Microsoft makes extensive uses of tools to assist its designers in adopting best practice. A full time, three person ‘practices harvesting team’ works to identify and distribute best practices as they emerge. These practices are reviewed and included in a comprehensive methods bank, giving designers access to a broad range of tools.
The company has a User Experience Handbook, which is a frequently updated internal microsite containing details of current best practices in user experience design. The site is created and moderated by the User Experience Excellence group but can be contributed to by designers and researchers alongside their work, which further enhances the collaborative nature of the Microsoft working environment.
Extensive work has also been conducted to ensure that designers, software engineers and business teams have a common language with which to discuss product developments. The product development teams, which include designers, also has regular meetings to formally share best practices and research findings with each other.
Erez Kikin Gil, Product Design Lead for the Windows Live Web Communications product team, explains that Microsoft’s overall user-centric product development cycle is supported by with some practical design principles, often visually represented by diagrams or icons.
This is one of the underlying principles behind all Microsoft design activities. Following that principle is design for user emotions. Designing for both simplicity and emotion produces an experience that is efficient as well as user-friendly. These two reinforce each other as simplicity makes room for emotion and emotion influences the perception of simplicity.
The principle is that ‘delight’ and ‘simplicity’ follow on from each other. In designing their Mobile Messenger product, the web communications user experience team took this principle to heart, employing a range of methodologies in the lab to access users’ emotions and reactions to specific visual and interaction design concepts while balancing it with their need for simplicity on the mobile device.
They compared user reactions and statements to the designers’ explicit goals and analysed the different emotions each design connoted, ranging from more angular and boxy designs that were perceived as safe and secure, to more light-infused designs that were perceived as fun, playful and personal. They then compared this to usability results around simplicity and ease of use, and chose the designs that were the best balance of the two.
Designing software according to the way a user works is critical to the success of the web communications team.
Erez Kikin Gil uses the Edo clock, a timekeeping device that was used in Japan from the 17th to 19th century, as a great example of a people-centric design.
Unlike the Western analogue clock, the Edo clock showed the relative hours of daylight throughout the year. For people who rely on light, this technology and interface provided a clear way to manage their life and work.
‘So if you think about the way we design software today, says Kikin Gil, ‘instead of designing software that will make users adopt tools, we are designing software that adopts to the way the users work and perceive the world. ‘
This approach can be seen in design decisions the web communications team made for their latest release of Windows Live Hotmail. The team learned that while some users preferred to use checkboxes to successfully manage their mail, others wanted a system that was similar to Outlook. As a result flexible options were created for users to choose the interface that works best for them.
In more depth Read about the benefits of
user research within the design process
This approach also focuses on simplification - this time about simplifying the options that are presented to users.
Choices are an important part of the experience design - narrowing choices to the absolute minimum makes it easier for users to make decisions which help them continue their interaction smoothly - instead of making the interaction about the selection process itself.
As Erez Kikin Gil explains it, this process is about ‘looking at what you’re designing and asking yourself, will the user be able to find what is bad or wrong here?’ This, he says, needs to be a yes or no question: ‘Is it an angel, is it a devil?’
For example, the web communications user experience team applied this holistic design principle when thinking about the best way to help users recognise and delete harmful messages from their Inbox.
Rather than providing five different choices for deleting, reporting, adding to contact list, and so on (and ultimately confusing users with all of the options), they chose to focus the user on one simple yes/no decision at a time. So if they are told ‘You do not know this sender’ they are given just two options: ‘Mark as Safe’ or ‘Mark as Unsafe’.
If the sender is unsafe, the Microsoft design team decided that all of the deleting and reporting of spam email addresses could be done at the back-end - so the users’ steps to solve the problem were minimised to the one yes/no decision.
As part of their process, designers at Microsoft are encouraged to ‘eat their own dog food’ or ‘dogfood a product’. This is means that developers and designers are encouraged "to use the product yourself that you are trying to sell to your customers." Wherever possible, members of the design team should make use of their own products.
Making everyone on a development project use the product, even in its roughest state, enables everyone to:
- Flush more bugs out of the product.
- Encounter the same bugs and design flaws that users would see, thus giving designers incentive to fix them.
- Learn how products actually work, which is often than not exactly how we think they work
- Gain a reality check that the product is as good as they say it is, and proves to customers that the company believes in the product
And because Microsoft is such a large organization, this process can flush out problems that could not otherwise be found prior to full-scale rollout at launch.
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