User Experience Research Case Studies
Over the course of about a decade, my employer Intel went through a rennaisance of sorts in committing to a more user-driven product development process across many of its businesses. I was fortunate enough to be part of that from the beginning, and helped build some of the basic capabilities for UX research at the company. For much of this time I supported the PC business with both foundational research, like the first two examples, and as UX became more embedded in the product development process in more UX evaluations.
Mixed Methods Research
PCs are for long, immersive sessions (ie work, gaming, creativity) and phones are used for quick “snacking” of information…this was the conventional wisdom for many years that informed many decisions at Intel, Microsoft and elsewhere on PC design…that is, until our team started to dig deeper into real-world user behavior.
Taking a Systems View of UX
In the Mac ecosystem, Apple’s vertical integration from hardware to software to distribution allows them to offer a mostly seamless user experience. In the PC ecosystem, Microsoft and Intel play that role, but the task of coordination across companies is much harder. In this project we uncovered quite a few “seams” in the PC user journey that prevented buyers from discovering and successfully adopting some new PC capabilities we’d recently released.
Building a Repeatable UXA Process
Its a challenging thing to introduce the discipline of user experience evaluation and testing to a company that historically has not considered UX in its criteria of launch readiness evaluation. My collegue and I were asked to develop such a process based on benchmarking of best practices.
Drone Software UX Evaluation
For a time, Intel was one of the top 3 manufactures of commercial drones, focused primarily on the market for aerial inspections (e.g., bridges, oil rigs, windmills). As part of the product offering, the team was developing software to support the workflow of aerial inspections including 3D modelling, fault detection, collaboration, and photo archiving. Here I was supporting the team with user testing of that software.