Observe
Combat photography & videography
Learned to work within real-world constraints, identify the essential story, and communicate with clarity.
About Charity
A UX leader with a builder’s range.
My career has moved through visual storytelling, graphic design, programming, interaction design, and experience leadership. The common thread is making complex information useful to real people.
Charity M. Jantzen · UXC
Curiosity built the range. Purpose shaped the career.
Creativity and determination are strongest when they serve the user and the product’s mission.
My story
From documenting missions to designing the systems behind them.
I began in the U.S. Army as a combat photographer and videographer. That experience taught me to observe carefully, understand context quickly, and communicate what matters.
It led me into graphic design, then computer programming. As the field of user experience evolved, I found the discipline that connected everything I cared about: people, systems, technology, communication, and problem solving.
Over more than two decades, I have worked across defense, geospatial intelligence, energy, healthcare, telecommunications, and startups. I have led teams in the United States and internationally, always with the same priority: advocate for the user while helping the product succeed.
Career arc
A multidisciplinary foundation for design leadership.
Each stage added a different way of seeing the problem—story, form, logic, behavior, and organizational systems.
Communicate
Graphic and visual design
Developed fluency in hierarchy, visual systems, and the relationship between information and understanding.
Build
Programming & technical problem solving
Gained respect for implementation realities and the importance of designing with—not around—technology.
Connect
User experience design
Brought research, interaction, accessibility, and product thinking together into end-to-end experiences.
Enable
Experience leadership
Expanded the focus from individual solutions to shared direction, team capability, quality systems, and strategic influence.
Leadership principles
How I show up.
Protect the user’s reality.
Bring context, constraints, accessibility, and behavior into decisions before the organization becomes attached to a solution.
Make complexity discussable.
Use maps, prototypes, principles, and plain language so multidisciplinary teams can reason about the same problem together.
Raise the standard without creating fear.
Critique should be rigorous, specific, and safe enough that people can expose uncertainty early.
Leave the team more capable.
A leader’s impact should remain in the systems, judgment, confidence, and relationships the team carries forward.
See how that perspective becomes a working design practice.
The leadership approach connects research, strategy, delivery, accessibility, and team development.