered "on-the-go" solutions, the team at Tierra Innovation and I designed this app to allow people to easily find poetry according to their current mood, topic, or cross-section of the two, as a portable companion to the Poetry Foundation website which allowed a much more directed and academic approach to search and browse.
In order to make the Poetry Foundation's database accessible to a mobile app user, we flattened their granular system of categorization into fewer categories, until we came to groups that yielded a managable set of results, when a mood was paired with a topic.
Early concepts explored the app like a digital "mood ring", responding to the temperature and pressure of the user's finger (in 2012, the biometric inputs of the iPhone were super exciting, remember?).
We moved away from this approach as it proved too gimmicky, and didn't reflect the validity of the content, which was a collection of thousands of the English language's most respectable poems by historical and contemporary poets.
Later we looked for more subtle ways of representing emotions visually, and came to a muted full-spectrum color pallete that addressed the full spectrum of emotions, while speaking to Poetry Foundation's established brand.
Finally, we couldn't resist using one gimmick provided by our friends at Apple, which was to allow the user to "shake" their phone in order to be served up a random set of poems, roulette-style.
Journey mapping to improve the patient experience.
I worked with NYU Langone to identify areas where digital services would most affect the way people feel about moving through the health system. After conducting internal stakeholder interviews, we started unfolding the existing patient experience by asking people to tell us about a recent health care experience. My team listened and took notes, and asked just enough questions to keep the narrative going. During the interviews, my team scribble down what stood out on sticky notes.
After each interview, we separated the sticky notes into what the patient was "thinking, doing, and feeling", and plotted them on the wall linearly. We continued this for 11 pateint interviews.
Mapping out each patient's experiece this way allowed us to start to see patterns, including common touchpoints and pain points, and we were able to recommend improvement in the areas that would yield greatest patient satisfaction.
Comcast Publishing Process
We defined Comcast's process for providing useful support content.
I worked closely with Caroline Jeppe, a content strategist, to advise Comcast's customer support team on creating relevant content for their customers.
Publishing workflow diagram
Comcast Billing Concepts
Our strategic thinking shaped the product vision.
Although my team's assignment was limited to redesigning online bill payment, we were encouraged to "think big" on the side—to continuously impress the leadership team at Comcast with fresh ideas and grow the account. I drew up quick sketches of a few ideas that leveraged technology to make paying your cable bill a bit easier and more fun.
Easily link your checking account
Pay by text
Pay without signing in
Integrate with third-party tools
Accessible bill
I joined Huge as a Senior Interaction Designer at the beginning of our long engagement with Comcast. Through a few early projects our small team, including Matt Abate (Creative Director), Sophie Kleber (Experience Director), Abel Lens (Experience Lead) and Todd Portnoff (Client Services) grew this account to our largest at the time. I focused on Comcast for almost three years.
Council on Foreign Relations: Events
Providing access to content through a usable IA.
The Council on Foreign Relations came to our agency (Tierra Innovation) with a request to provide access to their vast collection of audio, video, and transcripts from important events. The content at that time was scattered around the site: past event information was nested in the "About" section, and media related to those events was in "Publications". None of the content was linked to the bios of the speakers, or to the topics or regions on which the events focused.
I executed the wireframes that suggested simple but smart changes to the site and the content.
Events landing page
We added a landing page, or "hub" (as well as presence of Events in the main nav) that highlighted relevant and significant events. The hub featured a list of upcoming events paired with a very complex search that was geared towards journalists and academics who needed very specific content. The list and search results indicated with icons what type of media was associated with each event.
Hover states revealed metadata about the series.
Terminal content page
These pages brought together all media related to that event in a tabbed format, and gracefully degraded for events that had no or very little media content associated with it. We had different versions for events with and without content, as well as events that were part of a series and those that stood alone.
Advanced filters for journalists and researchers
A complex set of filters that allowed users to narrow content by date, region, topic, speakers and more while highlighting popular searches.
Fancy transcript tools
We provided tools for academics to dig into transcripts for research purposes, including searching within and copying a citation to the clipboard.
I was the senior designer and created all of the wireframes for this project, as well as most client communications, under the direction of Design Director Kristina Bell. This work was done in 2010 and has since been updated by another firm. The current site lives at cfr.org.
Council on Foreign Relations: Events
Providing access to content through a usable IA.
The Council on Foreign Relations came to our agency (Tierra Innovation) with a request to provide access to their vast collection of audio, video, and transcripts from important events. The content at that time was scattered around the site: past event information was nested in the "About" section, and media related to those events was in "Publications". None of the content was linked to the bios of the speakers, or to the topics or regions on which the events focused.
I executed the wireframes that suggested simple but smart changes to the site and the content.
Events landing page
We added a landing page, or "hub" (as well as presence of Events in the main nav) that highlighted relevant and significant events. The hub featured a list of upcoming events paired with a very complex search that was geared towards journalists and academics who needed very specific content. The list and search results indicated with icons what type of media was associated with each event.
Hover states revealed metadata about the series.
Terminal content page
These pages brought together all media related to that event in a tabbed format, and gracefully degraded for events that had no or very little media content associated with it. We had different versions for events with and without content, as well as events that were part of a series and those that stood alone.
Advanced filters for journalists and researchers
A complex set of filters that allowed users to narrow content by date, region, topic, speakers and more while highlighting popular searches.
Fancy transcript tools
We provided tools for academics to dig into transcripts for research purposes, including searching within and copying a citation to the clipboard.
I was the senior designer and created all of the wireframes for this project, as well as most client communications, under the direction of Design Director Kristina Bell. This work was done in 2010 and has since been updated by another firm. The current site lives at cfr.org.
