Amidst the allure of algorithms and the promise of automation, let‘s never forget the cornerstone that lends gravity to our craft: out focus on the human experience and our ability to evolve.

Microsoft's largest showcase and celebration of creativity, inclusivity, and development.

Design Week 2024

Building products that feel unmistakably Microsoft as a mean of cross-platform coherence.

Simone Magurno

Principal design manager

Timothy Achumba

Principal product designer

Fluent Signature Experiences

Natasha Jen

Senior designer

Culture x Design Keynote

We've spent the last two years collaborating closely to evolve Microsoft Teams to the Fluent Design System. While the journey has been long, and is still not yet complete. We'd love to share how we've transformed Teams and our philosophy for how we use Fluent across platforms as our vanilla base. Following the Fluent principle "Natural on every platform" we've been working on an approach for where and how we optimize for native OS experiences such as Fluent Windows and MacOS.

Kay Davis

Daisy Geng

WTF Does My App Have to do with Fluent

Join us for a talk on Fluent Expression, the intersection of personality and artfulness at Microsoft. Professionalism is constantly evolving as technology innovates, making expression a critical tool for building consumer grade products and is essential to helping our users feel at home in our products. Expression gives our brand and products that same opportunity— to be authentically Microsoft and unmistakably Fluent.

Alexis Copeland

Principal Creative Director

Claire Anderson

Principal art director

Fluent Expression: The Art of Infusing Joy into Microsoft 365

Joe MacLeod

I'll address the hard effort that goes into great content design and suggest ways to help content designers get a stronger voice and much-deserved role in the product design process.

Erica Jorgensen

Author

How to Bring Voice and Visibility to Content Design

Moment Makers: How to win over your Product Teams and build a customer-driven culture - Travis Lowdermilk, a UX Researcher in the Developer Division and co-author of the book "The Customer-Driven Culture: A Microsoft Story", will share the lessons he's learned in developing a Customer-Driven program within his organization. The key insight? UX researchers have an incredible opportunity to create powerful moments that not only empower their product teams, but also showcase the true impact of UX research within their organization. Join Travis to learn specific strategies to create pivotal moments of learning and customer connection with your product teams, while also earning their trust and respect in the process.

Travis Lowdermilk

MDC22 co-chair, principal UX researcher

Moment Makers:  How to win over your Product Teams

Jonathon Colman

Content Design Keynote

Proving the ROI of content design through AB testing and content metrics.

Sheila O'Hara

Principal content experience manager

Seth Olgesby

Senior content designer

Measuring the Impact of Content Design

A talk focused on Latin America, reflecting on the pandemic and the last year and a half, and the social systems that brought us here, wrapping up with some lessons we can take from it all and the role 'diseño' can have in it.

Designing the Future of Latin America

Framer’s feature set has grown exponentially over the past year. In this demo, we’ll take you through a new feature-set focused around building interactive components. We’ll showcase not just how to create these, but also the many different ways you can integrate these in your workflow at Microsoft.

Viktor Renkema

Product specialist

What’s New with Framer

In Ethics & Society, we are committed to building technology that helps us how move from a probable future to a preferable future -- especially taking into consideration why AI is different in speed and scale. To do that, we are intentional in asking a wider range of questions about how our work impacts people, cultures and societies. In this session we’ll share some of the tools, methods and mindsets that the Ethics & Society team uses to shape conversations in product development -- and examples of how we've done this. We’ll also offer practical tips for incorporating ethical thinking into your design process.

Mira Lane

Partner director

Jenny Williams

Senior Content Designer

Karen Chappell

Senior visual designer

Designing for the Intersection of Society and Technology

How can Designers Accelerate a Customer-Driven Culture? - Beyond talking to customers, what else drives a customer-driven culture? What do mature customer-driven teams look like? How can Design accelerate change? These are some of the questions that informed our E+D Customer-Driven Maturity Model. This research-based model spans 9 dimensions, each with their own blockers and accelerators. And to bring this model to life, we’ve also created a “how customer-driven is your org? quiz.” Respondents learn how their org scores overall (early, progressing, and advanced) and the area they scored the lowest which we frame as the biggest opportunity (customer voice, ways of working, leadership & values). In this session, we’ll share an overview of how we built the model, blockers/ accelerators for each area, and the ways we’ve used the quiz to educate E+D leaders.

Hilary Dwyer

Principal user researcher

Sheila Anderson

Principal PM manager

How Designers can Accelerate Customer-Driven Culture Change

Sara Hallin Sandstrom

Designing the future of immersive collaboration.

Ryan Hoback

‘Meshing’ Around

Hybrid meetings aren’t a new phenomenon, but the way in which we approached hybrid in the past, with the power residing mostly with those in the conference room, will no longer be acceptable. We must break from our past behaviors and shift toward the New Hybrid.  This will involve being very intentional about approaching our devices and infrastructure in an inclusive, accessible way.  How can we achieve a common quality of experience where all participants are full enfranchised with full access and presence despite the diversity of our interactions, including differing quality and scale of technology solutions, geography, role, meeting types, space, etc.?

Bill Buxton

Partner researcher

Equitable Meetings in the New Hybrid

As Microsoft continues to grow and diversify, how can we create continuity and quality in the experiences we create? We’re here to talk about our Fluent product design principles—critical tools we believe offer this guidance and alignment. Join us to learn more about our approach and how you can help.

Jennifer Bost

Principal content design manager

Anna Gregory

Strategist, planner

Fluent’s Principled Approach to Product Design

When we consider tools we use for meetings today, most are optimized for either fully remote work (all participants joined remotely via personal devices) or a hub and spoke hybrid configuration (local participants in a well-outfitted conf room with audio and a large shared screen + a few remote participants on personal devices). When we think about our hybrid future, our tools will need to adapt to changing workspaces and non-traditional meeting configurations. This can include meeting in outdoor spaces, open studio environments, on an outdoor job site, a medical clinic, or a manufacturing floor, and a variety of devices to optimize efficiency and inclusivity. How can we best adapt our collaboration tools and experiences to fit these ways of working in a hybrid future?

Ginger Hudson

Principal UX research lead

Outside the Conference Room – Hybrid Collaboration Involving Non-traditional Spaces and Physical Objects

So you're going back to the office (but your colleagues are not). This talk will give a few tips and suggestions for running hybrid meetings with inclusively.

Chad Voss

Tips for Better Hybrid Teams Meetings

The representation of cultural trends & expressions - What does expression look like across Windows, Office, and Teams.

Jason Custer

Sam Cundall

Principal designer

Mike Lajoie

Designer

Judy Safran-Aasen

Program manager 2

Pecha Kucha - Emoji Evolution

Dylan Romero

Principal Content Design Manager

Fragile Attention Economy

Recap of the year, our impact and influence of BDAM across Microsoft.

Terell Cobb

Principal Design Manager

Cherian Porter

Lex Barbosa

UX OPS program manager 2

ZoÃ« Ene

Designer 2

BDAM Year in Review (Impact, Convos, Internal, Highlights)

Design is everywhere, but for African-American and Latino youth, the journey to a design career can be overwhelming. Limited access and too few opportunities prevent the majority of these youth from even beginning the journey. My research explores diversity in design disciplines and investigates fifteen strategic ideas to expose African-American and Latino (AA&L) youth to design-related careers.

Dr. Jacinda Walker

Founder & Creative Director

Closing the Diversity Gap: Understanding the Design Journey

Design always has the challenge of subjectivity. We focus on user experience, storytelling, and emotional connections to pitch design ideas. They often can be counter by engineering teams through numerics, physics, and data.
This is the beginning of how we can begin to qualify the emotion and begin to put the science and data behind the design experiences we create.

Ivana Ilic

Human factors engineer

Kelsey Pagorek

Science Behind Design

Cayla Dorsey

Content designer 2

Megan Brown

Design researcher 2

Sushma Praveen

Amy Keeney

Principal Content Designer

Content Design for Children’s Privacy

(A) Gamers - It all starts with content.
(B) Devices - Purpose built Hardware.
(X) Services - Reaching more people on more devices in more ways.
(Y) Culture - Designing products that bridge gaming culture with Xbox and games.

Carl Ledbetter

Partner Director of Design

Monique Chatterjee

Senior Design Director

Elliott Hsu

Principal Designer

Elie Ahovi

Senior designer 

Ryan Whitaker

Principal Designer 

Chris Kujawski

Pecha Kucha - Xbox

Herman Marin

Co-founder

Adaptability: The Skill for an Every-Changing Future of Work

AI Empathy - AI engineers often don’t fully understand the needs and mindsets of our users. In order to create the best human-centered AI experiences we need to find a way to bring UXR closer to the people who actually build it. This presentation will share one fun way of doing this – a workshop that helps engineers and other functions understand user perceptions of AI. We will also cover the steps it took to get there, the design framework we developed and how we are trying to create a culture of empathy for our users and a deeper understanding of the limitations of AI.

Carolyn Chang

Principal user experience researcher

Christine Liao

Product design manager

AI Empathy

Design critiques are one of my favorite rituals we have on our design team at Figma. Excited to share with you how we use a variety of tools and methods to encourage healthy feedback cycles between designers and their work. FigJam in particular has unlocked all sorts of new ways to collaborate — get an inside look at how we design Figma and FigJam using… Figma and FigJam.

Noah Levin

Design director

Design Crits + Figjam = ❤

Learn the best practices for how you can best access and leverage the Fluent Design System in your designs with the Fluent UI toolkits.

Eric Freistadt

Product designer

How to Use Fluent UI Kits (Internal Only)

In order to achieve design excellence, the craft and polish of beautiful design often takes a lot of painstakingly detailed effort - however, strategic automation and engineering can sometimes help save time and make design scalable.

Alice Ferng

Director of Innovation & Technology

There’s a Figma Plugin for That: How Design Engineering Elevates and Automates Design

Interested in hearing about some of the exciting Figma and FigJam roadmap features planned for the second half of 2021?!

Sho Kuwamoto

Director of product

What’s New with Figma + Figjam

Tricia Wang

Research Keynote

Rachel Gogel

Stuart Getty

Brand strategist and author

The Future Will Have No Binaries

Voice and tone principles and why humor is a poor choice.

Jonathan Foster

First Rule of Humorous UX: You’re not funny

The digital divide is a critical factor in education, but there are also ripple effects to consider when referencing the impact on a student’s community of support. Although this is a complex, multidisciplinary issue to solve, there are proactive measures that we can take as a design community to reduce our contributions to the digital divide. Nelson uses a few key examples from the parent and guardian features in EDU that were used in the design process and explains how taking a neutral stance on this topic can work against equity.

Nelson Rozo

Product Designer 2

Fighting the Digital Divide

As much as it is important to light up new and relevant value for our users, equally important is the need to help them discover and realize this value. Several team across Microsoft have been working in this area. The Discovery and user nurturing V-team effort was kicked off last year to bring these teams/individuals together and work as one team to identify secular UX patterns around value and feature discovery. The V-team went on to create a set of guidelines and UI components for mobile and proposed a framework to choose the right one during design execution.

Amit Singh

Venkat Gopal

Being Better Together – Driving a Successful V-team

Join me to discover how we built the Teams Platform Fluent UI Toolkit, its importance to Teams’ 1st and 3rd party partnerships and key learnings that can help guide you on how to build similar design systems and work programs for your product or business area.

Alex Powell

Building the Teams Platform Fluent UI Toolkit

Innovation is critical to a company’s survival and growth. Yet, most companies lack a clear strategy for innovation. Challenges arise and tensions build when companies are pulled into the demands of the present while planning for the future. Companies need a way to future proof their business and develop a strategy to strengthen their core business while creating new adjacent and transformational opportunities.
In this talk we will introduce Customer-Driven Innovation, an approach to help organizations drive innovation through learning. We will walk through the three learning approaches that allow organizations to innovate in a continuous and collaborative manner enabling them to 1. Learn by asking the right questions; 2. Learn from people and learn by making; 3. Learn by balancing a healthy portfolio of core, adjacent, and transformational opportunities.
Join this talk to see how you, as a UX Practitioner, can help your organization drive innovation and plan for an uncertain future.

Jessica Rich

Principal UXR

Customer-Driven Innovation: Driving Innovation Through Learning

Josh A. Halstead

Kaleena Sales

Leslie Xia

Valentina Vegara

Ellen Lupton

Design Justice Keynote

Content designers (and UX writers, content strategists, etc.) seem to be very in demand right now. But where did they come from? What did they study? How did they break into the business? Keri Maijala, manager of the Content Design team at LinkedIn, leads the team in a discussion about the experiences and choices that led them to content design.

Keri Maijala

Content design manager

Lauren Camera-Murray

Staff content designer

Matt Hayes

Tamara Llosa-Sandor

Content designer

The not-so-standard career path of the content designer

If we’re truly going to empower everyone on the planet, we have to consider the needs of the neurodiverse community. In this session, we’ll show the results of a comprehensive research effort to understand the needs of neurodiverse users, and the guidelines we created for better, more inclusive designs.

Noah Bond

Senior UX researcher

LinkedIn Talent Marketplace

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Speaker's Sessions

Lessons in building an inclusive research community of practice

Overview