Natalie Kurz

Natalie Kurz has spent the last 20+ years leading both in-house and agency product design teams across enterprise UX, fintech, government, and healthcare — spaces where clarity, trust, and empathy are essential. She’s known for transforming complicated, fragmented systems into intuitive, connected experiences, always with a focus on making the complex feel simple, connected, and human.

One of her passions is building diverse and inclusive teams where designers are empowered to challenge ideas, grow their craft, and do their best work. She thrives at the intersection of systems thinking and emotional intelligence — scaling design operations, mentoring emerging leaders, and advocating for design as a strategic function that drives businesses forward.

A former innovation fellow at the CFPB, she’s also led design efforts for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid, U.S. Digital Services, Carnival Cruise Lines, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Subaru, Citibank, State Farm, Express-Scripts, and the CW Network. She’s previously presented on UX, content strategy, and agile practices at Chicago Camps, edUI, 18F Speaker Series, Agile Government Leadership, IA Summit, and G2 Xchange podcasts.

Presentations

UX Camp Winter 2026

Inclusivity by Design

Most organizations treat inclusive design as a nice-to-have checkbox rather than a strategic imperative. It’s time to change that conversation.

Inclusive design isn’t about helping one group—it’s about recognizing that people aren’t one-dimensional and creating solutions that flex to meet real human complexity.

Through real-world examples and practical workplace applications, attendees will see how inclusive thinking extends far beyond disability accommodations. This talk reframes inclusive design from a compliance burden to a business opportunity—inclusive design boosts usability by up to 30%, benefiting all users, not just those with disabilities.

Natalie will de-mystify how inclusive design differs from universal or accessible design, highlight inclusive practices when hiring and building diverse design teams, and unveil the secret formula that gets stakeholders to care about inclusive design.

UX Camp Spring 2021

Conscious Uncoupling — Innovative Ways to Separate User Habits from User Needs

When modernizing a legacy system, it’s easy to just recreate what exists—only a little better. This is an especially dangerous trap when the users equate what they need with what they already have. But what happens when your users don’t understand why they’re doing things a certain way? When their behavior is so ingrained that they can’t differentiate the what from the why?

When trying to understand current processes and uncover user needs for the new system, we encountered a wall of dogma separating our research team from the real problems users were trying to solve or the tasks they really needed to accomplish. It was nearly impossible for users to articulate why they were doing things — other than saying that was the way they had always done it. So how do you break habitual behaviors and get buy in from your users for changes that challenge their beliefs?

In this talk, we’ll share our experience uncovering user needs that are buried under layers of habit and complacencies. Participants will learn how to keep asking why until you get to the root of the need by using an outcomes-first approach to help users understand the difference between what they do (and why!) and what they truly need.

UX Camp 2016

Vocal Exercises: Finding Your Voice

You often hear about “writing with one voice” within an organization. But before you can do that, you have to define that voice. So what does that even mean? How do you do that? And once you do, how can you communicate that to other writers so everyone can “write with one voice?”

In this talk I’ll walk through:

Ideas to facilitate conversations with stakeholders about shaping your voice and tone
Methods for quickly establishing your voice for users
Ways to draft guidelines that help content creators employ the voice effectively in their writing
Tips for testing your voice with users

UX Camp 2015

The Unwitting Content Strategist

Few of us are formally trained as content strategists. We’re journalists. Information architects. Copywriters. Interaction designers. Digital marketers. Some are multi-headed hydras that get to wear all the hats.

But that doesn’t prevent us from tackling the nebulous task of creating content strategies. So what does that even mean? What goes into creating an actual content strategy that you can sit down and execute? And how can we bring our unique perspectives from other disciples to this field to produce a better outcome?

The first time I had to write a content strategy, I had to figure it out as I went. This talk will offer attendees concrete pointers, outlines, definitions and deliverables associated with that big, scary concept of “content strategy.” Attend this session and you don’t have to feel that same sense of dread I did when asked to “figure it out.”