This week’s interview is with Natalie Buda Smith. Natalie is a user experience team supervisor here at the Library of Congress.
Describe your background.
Most of my 25+ year career has been in the field of user experience, working in different countries for a range of organizations including Fortune 500 companies, non-profits, and federal agencies. My undergraduate degree was in film, but I was quickly swept into computer science through my internship at IBM in Research Triangle Park, NC. I was working on point-of-sales interfaces and was fortunate to be located next to NCSU’s School of Design. The School had a forward-thinking curriculum that integrated technology with more traditional fields of industrial and graphic design.
After attending NCSU for my master’s degree, I went into teaching design at the college level and was lucky to have university resources and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to study hypertext on the World Wide Web (WWW) in 1995. That was the beginning of my interest in all things Internet. I spent most of my career prior to the Library of Congress as a consultant, designing user experiences for such enterprises as the World Bank, Washington Post, Freddie Mac, Discovery Channel, NPR, PBS, the National Student Clearing House, Dow Corning, Blue Cross Blue Shield and more.
How would you describe your job to other people?