Microsoft XC Research
XC Research Blog
The Incubation Checklist will increase your project’s chance at success, but you’ll also have structured your insights in a way that can transfer what you’ve learned to your team’s (or your company’s) next incubation.
Producing great product insights is bolstered by understanding what motivates stakeholders to learn, how they retain information, how to build on prior knowledge, and what experiences can activate behaviors. This helps ensure that research is acted upon and encourages colleagues…
A responsible approach to innovation
The intersection of desirability, feasibility, and viability is seen as the sweet spot for innovation; these attributes are the cornerstones of Design Thinking. But what else should be considered? Here are some ideas to approach innovation responsibly, so you can…
Many of us will remember 2020 for masks, social distancing, loss in all its facets, and the upheaval of how we approached our daily lives in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. IT decision makers and business decision makers had…
Understanding our customers’ mental models, the friction they experience, and how they diverge from our pathways can inform how we design our product terrain in a way that guides users to the intended, ‘golden,’ destination by funneling them back from…
Driving impact is more than just building great products. It’s about understanding your customers to bring them the best possible experiences. User research provides us with the ability to engage with, learn from, and empathize with our customers. Through user…
Adapting to remote and hybrid learning has been difficult for many, including school administrators, teachers, parents, and students. In addition to overcoming the basic hurdles of hardware, internet connectivity, and new tools, other more subtle challenges have cropped up over…
Developing usable and valuable features is not much use if the feature is going to be turned off as soon as it hits the enterprise environment. They implored us to think of the stakeholder cycles that each new feature must…
Research teams across Microsoft have conducted studies to better understand how those changes impacted our customers, ranging from consumers, to students and teachers, to Information Workers (IWs). This global effort now belongs to a larger body of research, known as…