It's very rare at companies to be able to focus on international UX research, but Miki Konno has had the opportunity several times and hopes that others can benefit from her research. One of the huge benefits of international UX research is that it can identify blocking issues with designs and plans that the product team is either unaware of or that they undervalue because they don't know the true severity or impact of these issues. With so much revenue coming from outside of North America, it is vital that Microsoft or any companies take a worldwide perspective in its UX research efforts. This talk briefly introduces how to initiate, plan, execute, and share the research for various disciplines.
Bio
Miki Konno is a senior user experience researcher in the Microsoft Bing Mobile & Map UX team. She holds advanced degrees in Human Factors Engineering and Organizational Psychology, and she has been in technology industry for the past 16 years. Miki started her UX research career as an intern at Honda in 1996, a navigation software project with the large scale automobile-simulations. She worked at Sony, Hewlett-Packard, and Nielsen-Norman Group before starting at Microsoft in 2005 in the Windows Media Center group. She also worked in MSTV, MSN, and DevDiv, before finding her current home in the Bing Mobile & Map team. Miki's current research focus is Bing Mobile Personas, UK Map research, BSeattle local app, Bing Mobile/ Maps Competitive Benchmark, Facebook Map apps, Mobile Computing research with MSR, Scenario-Focused Engineering, and others. She is also a frequent speaker about her other research areas: Developer Research, Agile UX Research practices, Multi-Media UX (TV & Video), and Web usability.
