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I am currently a user experience researcher at Microsoft, in the Surface tablet team. I was previously working in the Developers Division on a variety of things including the Team Foundation Server product for managing large software projects, the Windows 8 development experience, the C++ Developer experience, and the help and community experience. On this website, you will find information about my job as an academic researcher and as a user experience researcher and designer. You can check out the research section for details about my research projects, including my Ph.D. thesis (in English) and markerClock. You can also visit my publication section to know more about my published research work.

I live in the Seattle area and I am always interested to hear about exciting, innovative projects that need a user-centered perspective. If you want to have a broad overview of my past projects, you can visit my portfolio section describing some of my work in user experience and human computer interaction in general. Finally, you can visit my photography website to see some of my work in this area.

news

January 22nd 2013: Happy New Year!
This new year, I will apply myself to become a father (anytime soon). I am very excited about this prospect and I look forward to the challenge! I wish you all a happy new year and I hope it brings you both joy and fulfillment.

January 11th 2013: New team!
I am now working full time as a researcher on the Surface team, looking at current and future hardware consumer products.

July 12th 2010: User Experience Researcher at Microsoft
As of today, I have started working as a full-time user experience researcher at Microsoft. I am looking forward to this change of pace in my life. And oh! Yes! I have also moved in a new home in Seattle!

latest from UXSide.com

UX & the Local Help Viewer
21 Feb 2011
Product Units are so often caught up in results – details that add up to results, that sometimes we forget the value proposition of the bigger picture: the overall User eXperience (UX). At Microsoft, we are increasingly working with UX professionals [...]

UX is chaos--picking out work and seeing cross feature team opportunities
11 Jan 2011
In this blog, I am going to talk about the craziness of supporting multiple development teams. I am one UX researcher responsible for interjecting user centered design and design thinking, among other UX practices within an agile development process. I'll [...]

ux research and bad data – part one: recruitment
22 Dec 2010
One of the main role of the researcher, is to provide quality, reliable data to the product team. However, it is not quite as easy as it may seem. Researchers, for lack of appropriate information or skill, may be at risk of generating data lacking in q [...]

recent publications

Explanatory Debugging: Supporting End-User Debugging of Machine-Learned Programs Todd Kulesza, Simone Stumpf, Margaret Burnett, Weng-Keen Wong, Yann Riche, Travis Moore, Ian Oberst, Amber Shinsel, Kevin McIntosh, to appear at VL-HCC 2010 (IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing), 2010.

Hard-to-Use Interfaces Considered Beneficial (Some of the Time)
Yann Riche, Nathalie Riche, Petra Isenberg, Anastasia Bezerianos, to be presented at alt.chi at the CHI conference in Apr. 2010.

PeerCare: Supporting Awareness of Rhythms and Routines for Better Aging in Place
Yann Riche, Wendy Mackay, in the Springer Journal of Collaborative Computing 19(1), Feb. 2010.