By Michele McDanel (opens in new tab)
Photo credit: iStock
I joined a user research team at Microsoft just over eighteen months ago, and in that time, it has been my joy and privilege to work with this group of dedicated, empathetic, fascinating people in discovering the stories in their research and amplifying them to the community at large.
Last year, we gathered several hundred professionals in the user experience/user research discipline across Microsoft for UXR Day. It was the first time we’d done so and would be one of the last in-person events held on campus prior to the COVID-19 pandemic-related shutdowns.
We’re gathering again this year, virtually across two half-day sessions. Our group of user experience professionals has now grown to around five hundred and fifty people, comprised of user researchers, design researchers, user experience researchers, data scientists, and product planners.
There will be 82 topics covered in a variety of lightning talks, breakout sessions, panel discussions, and keynotes. Going digital, while removing some of the “family reunion” feeling we experienced last year, opens up the ability to include more sessions. And of course, all sessions will be recorded so that people who can’t attend can still get the benefit of the sessions, or those who join our teams after the event can do so as well.
The topic of research methods is always of interest, and what stood out this year is the large number of submissions dealing with mixed-methods research. The second largest number of submissions dealt with empowering our product teams to learn first-hand by designing shared learning experiences they can participate in with us and by designing research training, tools, and templates they can use themselves. Looking back over time, this second category is an emerging trend for our community.
Other categories of talks include culture as a product, democratizing research, scalable research ops and growth hacking, inclusive recruiting and learning, responsible artificial intelligence(AI) and research-driven innovation, and responsible AI and working remotely.
I work with our user experience research teams every day, so I am constantly reminded how fortunate we are to have some of the brightest minds in our field within our ranks. Combine that with the ever-increasing strategic and cultural emphasis that our company is placing on being customer connected and data-driven, and you get a sense for how disproportionally powerful and impactful our small community is shaping up to be. We are not a subsect of Design. We are not a subsect of Data Science. We are not a subsect of Program Management. We are wholly and uniquely UXR! UXR Day is our annual opportunity to celebrate our identity as a community, to celebrate our collective brilliance, and to celebrate our collective power!
While UXR Day is an internal event, we share the news about what we’re doing and thinking to show how much the UXR discipline is valued, and encourage people to join our teams. Research is in our DNA.
If you are a researcher interested in joining Microsoft, search for and apply to current openings at https://careers.microsoft.com (opens in new tab)
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Michele McDanel is a builder, an organizer, and a storyteller with a bachelor’s degree in Communications and an MBA. Michele is energized by solving problems and meeting business needs through communications and customer experience solutions that raise the bar. She enjoys building relationships and managing teams. Overall, she likes figuring out what the “special sauce” is that will be the competitive differentiator for a business and its solutions. Michele joined the Customer Insights Research team in 2019 to amplify the great UX research and data science work they do, and to showcase the thought leadership of the team across internal and external communications, events, and social media.