The Microsoft design process

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.