My division at Microsoft is composed of several teams with over 1500 employees that delivers productivity tools and services for software development. We have recently undertaken a large-scale process and cultural change that has transformed the organization into one in which customer and product data is the currency that drives business, product, and design decisions.
This talk will focus on this transformation, specifically the techniques and lessons learned by our Ux Research team to scale observational research by turning it into a ‘team sport’, where the engineering team directly engages in all aspects of conducting observational research.
We will reference a case study on how we developed a feature we call PerfTips (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/mt703437.aspx). We will look at various tools and processes that we have put in place to increase the pace when conducting highly iterative observational studies . As with any such pressure to be fast and deliver more , we need to consider how we manage quality and stay confident in our research results. We will then look at how we managed parallel streams of research to support multiple teams with multiple agendas
