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MY ROLE

My role at Microsoft is as a User Researcher for Windows Shell product teams. This includes pretty much anything you might see or interact with from the desktop of your Windows 10 device. My focus has largely been on conducting qualitative (and sometimes quantitative) user research studies to recommend effective changes to impact the overall customer experience with Windows 10.

Alongside this, I have been a member of an initiative to integrate Product Managers into the research process and empower them to drive changes based on data they observe firsthand.

While I cannot provide details from each of the studies I have conducted, I have outlined my typical work flows for the two main types of research studies I conduct. If you would like more detailed examples of documents & artifacts, please reach out to me here.

METHODS

  • surveys
  • user interviews
  • usability tests
  • contextual interviews
  • card sorts

TOOLS

  • UserTesting.com
  • Qualtrics
  • Ovo Studios

USABILITY TESTS & USER INTERVIEWS

My small two-person team receives a steady flow of research requests from many different product teams on vastly different timelines. We work to triage this research queue based on business goals/needs & available resources

PLANNING

Once our research queue has been determined, I meet with product managers to discuss their timelines and hypotheses and generate research questions.

For usability tests and in-person user interviews I liaise with our on-site research operations team to create robust screeners to source the ideal demographics for this use case. Alongside this, I am booking available lab space and working with engineering teams (when possible) to get working builds for testing. Oftentimes, we have to make concessions here to encompass multiple product team research questions with the same pool of participants.

RUNNING STUDY SESSIONS

I create a script for the sessions, which will vary depending on if I am working on validating the usability of an existing experience or conducting generative user interviews to identify pain points. *

I typically run study sessions independently meaning I rely on myself to write up notes in templates I've created in Excel, and record all sessions with Ovo Studios. After every study, I watch all videos for behaviors and quotes I may have missed and write up transcripts for reference. 

The goal of every one of our studies is to generate insights that we can substantiate with user experiences and behaviors allowing us to make recommendations to stakeholders  to drive impactful changes to our products. These insights are written up into APA-style reports that are stored in our internal research database. Here we can track how often product managers are viewing and distributing our research to their teams and allows us to follow up and track how our recommendations are being acted on. 

REMOTE UNMODERATED SURVEYS

While usability tests and user interviews are my core focus as a user researcher, I also rely heavily on surveys and questionnaires via platforms such as UserTesting.com and Qualtrics. There are benefits to both, but the narration from users on UserTesting.com recordings allows us to make quantitative surveys more qualitative. 

Surveys are ideal for identifying trends in behavior prior to seeing any tangible product. This is where I conduct the majority of my generative user research. In other words, sometimes Product Managers come to us with a hunch and they'd like data to back up their claims. It is up to me to look for any primary and secondary research we might have on the subject and determine if reaching out to a larger population is the right choice. 

Take this example for identifying user behaviors towards mobile phone notifications: