Having completed a postgraduate in User Experience Design, I was fortunate to earn an Internship in Microsoft as a Design Program Manager. The role was with the Microsoft 365 Engineering team and the task was to review the design and functionality of a dashboard product to aid Microsoft Partners promote and increase implementation of Office Pro Plus software

Having worked in Web Production and Front End Development, my brief was to evaluate the product design calling on my previous experience and using current design principles. While wading through Marketing materials, technical specifications and style guidelines, I discovered a number of documented interviews with Microsoft partners. My initial thoughts were that they were informative and provided great background reading. As I was making notes, I realised that there was enough material with just enough structure to perform a qualitative analysis

Having familiarised myself with the interview data, I created and refined codes and themes until I had what I felt was a decent overview of the parters business needs, their pain points, their positive and negatives and wish lists. It made sense to me at this point to create a mind map to organise these findings and a list of insightful quotes

The advantage of having undertaken this analysis was that I felt like I had a much clearer overview of the business and the users. I also had enough data to create Personas and User Stories for at least 2 types of User, a Higher Level Sales Manager and a Technical Field Consultant.

Armed with the insights gained from the qualitative analysis, I revisited the initial design review. Not only was my understanding of the product greatly enhanced, I was full of ideas and suggestions as to how the screens could be redesigned with the users in mind. Some were minor tweaks in layout and organisation of data but I was also confident that I could present a number of significant changes that would enhance the product experience for the users and in turn benefit the goals of the organisation

I took the opportunity to create a functional spec for a new feature to promote business opportunities to partners and identify actions avail of these opportunities. This feature would take advantage of existing data but would highlight order to make the business opportunity more obvious to the business partner and this opportunity could be presented it with fewer clicks for the business partner.

Although, my initial deliverable for the internship was a design review for an existing product, I was delighted to extend this to include undertaking a qualitative analysis, persona creation and the delivery of a functional spec. I was also invited to present these findings at a department All Hands meeting which was a challenge I was both happy and apprehensive to accept

Reflections
While daunting to delve back into the workforce, it was surprisingly easy to adapt again. It was great to work with and learn from a talented team of people in a prestigious tech firm. As a woman returning to the tech space after so many years I was relieved to discover that many of the challenges exist in our minds. There is an undeniable amount of change in the technology that we deal with but it was reassuring that these challenges are very surmountable with training and working with great colleagues. But ultimately, the workplace and many of the practices are comfortably familiar and it is reassuring to know that we still have something to contribute