Microsoft UXR Days 2024 — The India Story
Microsoft UXR Day is an internal annual UX Research Conference that brings together cross cutting research insights, ideas, and innovation across Microsoft. This conference is an opportunity to bring UX Researchers (UXRs) and the friends of UXers (disciplines like PM, design, content, Eng et al that UXers collaborate with) together to celebrate, learn, and make valuable connections. It spans across 2 days, engaging roughly 550 UX researchers globally at Microsoft. Roughly 1 in 5 community members invest the time and energy to create high quality content for this event.
As the sun sets on UXR Days 2024, we look back...what’s unique this year was the new chapter that unfolded: the Premiere Edition of UXR conference days in India. On April 26th, the Hyderabad campus hosted the Premiere Edition of UXR conference days in India, for the first time ever!
It’s not just a fleeting performance; it’s a year-round symphony. UXR Day IDC 2024 marks the beginning of meetups, peer support, coaching/mentoring and coffee chats among the wonderful UX Researchers at IDC. And the knowledge sharing, resources, toolkits, templates etc. echo, shaping the research best practices across the company.
A Tale of Two Days
Picture this: April 24th and 25th — the global conference days. Across physical and virtual realms, 95 talks echoed. Topics ranging from methods, Copilot/AI-powered apps, empowering product teams, career growth, to AI-assisted user experience research, each talk was like a unique instrument creating a symphonic blend.
The India Chapter
It takes a village to plan, organize and host an event like this! The 4-hour India hub event had curated virtual and in-person sessions engaging over 80+ passionate minds. This magic couldn't have been possible without the enthusiastic volunteers who worked relentlessly behind the scenes!
The Keynote: 8 Dilemmas of UX Research and a Visionary Voyage of Predictions for the future
Serguei Endrikhovski, Partner UX Manager on the Azure Cloud Experiences weaved a tapestry of UX Research dilemmas and strategic foresight with predictions and possibilities that shape UX Research methods and practices in the years to come, in the backdrop of AI (r)evolution. From predicting an increase in strategic UX research, to the emergence of synthetic users to model the behavior of real users, Serguei immersed the audiences in a thought-provoking conversation during his keynote.
The Fireside Chat: Myths Shattered, Impact Amplified
Ankur Jhawar, Sonal Srivastava, and Debu Barve — 3 seasoned UX leaders at Microsoft India Development Centre (IDC) ignited the minds of audiences during a fireside. They unraveled the saga of UX research at IDC and delved into stories of UX Research impact across flagship products like Microsoft Kaizala, Office Web and Azure Core Compute at IDC. The fireside chat also busted some infamous myths and reinforced the importance of UX Research and customer insights driven decision making for tech products.
Lightening Talks: Measuring UX Quality at Scale, Synthetic users & AI Experiments
Satya Srivastava from the Office Product Group shared stories of her visionary discoveries on measuring UX quality through benchmarking in the Office web space for apps like Excel and PowerPoint web. Vishwam Rajagopal from the M365 core team engaged the audience with live demos of AI playground and experiments with synthetic users.
The Finale: UXR Leadership in India and a Glimpse of Tomorrow
Prachi Sakhardande hosted a panel discussion with various UXR Leaders from India adding sizzle to global products.
The UXR Day 2025 awaits — a blank score, waiting for beautiful minds to compose the next movement of UX Research (r)evolution at Microsoft, India Development Centre!
(23) Reflecting on a Successful Microsoft UXR Day, India! | LinkedIn
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