Hacking Hackathon: How Microsoft User Researchers Are Changing the World
What I learned about bringing your whole self to work during One Week 2018
At the end of July, I traveled to Redmond, WA, to partake in Microsoft One Week — a global celebration that “encourages Microsoft employees to step away from their day jobs and drum up new ideas, tackle problems, create change, and make a difference.”
One Week festivities comprise an Expo, Science Fair, Give Fest, and Hackathon. During this latter event, I met with members of the Microsoft Research + Insight (R+I) team outside the giant white tents to chat about their projects. My goal? To learn as much as I could about what makes this hackathon — and this company — so special.
A peek inside the tents
The Microsoft Hackathon varies from any similar event I’ve witnessed. A mashup of “hacking” and “marathon,” the word “hackathon” typically conjures images of engineers coding at 3 A.M. while pounding black coffee. Here, though, employees and interns from across the company come together to create, innovate, and hack on ideas that light them up. In 2017, more than 18,000 people in 4,000 cities and 75 countries participated, making this the world’s largest private hackathon.
“This is a great opportunity to meet people from across Microsoft,” said user researcher Jessica Tran, who helped run a Hackathon project intended to improve processes for gathering customer feedback. “There’s a buzz in the sense of a lot of people working on different projects, and it’s very positive energy. People mingle and circle around to learn what other people are doing.”
Michelle Wantuch led her project’s research team, which conducted six interviews with seven participants in just two days. “It was a fantastic experience that allowed me to work on something I am passionate about, learn and practice skills outside of my normal day-to-day, and work with amazing Microsoft employees from different parts of the company,” she said.
Senior user researcher Ian Hamilton, who has been with Microsoft for 16 years, believes the company’s established nature helps set its Hackathon apart. “We’re running a company that is older than the average startup, so a Hackathon here looks different than it does somewhere else,” he said. “You don’t have people sleeping under tables and eating food in the middle of the night. This place cleared out by 7 P.M. last night.”
“It is this really exciting frenetic energy,” said Chelsea Cormier McSwiggin, whose Hackathon project focused on helping people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) better prepare for job interviews. “Everyone is so invested in their hack; it’s inspiring and invigorating!”
Alpa Dave, a senior user researcher whose project used virtual reality to help people uncover and identify unconscious bias, told me she loved being part of a diverse team. “Every single person stepped up to lend their strength to the project,” she said. “It is inspirational to think about how tech can make our workplace better by helping us identify unconscious bias and reduce its impact.”
User researcher Tom Glanz has been with Microsoft for five years. “Our collective potential as a unified research community has always struck me as an area ready for innovation and improvement,” he told me. During his time in academia, Glanz noticed that duplicating research efforts was a problem in the field of psychology. “When I came across The Future of Research hackathon project, it felt like a great way to innovate and make strides to improve our own research community here at Microsoft to start to address this issue,” he said.
Hacking for good
Mike Bortnick, principal user research manager, participated along with Tran and Hamilton. “Our project was conceived to contribute to the customer-obsession culture at Microsoft by significantly shifting our engineering habits and behaviors toward regular customer conversations,” he said.
Other projects were decidedly personal. Cormier McSwiggin, inspired by her previous work with nonprofits, said she joined her Hackathon team because it aligned with her politics. “We’re trying to create a design that would benefit people living with ASD, and that also is a great opportunity for us to think of accessibility, UI, and UX from the very beginning rather than as an afterthought.”
User researcher Keola Ching was inspired by his stepmother, who had ALS, to create a device that would improve a quadriplegic person’s quality of life by giving them more control over their environment and reducing caregiver burden. “Three of us have very personal reasons to be part of this team,” he said. “Two have lost family members to ALS, and one of the engineers has a father who has been quadriplegic for quite some time.”
Mateo Chavez, who previously wrote about diversity and inclusion in user research, joined Ching’s team to support his mission. “In ways that I’m able to help him make this passion of his come true, I wanted to be involved. I don’t have any family members who have suffered from ALS, though we all know somebody who has suffered from something that required them to need assistance from others.”
Ashley Ferguson has a background in accessibility research and lost her mother to ALS. “I overheard Keola sharing the project with Mateo, and I was like, this sounds really interesting, and it was a sad but weird coincidence.”
Along with his teammates, Ching conducted a demo during Hackathon. A representative from the Evergreen chapter of the ALS Association attended, and even Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stopped by to give the device a try during the Science Fair.
Coming together for customer obsession
R+I Partner Director Joe Munko reflected, “The Hackathon is one of the coolest things Microsoft has done to drive a growth-mindset culture.” In my brief experience, he’s right. The energy of One Week was palpable, and I left with a greater understanding of how the team here leads a customer-obsessed culture through its knowledge and influence.
Have you participated in a hackathon before? Tell us about it in the comments, or tweet @MicrosoftRI.
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