Microsoft Academic Search - UX Research
Purdue University x Microsoft Research · 2017
Microsoft Academic Search is a Microsoft Research product. The following is a limited overview due to content restrictions.
The Short Version
Four-person research team embedded with Microsoft Research. Studied how academic researchers actually discover and navigate scholarly literature — behaviors that turned out to be largely invisible even to the researchers themselves. Findings directly informed the redesign of Microsoft Academic 3.0, which shipped in early 2018.
Microsoft Research needed a deeper understanding of how academic researchers actually find and use scholarly literature — not what they said they did, but what they actually did. Search behavior in this context is deeply habitual and largely unconscious, which makes it exactly the kind of problem that surveys and direct questioning can't answer. You have to watch.
I led contextual inquiry sessions with academic researchers — establishing rapport and guiding conversations to surface natural behavior rather than stated preferences. I also owned the visual presentation of our findings, developing the look and feel of deliverables presented directly to the Microsoft Research team. Additional methods included heuristic analysis, semi-structured interviews, and affinity diagramming.
Sponsored by Microsoft Research · Faculty Mentor: Dr. Colin Gray, Purdue University
Research Questions
How do experience level and field of study impact literature review process?
What commonalities and differences exist in the literature review process amongst experienced researchers?
How do experienced researchers identify papers outside their primary field of study?
What tactics do scholars use to identify related works for a paper?
How do librarians assist researchers in finding relevant information for their topic?
Our research methods included semi-structured interviews, contextual inquiry, and heuristic analysis. Combined findings were synthesized into three deliverables presented directly to the Microsoft Research team: user personas, a contextual inquiry report, and mental models mapping how researchers actually navigate the literature discovery process.
What I Learned
This project was an early lesson in the difference between what users say they do and what they actually do. Academic literature search is a deeply habitual, often invisible process — surfacing it required careful observation and interviewing techniques rather than direct questioning. Working directly with Microsoft Research sponsors pushed me to communicate findings at a level of rigor and clarity I hadn't been held to before, which shaped how I approach research reporting ever since.