The Impact of Customer Connection Programs: A Study in Focus
By: Lee Dicks Clark
Tags: Research And Insight, User Experience, Technology, Design, Microsoft

Research has shown it takes 23 minutes to return to peak focus after we experience a distraction. That means every interruption to a person’s focused time costs them nearly half an hour. It’s no wonder, then, that helping people find the right balance between maintaining focus and keeping up with important information has become an emphasis across Microsoft and the tech industry.

Here at Microsoft, we see this emphasis emerging in many ways, including recent innovations to Microsoft 365 capabilities:

Windows notifications can be managed directly from the pop-up.

Focus plan in My Analytics helps people carve out regular time for uninterrupted work.

Scheduled focus time in Outlook cues Teams to display your status as “focused,” pausing notifications there.

As a principal program manager leading development of the Focus Assist feature, I’m familiar with the 23 minutes statistic, along with research about focus and distraction that Microsoft has been working on for many years.

But through our guided customer connection program, I discovered that conducting studies has a far more profound impact on a person’s sense of investment and empathy with customers than reading reports.

Our program helped me understand customer needs more fully, informing improvements in our do-not-disturb feature and the larger Microsoft initiative to help people focus.

Getting started with training and research questions

As part of Microsoft’s drive toward customer obsession, I and the other PMs in the organization attended a research training immersion. The researchers introduced us to the program’s hypothesis-driven framework and offered to guide us through our own studies.

The team was working on research-informed solutions to help people manage the flow of information in their lives. We wanted to understand customer pain points from an experiential perspective and assess whether we were on track, solving the right problems, so we set out to answer a few human-centered questions:

What frustrates people when they’re trying to focus? Which circumstances most require focus? What new information do people find it frustrating to miss?

In the first phase, centered on problem discovery, our research program helped us establish four hypotheses that we would test by talking to customers. Some of these focused on managing information and interruptions:

Many Windows customers are most frustrated about effectively managing the increasing influx of information and interruptions they get from people, services, and apps because of the lack of effective ways to control and triage them.

Others centered around completing a task:

Many busy people who are trying to complete a task that they care about are frustrated by irrelevant interruptions that distract them.

All of our hypotheses focused on problems and pain points, allowing us to surface our expectations and test them, rather than carry them into the solution phase as latent assumptions.

Customer insights and empathy in the problem phase

Next, we framed interview questions to test our hypotheses. It was essential to have some formal structure and guidance at this point, to help us articulate questions in a way that was neutral and not leading.

Heading into the interviews, our guide also coached us on how to listen, pausing and asking open-ended follow-up questions to draw out more insight from customers.

Our first round of interviews supported our hypothesis that people wanted an easier way to handle information and interruptions. We also learned that the customers we talked to would like to be able to interact and engage with relevant notifications more.

Some of our findings led us to a broader understanding of customers’ needs and pain points. For example, while work-related tasks emerged as the most crucial for focus, participants routinely brought up gaming and movie watching as tasks for which they wanted to quiet the noise. Customers also cited people and their surrounding environment as some of their biggest sources of distraction.

As we talked with customers, listening to their concerns, I felt the power of their stories in a way I hadn’t expected. One mother I spoke with was trying desperately to support her kids while making as much quality time with them as possible. At work, she would end up bringing her laptop in the bathroom because it was the only place where she could get focused time away from coworkers. As she spoke about her fight to manage her time, she started to cry.

Now whenever I think about the value of those 23 minutes a person loses when they’re distracted, it’s not just a statistic. It’s about this human being, and others like her, whose time is priceless.

Concept-phase interviews and solutions

Actively listening to customers is a great springboard for new ideas. In the next phase of our study, the team formulated four new hypotheses around solutions that might meet the needs we’d surfaced.

To test our solution hypotheses, we created new interview questions and sketched four low-fi concepts representing potential solutions. Of these, customers strongly preferred the solution which would allow them “to easily set up both your digital and physical environments in a way that meets your focus needs, so you can get things done.” When in focus mode, devices and software such as Skype and Teams would show as busy.

After we prioritized our concepts, other studies were conducted to refine features and prototypes. In 2018, Windows overhauled its previous do-not-disturb feature, which had simply blocked all the noise, rebranding the improved version as Focus Assist. This solution uses smart filtering governed by automatic rules that allow for Windows notification suppression in the following contexts:

When you’re in a meeting, sharing your screen

At recurring times of day that you can define

When you’re gaming or watching a movie (in full-screen mode)

In the default setting of focus mode, only messages sent with a priority will break through, but customers can designate who breaks through at any time.