Transcript of Interview With Sayena Majlesein
Interview With Sayena Majlesein
This interview features Sayena Majlesein, senior design lead at Microsoft. You can watch it on Sayena’s profile page.
Transcript
– Welcome back to another one of the series of videos where I get a chance to interview one of the many speakers that will be participating at the Convey UX Conference coming up the last week of February. Today I am very pleased to be speaking with Ana Maj. Hello Ana. How are you today?
– I’m great. Thank you for having me.
– And I’m talking from my home office, which is in Bellingham, which is a bit north of Seattle where Blink has its headquarters office. Where are you talking to us from?
– I live in Kirkland. I’m very close to Microsoft campus, located at Redmond, you know, in the greater Seattle area, but right now I’m inside my living room working from home in Kirkland, Washington.
– Well, it’s good to have you as part of the program, and probably the best place to start is if you could tell us a little bit about your background and the types of things that you’re doing at Microsoft.
– Yeah, for sure. I have an undergraduate degree in computer science. I, for a very long period of time, I was doing a kind of a hybrid role between user experience design and software engineer. There are many titles for it. I think my first role was even like a UX engineer as I started, I was working in the startup industry, I think for over six years, and then since 2021 I joined Microsoft. Right now I am a senior design lead at Microsoft. Our org is called Sila. It stands for Corporate Legal and External Tools. It has a lot of different types of projects, including projects that are related to internal Microsoft tools for lawyers and legal experts, and it also includes philanthropy projects that Microsoft has, like the TEALS program, technology, education and Literacy for schools that are, you know, a lot of high schools all over the US are using it to teach, teach computer science. So I did that and then prior to joining Microsoft and in between my roles in a startup industry and then Microsoft, I did my master’s at the University of Washington in Human Computer Interaction and design. That’s a little bit about me. If you have any question, I would be more than happy to dive deeper into any of those, you know, areas.
– Oh, that’s a, that’s a great introduction to you and your work. It sounds like you’re, you’re really busy and you keep yourself busy. Yeah. Let me just ask you, you know, with the work that you’re involved in now, is there anything that you’re par particularly excited about or passionate about or has taken up a lot of your time right now?
– So, that’s a very good question. A lot of the things that right now are my area of focus or my passion are related to just chat GPT integrations and AI tools that have, you know, have been all over the place since I say like last year it’s been a very, very busy year for us in, in terms of defining the role of user experience designers and user experience researchers in the field, or even looking at how these AI tools are influencing and impacting accessibility design. How can they provide people with more options or with more incredible, incredible opportunities to, I to look at the word in a more, through a more inclusive lens. That’s one of my passions. I would love to learn about that. I think these tools are amazing in terms of that, but yeah, I’m just like, based on my topic and the thing that I’m gonna talk about is just one of the other areas of my passion is just understanding how these tools can scale on a, you know, in a, in a global kind of like level, not only for the users in the US or western countries that most of data that these AI models use in order to train with, but also for other countries that have less data, you know, that is available. How can we scale it considering all those cultural differences, how can we scale it and deal with the hallucinations or a lot of the biases that this
– Well,
– Yeah. Well let me, what is the role of designers in terms of, in terms of,
– Well I, AI is definitely one of the major themes of the conference and let me just say the title of your topic. Culturally inclusive AI Enhancing User Experience with Global Perspectives. So you already gave us a little bit of information about the background there. Maybe you tell me a little bit of, you know, how, how does it fit into Microsoft’s strategy, the work that you’re doing? Are you looking at a specific set of products or is it more broader about how Microsoft is doing things with global perspectives?
– It is a very good question. It’s not just within the Microsoft strategy. I think it’s something that any designer within this industry should also on a professional and individual level pay attention to. Because of the very fast pace of how these tools are being developed right now. It might be something that you start like not paying attention to and then be, becomes a bigger and bigger problem as these tools and products become global at Microsoft, you know, we are very much encouraged to think about all customers globally. We are very much encouraged to think about people with accessibility needs all the time when we are designing a solution. So I think this is really close to our heart, but in terms of the everyday work that I do, I just think of, when I think about the roadmap for all of these products, this part of thinking about how it’s gonna be culturally inclusive in the future is part of any roadmap that we design. It’s just part of any, any designer should pay attention to it. And I know it can be hard and challenging again because of how fast we’re moving, but it’s, it’s just amazing. Also, on a very personal note, I was born and raised in Iran, so I’m an immigrant in the us you know, it’s very important for me to talk, to talk about these things because I just have a very, very, I have, I have lots of interactions with people from different countries and it’s just, I feel like it’s just, you know, my responsibility to give back to society and think through that lens as well as my everyday work.
– Well, tha thanks for sharing that and, and telling us a little bit more about the work that you’re doing. I, when we were talking earlier, you also mentioned, well, you’d mentioned you, you know, as a designer, that you had some, you know, questions or thoughts about how a designer will be defining themselves moving forward in the, into the future. So maybe you could talk about that a little bit.
– Yeah, for sure. One of the reasons that I attend these conferences, and I really want to be close to the UX community all over the world, is because we are trying to define this new role of designers and researchers where some of our conventional processes in terms of like human-centered design approaches might not necessarily adapt to our new like agile way of working with these AI tools and designing them with these like consistent patterns for building ai. Now there is a huge opportunity to redefine these roles. So one of the things is I’m trying my best to figure out and learn whether it’s like prompt engineers or architecture architectural design or something else. What are these, what are these complimentary skills that we need to add to our own a skillset in order to be able to still be successful in our roles as UX professionals in this industry? I’m really hoping to even learn more about that in the com UX as I learned more about people’s projects and how they have adapted their roles in order to resolve some new challenges.
– Well, yeah, that sounds like a, a good topic for discussion at the event. Talking with others about that. One of the elements we have at the in-person, Seattle portion of the conference is a bookstore. We also have an online version of that bookstore. So I always like to ask if there are any books that you’ve read recently, something you might wanna recommend. It doesn’t have to be specifically in the UX area. Is there anything you wanted to mention?
– Yes, there is a non nuix related book, but I really recommend it to everyone. It’s called Outliers and I was looking up the writer, it’s Malcolm Gladwell and this is an amazing book. It talks about how certain people have been successful in, in the roles and talks about like internal and external factors that influence success. I really recommend that. It’s just really interesting to read the book even as it was written a a while back ago. But look at like all these things that is teaching you and just adapted to your everyday life right now.
– Well, I think that sounds like something interesting that we should add to our conference bookstore. Well, Sayena, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me here and look forward to seeing you at the conference in a few months.
– Yeah, thank you so much for the opportunity. I can’t wait to be part of that.
– Thanks a lot. Bye-Bye
– Bye.
