Today, Microsoft is the world's largest supplier of operating system and productivity software and has greatly expanded its product offering to include a broad range of software for business and home use, as well as products for the video games and mobile technology markets
Microsoft’s new product development cycle will usually begin with a need identified by product planning or user research teams. These needs emerge as a result of extensive market and consumer research, conversations with customers and extended user research ranging from exploratory field research to usability lab studies to identify currently unfulfilled needs and opportunities.
A key element in the new ‘user experience’ paradigm, which draws heavily on the input of design methods, is that technology has moved away from being at the centre of the design process. Development teams proceed on the assumption that a technological solution to a given problem will be available, but the trigger to begin the development of such a solution has to be an identified and well-understood user need.
A user-centric product development cycle
According to Surya Vanka, Head of the User Experience Excellence group, Microsoft’s new product development adheres to a five step cycle:
Understand - A phase of research and information gathering intended to give designers a deep insight into the real needs, motivations and issues among the product’s users. This phase often results in initial key observations: the ‘ohs!’
Envision - In this phase designers are encouraged to think broadly about what they might offer the users based on what they learned during the Understand phase. This phase often results in new insights and conceptual breakthroughs: the ‘ahas!’
Specify - In this phase designers and other members of the product development team establish a detailed specification for the product they intend to deliver
Implement - The process of delivering a working product. A successful culmination of the Specify and Implement phases often produces ‘wows!' from the customer
Maintain - Software products undergo continuous evolution as new needs emerge, new capabilities are added and the wider environment changes. As a consequence, a product’s design team will have continual input into modifications throughout a product’s lifetime.
Project management
Multi-disciplinary teams and working is equally prevalent in the general project management of a design project. Periodic design cycle meetings allow the full range of project stakeholders to look at progress and check if a proposed design meets all the project’s business goals. The whole development team attends these meetings, ensuring that they have a clear understanding of business requirements as well as user needs.
Evaluation
Ultimately, says, Kikin Gil, design is integrated so tightly with the rest of the product development process at Microsoft, that it is difficult to evaluate its impact separately. Nevertheless, the company makes extensive use of measures of product satisfaction and adoption rates as a key indicator of user experience success. On the principle that users who enjoy their interaction with a product or service will return to it, says Kikin Gil, this measure gives a robust indication of the success of the user experience design.
Testing
Once a proposed solution to a problem has been identified, this is prototyped quickly and taken to user test for evaluation. User testing is absolutely critical to product development at Microsoft. ‘Our internal audience is hungry for user research as it proves product relevance,’ says Kikin Gil. The company’s user experience function is thought to be the third largest in the world, with more than 45 separate user experience teams and there is a total staff of more than 550 within these teams globally. This includes both designers and user researchers.
User experience teams will test prototyped products with sample user groups. They will also contribute to the design process at earlier and later stages through ongoing testing of existing products and long term beta test programmes with expert users. User experience teams across Microsoft will also be closely involved with new target markets, helping to determine the characteristics of particular new user groups, and assessing the impact of existing and proposed products in that context.
Microsoft has made strenuous efforts to make user testing feedback available as widely as possible throughout the organisation. Most user testing sessions can be viewed and accessed remotely via video link. Any observation of user testing in progress will be supplemented by a formal report on the outcomes from the user experience team, and the outcomes and other insights from this process will be fed back into the next round of product development.
Some of the general principles and approaches typically used by user experience teams at Microsoft include the following:
1. Design decisions should be based on deep evidence of actual user behaviour, not assumptions on the part of the development team.
2. Products must be able to scale to billions of users worldwide without losing intimacy with individuals.
3. New paradigms are often essential to solve very different and far more complex new problems.
4. Microsoft has a responsibility to help users learn and adapt to the new interfaces that it introduces.
5. Continuous feedback from users forms a virtuous circle, helping to improve product performance, product team empathy and product quality.
6. Bringing the user into the development process in tight iterative loops can deliver new insights. This type of approach is increasingly popular in the computer game space, where users can take an active role in shaping future products.
7. Simplicity is difficult to achieve, but worth striving for.
Design development of MS Office 2007
Microsoft recently saw its efforts in user-centred design translated into the successful update of one of its core software packages, namely MS Office 2007
Since its initial launch in 1989, there have been several iterations and re-designs of the MS Office software. However, the launch of Windows 2007 in 2006 included the revised edition of MS Office products. This was a turning point because it implemented a substantial design shift rather than a small incremental change. In many ways this represents the centrality of design to the product development process at Microsoft.
For this major new version of Office, Microsoft’s product team recognised that it had a major opportunity to drive the user experience forward, but that it also had to manage the experience and expectations of millions of users of the existing product.
Previous design changes to Office had been smaller iterations, conscious of user aggravation at changing functions and capabilities. However, faced with quantitative data that suggested that people were having usage problems and that Office purchases were trailing off, the development team, led by Brad Weed, established a set of design tenets to underpin the re-development of Office. These were:
- A sense of ‘mastery’
- People should be able to focus on the content they’re working on in Office, and not on user interface. The design of Office should help people work without interference
- Choices should be reduced to increase the user’s sense of mastery
- The efficiency of access to features should be increased
- The soul of the programme should be brought out and embrace consistency rather than homogeneity
- Features should be given a prominent home in a consistent location rather than activate a ‘smart’ user interface that guesses what the user needs
- Straightforward is better than clever – and promotes the feeling that this is still Microsoft Office.
- Taking the ‘big bet’- making a big change is difficult, but must be done
- Trust in users to learn a new way of working
- You must remove to simplify
The resulting design of these principles is felt to have delivered a product that feels ‘different but familiar’. The development of Office 2007 took place between 2003 and 2006 and involved over 1,000 people at Microsoft. In addition, it involved more than 200 users who spent more than 400 hours with the new interface testing the experience of almost 30 new core tasks.