Surya Vanka is a nine-year veteran of Microsoft where he oversees engineering standards to create products that provide customers with a high-quality user experience. He is responsible for ensuring the 600 design and user experience professionals spread across Microsoft remain at the cutting edge of research and design innovation, and that user needs rather than technology remain at the center of the company’s development process. A former professor of design (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and a Fellow at the prestigious Center for Advanced Study, he is also an author, award-winner, and commentator in various media.

 

 

 

he most successful businesses today are those that consistently create compelling end-to-end experiences that delight customers time and again. A closer look shows that many of these businesses have successfully evolved from being traditional engineering-centered or marketing-centered companies into experience-centered companies. Designers have an important dual role to play in helping shift this center of gravity so businesses are better informed and inspired by a deep understanding of their customers. In this session, Surya Vanka describes the evolution of the role of design at Microsoft.

 

Software products used by several hundred millions of users dispersed across hundreds of countries represent enormous scale and diversity. It would seem impossible task to capture a detailed and eloquent view of these users’ lives, and to empathize with their experiences. On the contrary, we are at an exciting tipping point in user understanding; we can see users’ behaviors, intents, successes, and emotional reactions in a truly scalable and interconnected way , and see the world through users’ eyes in ways previously unimaginable. Surya Vanka will describe how user research at Microsoft has developed ways to scale intimacy.