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Design at Microsoft

Microsoft has evolved from being technologically-driven to focusing on user experience and design thinking. It now considers design a core part of its success. Microsoft integrates designers into product teams to collaborate efficiently. It uses groups like the User Experience Excellence group to disseminate best practices. This focus on user-experience is influencing Microsoft's organizational structure and culture.

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58 views5 pages

Design at Microsoft

Microsoft has evolved from being technologically-driven to focusing on user experience and design thinking. It now considers design a core part of its success. Microsoft integrates designers into product teams to collaborate efficiently. It uses groups like the User Experience Excellence group to disseminate best practices. This focus on user-experience is influencing Microsoft's organizational structure and culture.

Uploaded by

kapsarc
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Eleven lessons: managing design in eleven global brands

Design at Microsoft
Microsoft, the world’s leading supplier of operating system software, has
completed a significant evolution in its attitudes to design. Having once been a
technologically-driven organisation, Microsoft now uses design thinking to focus
on developing products that answer users’ needs. With management support,
this focus on user-experience is also influencing Microsoft’s organisational
structure and culture.

Overview
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 in the development of Microsoft products and services
— 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.

Design Council, 34 Bow Street, London WC2E 7DL


Tel +44(0)20 7420 5200 Fax +44(0)20 7420 5300
www.designcouncil.org.uk
Design challenges at Microsoft
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.

History
Microsoft was founded in 1975 to develop software for the nascent personal computer
market. It was an extremely early entrant into this sector, beginning its business at a
time when few believed that the PC would come to play a significant role in business or
personal life.

Microsoft launched its first operating system (MS-DOS 1.0) in 1981 and entered the
productivity applications market in 1989 with the launch of its Office suite. A year later,
the company launched the first version of its Windows graphical operating system.

Design Council, 34 Bow Street, London WC2E 7DL


Tel +44(0)20 7420 5200 Fax +44(0)20 7420 5300
www.designcouncil.org.uk
Designers at Microsoft
Designers at Microsoft operate in a multi-disciplinary environment. They are
selected and trained for their ability to communicate and collaborate across
disciplinary borders, and for their ability to understand the technology, business
and user goals of their project and create designs that effectively meet those
goals.

Microsoft integrates its design and product development


teams totally, and design input takes place as part of the
overall product development process. Each product team,
such as Mail and Calendar, is comprised of
representatives from programme management, test,
development, design, user research, product planning,
marketing, international project engineering, content
publishing, and so on. These in turn draw on several key
central resources, among which are the User Experience
Excellence group, the Central User Experience Support
Team, Microsoft Research and product design experts
from across the company.

In more depth
Find out more about how multi-disciplinary working in the design process can lead to
the development of new products and services

The User Experience Excellence group is central to the designers’ ability to work in this
way. Headed by Surya Vanka, this is effectively a group of ‘culture change agents’ who
are engineering standards to create Microsoft products that provide customers with a
high-quality user experience. They are responsible for the harvesting and dissemination
of best practices to the designers and researchers operating within product
development teams.

According to Surya Vanka, Manager of User Experience in Microsoft's Engineering


Excellence Group, teamwork, humility and a user focus are key personality traits of
designers in Microsoft.

Capability building
Designers' skills, training and career development are carefully monitored in alignment
with the User Experience Excellence group’s targets and a comprehensive capability
building programme is implemented for Microsoft's designers, managed by the group in
partnership with Human Resources. Developed and customised for each individual,
online training programmes and modern delivery mechanisms such as on demand
video archives are supplemented by a range of general development activities. These
can include visiting lectures from leading academics and design practitioners, as well as
regular and actively promoted discussion groups and ongoing internal product or
innovation forums.

Design Council, 34 Bow Street, London WC2E 7DL


Tel +44(0)20 7420 5200 Fax +44(0)20 7420 5300
www.designcouncil.org.uk
Peer to peer coaching is used to help transfer key skills and best practices across the
design function. Designers receive training on integrating effectively with other
engineering disciplines, which is required to effectively deliver their input to the rest of
the development team.

In more depth
Find out how other companies in our study hire designers who demonstrate a wider
skill set including: multi-disciplinary working, business acumen and strategic thinking

Status
In 2006, Microsoft employed more than 71,000 people worldwide and received net
revenues of US$44.28 billion. The company grew 11 per cent last year.

Microsoft’s headquarters are in Seattle, US and the majority of the company’s activities
are still based in the Puget Sound area of the US, with 33,000 employees at various
facilities in the region. More than 50 percent of Microsoft’s employees are US based,
but the company has operating subsidiaries in more than 100 countries worldwide.

As part of the design process study, Microsoft’s User Experience Excellence group and
Windows Live Web Communications user experience team (comprised of design, user
research, and technical writers) were interviewed to understand the context for design in
Microsoft and how their processes integrate design into the product development
process.

The evolution of design at Microsoft


Microsoft has transformed itself from a technology-centric to a user-centric
organisation - and the role of design in this new paradigm has been central.

‘In 1993 design was a luxury. It is now generally accepted that design is critical to our
success,’ says Brad Weed, Director of User Experience at Microsoft, who led the
transformation of MS Office 2007 through a core set of design principles. Support for
this new strategy comes from the very top in Microsoft, being driven by Bill Gates, the
company’s chairman and chief software architect.

Design process evolution


Microsoft’s design process has evolved as the company realised it needed a more user-
centred approach to product development.

A key element of this was the realisation that the growing capability of its technology
brought greater complexity - and that this could adversely affect the way in which users
responded to the company and its products. In response, Microsoft identified design as
a critical method to quickly translate user needs into products.

Design Council, 34 Bow Street, London WC2E 7DL


Tel +44(0)20 7420 5200 Fax +44(0)20 7420 5300
www.designcouncil.org.uk
Surya Vanka
Manager of User Experience Excellence, Microsoft Engineering Excellence Group

‘Technology can master complexity, but design must master simplicity’

The way design is considered in the role of product development has also changed in
that time, with the design process moving from a ‘user interface’ to a ‘user experience’
paradigm. ‘It’s not just about real estate’, adds Erez Kikin Gil, Product Design Lead at
Microsoft, pointing to the need to move the scope of design into experience, almost
taking for granted that the necessary technology exists. This change is mirrored in
Microsoft’s own shift in offer: and a company that was once entirely product focused
now offers an increasing number of services to its customers.

Organisational position and influence


As design has taken on a more central role at Microsoft, so the company’s design
function has become central in developing some of the key ideas for user centred
product development. Today, design is represented in all product development teams.

In order to monitor the standards of excellence that Microsoft sets for its products and
services, and for them to adequately reflect user needs, a User Experience Excellence
group supports skills and expertise that are part of new product development, including
design.

The central User Experience Excellence group, and indeed other Excellence groups
covering other areas within Engineering, act as repositories of best practice and as
agents for change. They encourage wider management to understand the power of
strong design input and ensure the creation of a culture and the tools required to do
this.

In more depth
Read more about how successful design companies need good leadership

Innovation
New product introduction and product evolution are both key to Microsoft’s competitive
position. The company has always pursued the development, acquisition and protection
of innovation as a core part of its strategy. In 2006 Microsoft was granted its 5000th
patent.

Design Council, 34 Bow Street, London WC2E 7DL


Tel +44(0)20 7420 5200 Fax +44(0)20 7420 5300
www.designcouncil.org.uk

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