Drew Voegele

Leading a highly talented multi-disciplinary Design organization tasked with delivering world class experiences for Microsoft's Azure Data organization: database platform, governance, and intelligence. Our portfolio of products includes SQL Server, Purview, Power BI, Synapse, Azure Data Factory, Power Query, and Kusto. These products and capabilities have now been integrated into a single platform, Fabric, weaving their value together for data developers to create enterprise solutions with their data. This role is as much about fostering culture, inclusion, collaboration, and team connectedness as much, as it is about design leadership by focusing on systems and processes for empowering the team to learn, grow, and make impact to the best of their potential. As the team has matured I have had the opportunity to engage more in ideation, methods for understanding UX health, and evangelizing critical user needs with my team as well as our PM and engineering partners.

Leading and managing the Power BI Design org across all of our offerings: Desktop, PowerBI.com, mobile, and integrated experiences. During this time, we were able to grow the team in not just numbers but balance of disciplines, providing more growth and impact opportunities for the team as well as developed into being critical partners for growth of the organization via new market opportunities. These efforts have resulted in consistent and significant growth in key satisfaction metrics in parallel with rapid growth in user adoption.

Studio X was a strategy design group within Cloud+AI that focuses on innovation and integration. Early efforts resulted in Power BI experiences seamlessly integrated with big screen and mixed reality hardware, such as Surface Hub and HoloLens. This work provided us the opportunity for horizontal collaboration across a variety of Microsoft design and engineering teams. In return, those efforts revealed insights and opportunities around harnessing the next generation of data an interactions. On the coattails of those insights, Studio X incubated and centralization the IoT and Blockchain design teams. These experiences codified the theme of our efforts around the vision of a platform that brings next-gen data and technology together with integrated enterprise experiences. In addition, Studio X was also the design team that brought the first iterations of the Cloud Collaboration Center to life!

My primary responsibilities are leading efforts in creating seamless experiences that connect cloud and on-prem environments, integrating experiences from an acquired company (Datazen) into the Reporting Services (RS) stack, and updating the UI and visualizations of RS to create consistency with the Power BI design language. Across the entire design organization I also lead alignment efforts to reflect user activities and goals, then leveraging that methodology to identify experience gaps across our product stack, communicating that information upwards for incorporation into future planning.

I was the UX design lead for Power BI Desktop, successfully delivering the organization's first end-to-end BI experience outside of Excel as well as incorporating a new design language based on Microsoft's most recent efforts. I worked with the leadership team, PM, and engineering to prioritize experiences, refine scenarios, track progress, assess success and make changes accordingly. In order to complete this work on time I lead a team of 6 designers, 5 of which I hired and onboard in that timeframe.

I was the UX manager of the design team for both Power Pivot and Power Query, helping designers work with PM and Dev in refining behavioral and experience requirements, style guide evolution and maintenance, and creating cohesion between our BI experiences. I worked with PM and engineering leads on planning and prioritization of feature creation as well as filling experience gaps. I was also the primary contact with the Excel team in an effort to make sure our experiences felt as if they came from the same team. In addition, I was the driver and primary designer of experience concepts that resulted in the creation of Power BI Desktop and PowerBI.com. I worked with other designers, PM, and engineering to incorporate their feedback and garner support. I also communicated these ideas upward which got the green light to move forward into productization.

As a UX designer on Power Query I drove behavioral and experience requirements, information architecture, user flows, contributed to the creation and management of the style guide, designed and evaluated telemetry, assessed and communicated research needs, and was the primary contact with our PM and dev teams. In addition I also lead, executed, and communicated concept designs that resulted in productization and continue to drive future experience planning.

I drove UX research planning and execution at both the strategic and tactical level for business intelligence experiences in Power Pivot, Power View, Analysis Services, and Reporting Services. My activities included site visits, usability studies, development of a benchmark program, telemetry design and analysis. I would also contribute high-level design as well as wire frames and full fidelity designs when needed. My work impacted experience requirements, work flow, information architecture, and UI.

I designed and conducted usability, benchmark, and telemetry based research as a contractor for Microsoft Game Studios and am credited on Mass Effect and Forza Motorsports 2. I also helped identify and filled gaps in various survey standardizations and procedural documentation. Mass Effect: Optimized combat controls, targeting, powers usage, squad controls, weapon selection, and context sensitive controls (i.e. cover system, item pickup), in addition, improved usability of menus and UI’s. Forza 2: Balanced Time Trials difficulty and progression by conducting research that resulted in perceptive and performance data that helped determine an appropriate challenge ramp.