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(opens in new tab)Yesterday in this space, you learned about the engineering (opens in new tab) behind Xim (opens in new tab), a free app from Microsoft Research that brings fun, interactive photo sharing to users of Windows Phones (opens in new tab), Android phones, or iPhones.
Developing a new app requires a mixture of skill sets, from those focused on the plumbing and interfaces, to others who work “higher up the stack,” focusing on how actual users can extract the most value in the shortest time.
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Sarah Needham works higher up the stack. In her first year as a user-experience designer with FUSE Labs (opens in new tab), she designed the Xim user interface, which offers an inviting experience based on plenty of research into how users interact with the app.
Needham, who is in Phoenix from Oct. 8 to 10 attending the 2014 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (opens in new tab), says the process of fusing the technology with appropriate design required a collection of distinct interpersonal and developmental skills.
“Collaboration and iteration within the FUSE team—and empathy for our users—transformed Xim into what you see today,” she says. “We took an amazing piece of engineering that pushed what it meant to share media and translated it into a snack-sized app that asks users to ‘share their photos, not their phone.’
“Getting to this place of focus involved running usability studies, rapidly prototyping UI elements, and fearlessly shifting our UX as we homed in on our goals.”
Needham is among the Microsoft representatives who are discussing Xim this week during the Grace Hopper conference, the world’s largest gathering of women technologists. She’ll be explaining how the app offers a synchronized experience for sharing photos in real time with multiple people, how only one person in a group needs to have Xim to enable the sharing, and how a cloud-based system ensures that the content expires after a while, so there’s no need to manage or store the photos once the Xim session ends.
She’ll also probably find herself telling her own story, which she describes in brief:
“My 28-year-long road to Seattle has been comprised of brief educational stops through Los Angeles, Boston, and Stillwater, Okla.,” she says. “In April 2013, I wrapped up my Masters of Fine Art in Media Design from the Art Center College of Design, where I focused on design’s fictions and critical interventions.
“How I landed in that world of fiction can be directly linked to my background in architecture, where I learned to question the world from all angles—literally.”
That passion for cultivated inquiry, it seems, is what prompted her to pursue her postgraduate career at Microsoft Research.
“There’s this lovely quote from Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There,” she says, “where the White Queen states, ‘Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast!’ I cite this quote when defining my practice and working style as a designer.
“The innovations and provocations that emerge out of Microsoft Research push the boundaries on what we understand as possible. To be a designer and contributor to the dialogue of research and engineering is one of extreme privilege and allows me to continue suspending my disbelief while collaborating on projects that look to the future and ask, ‘What if …?’”