Austina De Bonte

Biography
Austina De Bonte started her interest in social software at the MIT Media Lab’s Epistemology and Learning Group, where she investigated online social learning environments for kids with mentor Amy Bruckman. After graduating from MIT with Masters and Bachelors degrees in Computer Science, Austina joined Microsoft to bring her ideas to consumers worldwide. At Microsoft she designed the v1 user experience for MSN Communities, then went on to join the MSN Messenger team shortly after its launch in 1999. Since then Austina has been proud to work on the #1 instant messaging service in the world (if not in the US just yet). Austina spends most of her time thinking about user experience and the delicate balance between adding features and maintaining a straightforward, highly usable, and emotionally satisfying UI.

Position Paper
Here are a few questions that are top of mind for me these days:

• What is the “next big thing” in social technology to get broad consumer adoption? We’ve had the Internet, e-mail, IM, mobile phones. What’s next? Is it sharing photos? Video calling? Social networks? Blogging? Something brand new?
   
• As people’s IM contact lists are exploding in size, how should we adapt the UI and user model to accommodate?
   
• How do we maintain the balance between adding features that customers ask for, at the same time keeping the simple and lightweight UI they expect from instant messaging?

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