In celebration of Women's History Month, we are profiling a select group of women at Microsoft and examining what it means to be a woman in a technology career today. Check back each Monday in March to read a new profile.

A Philosopher Changes Her Stripes

Some people who are ready for a mid-life change might buy a sports car or change their hair color, but Connie Missimer made a radical career change. She went from dealing with the abstractions and rationalism of philosophy to the hard facts and empiricism of user experience (UX) research.

With a master's degree from the University of California, Berkeley, Missimer taught philosophy at Los Medanos College in the San Francisco Bay area for nearly a decade. She even wrote a textbook on informal logic in 1985, entitled Good Arguments, which is now in its fourth edition. However, when she and her husband, a neurobiologist, moved to Seattle in the 1990s, Missimer focused her career in a decidedly different direction. Today, in sharp contrast to her previous career, Missimer is a UX researcher in the Windows/Windows Live group at Microsoft.

"I was looking for a new challenge in my life," Missimer recalls. "I decided to switch to a career that's inherently empirical, because I realized that as a philosopher you can make the most artful and elegant of arguments, but at the end of the day you never bark your shins on the coffee table of reality and change course. Through my husband's work I saw how powerful empiricism can be."

While by day, she managed a business in which she presented seminars on effective writing to corporate professionals; in the evening, Missimer attended classes at the University of Washington (UW). "At UW, I fell upon a course in usability and decided almost immediately that this would be my new career path," remembers Missimer.

Three years later, Missimer received her second master's degree—this time, in the field of usability.

Slivers of Reality

"There's a key difference between UX research and philosophy," says Missimer. "Both involve building theories, but in UX, we arrive at our theories through experimentation and data collection."

Missimer quickly lists several varieties of UX research, including heuristic evaluations, cognitive walk-throughs, and rapid iterative tests. For some studies, she visits the homes or workplaces of her research subjects; for others, it makes more sense to conduct tests in one of the Microsoft usability labs. "Each method gives you a different sliver of reality," she notes.

"There's nothing like data," Missimer continues. "People can argue their heads off—and as a philosopher I got pretty good at that myself. But at the end of the day, if you have six out of eight users who can't find a certain function on their computer screens, that's a pretty powerful argument that the layout of the screen should be changed before the product is released."

When she visits the workplaces or homes of her research subjects, Missimer acts like an anthropologist; she sits quietly and unobtrusively takes notes about new product opportunities while the subjects go about their daily lives. When she is in the lab, she tests features that are in development; her goal is to determine what users like, how much trouble they have, and what specifically causes them difficulties. A problem could be caused by something as simple as an on-screen icon that is difficult for the user to locate or user confusion over the meaning of a term.

"Sometimes you're really tempted to jump in and say, 'Just click here!' You have to suppress those urges."

What Customers Want

After she graduated from the University of Washington, Missimer put her newly developed skills to use at two technology start-up companies in the Puget Sound (Washington) area. At one company, she helped turn a large, unwieldy product into something more marketable.

According to Missimer, product developers commonly include as many new features as possible in a new product—based on the erroneous assumption that a product with more features is worth more to users.

Missimer first began working at Microsoft as a contractor. She conducted a study of the proficiency tests that were used at that time to gauge students' skill levels with Microsoft Office applications after they completed training programs.

The first thing she did was take the Microsoft Office Word proficiency test. "I flunked it," Missimer admits. "This surprised me. I had been using Word for 12 years and considered myself rather proficient. So I had some other experienced users take the test, and they all flunked it as well."

"This forced me to think more deeply about what people do when they use an application like Word. If you asked me, for example, how to add a German umlaut to a word, I couldn't tell you, but if you told me to actually do it, it wouldn't take me long at all."

Missimer discovered that a person's ability to perform functions quickly in Office Word predicts their success on the job more accurately than their ability to memorize the Word drop-down menus. Because of her research, the tests that were part of that course were completely revised.

Since she joined Microsoft as a full-time employee in 2003, Missimer has conducted UX research studies for the Tablet PC and Windows groups. She recently introduced Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation (RITE) into the mix of usability research methods in the Windows/Windows Live group. The RITE method involves changing the user interface as soon as an issue is identified and a solution is clear, rather than continuing to test an interface you have already learned is faulty.

Two Screens are Better than One

Missimer considers herself an innovative thinker, and those who know her work would be hard-pressed to disagree. In fact, she has won a Microsoft innovation award.

She bases her ideas on a solid foundation of underlying logic—as you might expect from the author of a book on rational thinking. The first thing one notices upon entering her office at the Microsoft Redmond, Washington, campus, is that she has two computer monitors on her desk. "I read that for people who frequently need to jump between multiple windows on their computers, having two screens increases productivity by 30 percent," she explains. "I'm always looking for novel ways to improve on the user experience."

Missimer's interest and exceptional intellect can be stimulated by a variety of subjects, including medical research. About two years ago, she read a report on the ability of dogs to detect lung and breast cancer by smelling the breath of human patients. The claim intrigued her, and she read some of the research papers on the subject. "It turns out that dogs, thanks to their super-sensitive sense of smell, can detect volatile organic compounds that are exhaled only by people with certain forms of cancer," she relates.

Missimer is now proposing the creation of a national canine cancer-detection training program, analogous to the programs that raise and train Seeing Eye dogs. "You could have booths at large public events where people could get screened for free, just as we have blood pressure screening kiosks today," she suggests.

Unable to resist the pun, Missimer calls it a "Lab" test, short for Labrador Retriever (a breed of hunting dog).

"People don't tend to associate dogs with health care. But I've done a lot of work on the history of ideas, and one of the things I've learned is that many major discoveries sounded counterintuitive when they were first proposed, from Darwin's ideas on evolution to the notion that seatbelts could save lives. It took a ton of empirical evidence to convince the masses that these ideas had merit."

Missimer demonstrates the kind of innovative thinking that Microsoft values in its employees. And Microsoft customers could not ask for a better advocate who works on their behalf in the company's software design process.