Cátia Oliveira, from Altice Labs’ User Experience, Communication and Product Promotion department, participated in the TechDays “Made in Aveiro” session, attended by eight guests from different areas of knowledge, all alumni of the University of Aveiro (UA), who shared their academic and professional background with the audience and also had the opportunity to leave a message to the City and the University that welcomed them.
During her speech, Cátia Oliveira shared what motivated her to join the UA, a university that was already a reference at the time and which presented a training offer of excellence and also the experiences that some friends lived and how this inspired her to believe it was the right university for her. Besides being the university of her city, this city has always inspired her. She pointed out that the Information and Communication Technologies course was ideal, since it combined arts, in which she was trained, with the technological part, a new way of looking at a more artistic but also technological medium that was growing.
With 11 years of professional experience, Cátia began her career as a web designer in a department where project development addressed the company’s internal needs. With the opening of an hour bank at the company, she had the opportunity to support a project for the end customer. During this time, which would only be of some support, she was being absorbed by the project, eventually moving entirely to this department responsible for product development in the area of Business Support Systems (BSS). With this, she begins to feel that the company is taking some first steps in hiring specialized people in the area, culminating over time by naturally creating a transversal team in the User Experience area where she’s been until now, being responsible for the coordination and definition of the UX strategy in Smart Cities and BSS products.
Throughout this journey, she has already had the opportunity to collaborate as a consultant in projects where the company has research partnerships with the University of Aveiro and the Polytechnic Institute of Viseu and with this work alongside the teachers of the respective institutions she ended up being invited to participate in one of the classes, where she worked with the students to build a customer journey map and explore creativity as a means for innovation so that they could also take advantage of the work being done on their own projects. In addition to these sessions, she has been invited by IADE to share how the team applies UX methodologies in practice and in a business context and by Agile Connect for a Design Thinking workshop. She has also been a master’s degree advisor in her area for exploring UX methodologies, applying copy in a product context, and UX alignment for product communication.
Never having changed companies and always in the same city, she had the privilege of following the evolution of the company through the natural restructuring to adapt to the new realities and with this she ended up interacting with several areas and teams of the company that enhanced the knowledge of internal products and the collaboration with teams with such different realities and needs.