Celebrating UX Research
At Microsoft, we celebrate the discipline of user research with User Experience Research (UXR) Day, an internal, annual research event that brings together cross cutting research insights, ideas, and innovation. Now, it’s almost time for UXR Day 2022, and we’re inviting you to watch this Medium channel as many of the topics will be shared here in the next several months.
For researchers across Microsoft, UXR day is an engine for infusing research within and across product teams and is a great place to share our most impactful work. The power of community enables this large-scale team of hundreds of researchers to feel like a cohesive band, focusing on the future of inclusive design, customer-driven experience, and accessibility needs to name a few notable areas.
Last year, UXR Day included 80+ sessions from 100+ presenters on Culture as a Product, Democratizing Research, Mixed Methods, Responsible AI, Research Driven Innovation, and much more. We invited external Keynote speakers Pia Zaragoza and Renee Reid, who discussed inclusive design, research, and accessibility. And we heard from Microsoft business leaders, Amanda Silver and Joe Belfiore who took part in a special research-centered Q&A session on how to align business and research. Several highlighted presentations from UXR Day 2021 have been shared on this site and are listed below:
- Moment Makers: How the best UX researchers engineer moments by design by Travis Lowdermilk
- Our journey to creating a customer-driven maturity model by Hilary Dwyer
- A conversation on making the switch from Psychology to UX Research by Camille Basilio
- Continuous, Collaborative, and Co-Experienced UX Research by Karl Melder
Many event participants shared that the diversity of topics and the strong sense of community were valuable:
“I always find new methods that I can add to my research practice and meet new researchers to connect with. That’s really high value to me!”
“The talks were fantastic! I loved seeing the research being done across Microsoft, we don’t always have that opportunity and I really appreciate UXR day for that.”
UXR Day is a time for connecting with the user research community and building inroads for continued engagement throughout the year with sponsored book clubs, coffee chats, and meetups. After the event, many resources like toolkits, templates, and instruments are published and shared to help shape research best practices across the company.
Come be part of Microsoft’s thriving UXR community and participate directly in UXR day 2022. Please check out our many job opportunities and we hope you revisit this Medium channel to discover the innovative topics and ideas shared by research leaders across Microsoft at UXR Day 2022!
