Hello, I’m Charlene Atlas.
I am an interaction designer living in the Seattle area. My passion is making the interaction between humans and technology fun and intuitive.
My expertise is in augmented reality interaction design and hardware. My design process is to first do research, then iterate in a tight loop of ideation, prototyping, and validation. My technical background enables me to make experiential software and hardware prototypes. I can also work with developers on my team to build more robust prototypes and shipping features. We mostly use Unity 3D engine, microcontrollers such as Arduino boards, and a variety of other hardware components, like haptics, tracking systems, head mounted devices and other wearables.
In my spare time, I am a maker that focuses on projects that bring together the digital and the physical. The book “Enchanted Objects” inspired me to think about how technology can seamlessly exist in our lives through the physical objects we already know and understand.
I recently started a new role in Facebook AR/VR as an Interaction Designer. It has already been a lot of fun and I am excited to dig in and start making an impact. Previously I was a Senior UX Designer at Microsoft. As an eight-year veteran of the company, I worked on platforms from Kinect to HoloLens. Three of those years I was a Designer, working on cross-disciplinary teams to create shipping features and blue sky future-facing prototypes. My last role was on an incubation team in Windows, working on mostly confidential projects. In my incubation work I often worked across multiple organizations within Microsoft to get results. The recently announced Surface Hub 2 is a product of such a collaboration. My team worked with the Surface team and other teams across Microsoft to define the product vision through research, prototyping, user testing and storytelling. In addition to Surface, I have worked in collaboration with many other teams, including Microsoft Research, and Microsoft Office.
Before working in incubation, I helped develop and launch the Microsoft HoloLens — “the first self-contained, holographic computer”. It was amazing to be part of something so groundbreaking starting early in its development through to launch. Every day it felt like we were being asked to do the impossible. I started out as a test engineer for HoloLens experiences, which not only involved ensuring app quality but also working with the HoloLens platform and hardware teams to find and resolve issues.
I shipped two HoloLens launch titles as a designer: HoloStudio and RoboRaid. HoloStudio allowed users to create and share their own holograms. For HoloStudio, my largest contributions were the design of two features: Text Tool and Stop Motion Tool. The Text Tool enables users to add 3D text to their holographic creations. The Stop Motion Tool is for making holographic GIFs!
RoboRaid was the world’s first mixed reality shooter. I owned the intro sequence that provides context for the game and gets the player amped up to play. I wrote voice over lines, recorded temp VO, worked with artists on animated storyboards and VFX, and worked with a developer and audio engineer to implement it all into Unity.
Since I was a kid I wanted to make video games. I saw the names at the end credits of a game and in the manual and thought, “You can make games as job?” Over time my desire to make games became grounded in the desire to recreate the fun my brother and I had as kids for as many people as possible. Many in my family have medical careers, so I have said multiple times in life, “You keep people alive, and I’ll make sure they have fun while they’re here.”
My transition to UX design was an interesting one. Creative Director Riccardo Giraldi and his design team put up pages from Universal Principles of Design in the bathroom stalls. Intrigued, I got the book from the library and also started reading other design books, like Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things. It turned out that my obsession with the seemingly mundane aspects of everyday interaction with the world was a core skill of a profession! I was hooked.
Now that I have discovered the broader field of user experience design, my lifelong desire to make games has expanded into all physical and digital interactions. When my job was to test games, I wanted to only test games, because any other software testing would be boring. Now that I am in the UX field, I think everything is interesting to design! I constantly analyze the world around me and how people interact with the objects in it. Paper towel dispensers, faucets, and showers are of particular interest to me for some reason. The variety in their design is amazing! I almost never see the same thing twice. Someday I plan to do an in-depth look at these physical interfaces that exist in our daily lives.
Watch this space!
Drop me a line sometime!
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charleneatlas/
Twitter: CharleneJeune
Email: atlas.charlene@gmail.com
