My Role

Design researcher

Story

As part of academic-industry collaborative project with Microsoft, I teamed up with my fellow students to conduct a qualitative research on the Information Workers understanding, their usage behviour, needs, goals and objectives. This project was a combination of both User centered and Activity Centered design approach with focus on design research.

There are three types of Information workers – Structured Task Workers – Business worker and Data Entry worker. We have interviewed all the three type of audience and observed usage patterns and the way they interact with the operating system in everyday environment. After identifying the pain areas and design opportunities, design concepts have been generated.

Some of the concepts are Skew Plane visualization of the desktop which would enhance the space utilization by accommodating more data in the available desktop real estate. The others are in the areas of folder management and touch screen interactions.