Microsoft XC Research
XC Research Blog
Human beings are creatures of habit*. Our routine behaviors are repeated regularly, often without our conscious awareness. When designing for AI experiences, such as voice or assistive features, we are competing with long-standing habits that people have formed to complete tasks. For teams working in this space, changing these habits means connecting a user’s problem…
While heuristic evaluations are less expensive, they’re typically not as exciting to run as usability studies or interviews, and they don’t produce convincing videos for stakeholders. So, how can we raise the stakes for heuristic evaluations and when should we?
Many researchers have documented the importance of color in shaping perceptions, providing context, and helping users connect with an application. We took a more focused approach recently in examining color as relates to icon sets. Our goal was to understand how color might affect user comprehension, efficiency, and satisfaction. At stake: The satisfaction of long-time product users who…
This article discusses how to approach AI through the lens of trust, putting people over product. Research conducted by the AI team outlines four steps you can start implementing now to design your AI with trust in mind, evaluate the…
Discussions at the customer level bring product teams together; user models (UMs) synthesize and summarize customer information to facilitate those discussions. This article discusses the move from personas to UMs because personas reduce customers to an average that doesn’t exist, while UMs allow for a broader representation of a range of customers.
User researchers have a variety of tools at their disposal, and one of the most flexible of those is the experience review (ER). We’d like to share the process, learnings and best practices gleaned as we’ve worked on ERs for teams across Microsoft.
If we want AI to truly benefit people, we need to design it in a way that promotes and builds trust. This article explains the three stages of trust development and how UX designers can help AI to “do it…
In this article, we walk you through an example of how our team has employed user research as a tool to understand the language preferences of a particular group of customers; in this case, very small business (VSB) customers performing…
As part of the XC Planning and Research team, we’ve conducted unmoderated user sessions and held workshops to help us understand the tools that employees are using to organize and act on their work. The findings will help us build…