Design is considered to be a core enabler of both current and future success at Microsoft. The need to deliver consistently high quality products has led to the integration of design thinking into user-led product solutions, which has influenced the culture across Microsoft.
Key elements of this strategy include:
- The management led support for a focus on user experience as a key differentiating factor for Microsoft products and services going forward
- Integrating designers with product development teams, fostering an environment of efficient collaborative working
- The establishment of central excellence groups, such as the User Experience Excellence group, to gather and disseminate best practice
- The use of intranet tools and templates to deliver best practice methods to designers
- The development of techniques for communicating design principles across the business
- Extensive use of user research methods with tight integration of user experience and test activities with product development teams.
As the dominant player in several of its operating areas, Microsoft has a user base of more than a billion people and supplies products in 130 languages. Its products often become de facto standards and, as such, can generate strong, vocal criticism
The rapid pace of development in the software industry and the emergence of new ways of working, which emphasise flexibility and the ability to work on multiple devices in different locations over the traditional dominance of the desktop PC, are also putting pressure on Microsoft to continue to evolve its offerings to maintain its strong market position.
In its productivity tool markets, Microsoft must combine increasing product complexity and sophistication with the need to maintain usability and improve user experience. Its Word document-processing application, for example, had less than 50 individual menu items when it was first launched. Today, users can choose from nearly 300. This increase in complexity has required the development of different user interface paradigms.
The company also launches new products at an extremely rapid rate. It brings more than 200 new products to market every year, and over 360 internal product teams are also constantly engaged in a process of revising, improving and updating their products.
Thousands of companies also develop products for Microsoft platforms, and the company enters into collaborative relationships with a large number of other organisations.