Product Units are so often caught up in results – details that add up to results, that sometimes we forget the value proposition of the bigger picture: the overall User eXperience (UX). At Microsoft, we are increasingly working with UX professionals...

In this blog, I am going to talk about the craziness of supporting multiple development teams. I am one UX researcher responsible for interjecting user centered design and design thinking, among other UX practices within an agile development process....

One of the main role of the researcher, is to provide quality, reliable data to the product team. However, it is not quite as easy as it may seem. Researchers, for lack of appropriate information or skill, may be at risk of generating data lacking in quality. There are multiple strategies that can be taken to ensure the highest quality of the data being collected, including careful review of the research protocol and a general skeptical approach to one’s research methodology. In this post, I’ll introduce the underlying reason why a good researcher should always initially cast a critical eye on the data he is being fed, and apply this to his own data. I will then discuss some common threats to good data collection I have encountered in recent weeks, and in particular the threats of bad recruitment.

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Great research does not matter if nobody reads it As a user experience researcher, your goal is to provide knowledge to the product team about the audience they are designing for(*).However, the effort spent creating that knowledge is ultimately wasted...

UX methods are abundant. They don’t always work in the way they are outlined either. In reality, methods are guidelines for collecting data on users during a point in the development cycle. In other words methods are rarely applied exactly the...

Lately I’ve been thinking lots about design thinking. I’ve been doing so because I think deeply about lots of things that affect me. Design thinking affects me because I am living in a culture of engineering thinking. What I mean by design...

In my last post , I discussed how using the right level of fidelity could ease design reviews and help the design process, especially in multi-disciplinary environments. This topic is somewhat related to the one I want to discuss today, which...

Coming out of my Ph.D., I was not quite prepared to become a user experience researcher in the industry. While I was well prepared with the research side of things, everything else was, and to a large extent still remains, unknown. So as I am learning...