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Nadja Vol Ochs
Microsoft Corporation
April 19, 1999
What drives design at Microsoft from day to day and into the future of innovating products and software? Here's what I found out from various voices at Microsoft -- people -- faced with design challenges ranging from the user interface for SQL or BackOffice to the simple and functional interfaces for the future of Windows.
The one person who was mentioned most frequently as an inspiration was Edward Tufte 
. Mr. Tufte is a professor at Yale University, where he teaches courses in statistical evidence, information design, and interface design. He has written seven books, including Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative , Envisioning Information , The Visual Display of Quantitative Information , and Data Analysis for Politics and Policy . His books and demonstrations of the importance of quality design permeate the minds of many here at Microsoft, including myself. Many years ago, while I was in college, my father introduced me to Mr. Tufte's books. Last summer, Edward Tufte brought his concepts to life at a seminar held in Seattle. Keep your ears open, as he does travel and lecture.
Other inspirational people mentioned were Stephen Eick at Lucent Technologies for his data visualization work, Doug Englebart's theories and invention of the graphical user interface, and Donald Norman as an educator and author.
Recently, Donald Norman spoke to a group at Microsoft Design Day 99, and challenged the audience with his comment that Microsoft listens to its customers too much -- subsequently creating software that is too complex and feature rich. His statement led to a strong debate, including a vigorous defense of the valuable role that user feedback and input play in designing products at Microsoft.
Scott Randall, of the Geography Group, places high value on customer input as a design motivator. He appreciates feedback gathered from site visits of customers. The interviews with users about the actual work they do -- as they do it -- are very powerful. Scott's team has some very vocal users, who post ideas and wishes to a newsgroup and are not shy about sending comments to the Support group. In addition, the Geography group uses surveys as an effective way to gather feedback.
Toni Saddler-French, a technical writer for the User Education group, elaborated: "Watching customers use our products is inspirational to me. It's exciting to watch customers 'just get' a feature and understand how to use it; it's humbling when they don't.
"Attending usability tests, listening to support calls, or just watching friends and family can provide helpful insight. Watching someone struggle with a product is a great incentive to go improve it."
Monica Granfield, Product Design Lead on the BackOffice team, explained: "What I find fascinating is that UI design is so much about getting inside people's minds. I'm a very curious person who enjoys interacting with people and learning. UI design is about learning about people, what they do, and products -- then trying to map how the people think to the tasks, while considering all the variables involved, such as the user environment.
"If you get it right, you meet a user's expectations, and it's very gratifying because you will make it easier for them to accomplish their tasks. I like the fact that I am making someone else's life easier, or at least trying to, and helping them to accomplish something."
Doug Leary, of Virtual Worlds, added that "UI designers frequently design for people who are very unlike ourselves. Prior training and experience as an actor has been a valuable resource for me. Acting is one of those things that is hard to explain how to do -- you just know when it's right. One way you know you're getting it is that you feel your perceptions being filtered through the character. You have some of the internal reactions you would expect the character to have.
"If you can accomplish this, then you will almost automatically see ambiguities and other flaws in your design. Really effectively putting yourself in the user's shoes also helps you not go overboard in imagining problems that aren't there."
Many people believe strongly that computers should be adapted to people physically and mentally -- and not the other way around. Shyam Habarakada, a software test engineer read, "Computing as if people mattered" a long time ago, and it's been in his head since. He cited a passage from Computing Horizons :
"This is not my phrase, but Alan Kay's. The importance and subversiveness of this innocent-sounding notion cannot be overstressed.
"Kay is one of the few individuals in the computer industry who has consistently stuck to his belief that computers should be adapted to people, and not vise versa. This is not how most of the industry has worked. The general attitude seems to be that people should wear square shoes, because squares are easier to design and manufacture than foot shaped shoes. If the shoe industry has gone the way the computer industry it would now be running a $200-a-day course on how to walk, run and jump in square shoes."
- Tony Durham
Program Manager Paolo Malabuyo attested that designing for your users is definitely a major inspiration. "Who are they?" he asked. "What do they want to do, what do they know, how much, etc. etc. etc.? And one of the things that I love about what I do is that what we're often aiming for is a moving target. I don't think we're ever going to get to a point (at least not for a long time) when we can say, 'Yes! I've got it! This is it. This is what users want and we've got it all right here.' As time goes by, our users change, and we should always change along with them.
Another thing that I love is the fact that we're looking at a global market -- different languages, different cultures, and different backgrounds. All these may lead to different UI approaches!"
Randal Mundt from PSS compared design to language. "Many wonderful books have been written in Spanish; I have read none of them, because I do not understand Spanish. Design is like a language: Wonderful things can be done -- but if the user does not understand, the object becomes garbage."
Sometimes, familiarity can breed expectation. For example, there is a level of customer expectation for other Microsoft products to live up to Microsoft Office, according to Scott Randall. "Everyone uses it, everyone expects our software to behave something like it." A constant struggle between innovation, expectation, and maintaining consistencies across brand and user interface guidelines drive much of the work on Microsoft design teams.
Monica Granfield finds the idea of a pattern language interesting. Patterns and pattern languages are ways to formulate and describe actions or behaviors, and series of actions or behaviors. They are structures that can be used as a way to organize complex information and solve a problem. A pattern language captures experiences in a way that makes it is possible for others to reuse the experience.
The method of establishing a set of common rules, ideas, or patterns to build on is used in architecture, user interface, and software creation. Pattern language patterns provide design solutions that are concrete enough to immediately put into practice, with good results, and yet are sufficiently abstract to apply to countless situations, limited only by the imagination and skill of the pattern user.
When designing a UI, Monica uses pattern languages in the following way:
First, she identifies the individual patterns:
Here is a simplified example using the pattern of an object -- a calendar
Name: Calendar
Context: Design of a scheduler
Forces: Users need to use the calendar to schedule objects and see a big picture of the schedule of objects in relation to one another.
Problem: If a user can not successfully schedule an object and see how the one object relates to another, the scheduled objects may fail.
Solution: Use common scheduling UI components and metaphors, such as a calendar and a calendar widget, that a user will already understand. Provide the user with a graphical view of the objects that are on the schedule.
On a larger scale, these patterns can be used to determine an overall architecture, which is the overall pattern that these objects and actions form.
These will help to determine :
It is important to keep abreast of what is happening in popular culture, and to broaden your experiences. David Brunet gathers inspiration from a diverse variety of media for Windows CE identity, documentation, and marketing initiatives.
He is an avid pop culture and print periodical junkie, with subscriptions to such publications as Vogue, Wired, Elle Decor, Colors, Wallpaper, Interview, Communication Arts, Motor Trend, Mac World, PC World, and Vanity Fair. He collects ideas by tearing out and filing appealing ads and editorial content, which he refers to when he needs ideas for anything from an icon, logo, or splash screen to an illustration of an operating system.
"I believe it is important to take in contemporary communication trends to understand the current market," David said, "to understand and project where it will be when the current project releases, always keeping in mind brand initiatives and Microsoft marketing trends."
When Scott Berkun, program manager for the Windows shell team, read:
"To design something really well you have to get it. You have to really grok what it's all about. It takes a passionate commitment to really thoroughly understand something, chew it up, not just quickly swallow it. Most people don't take the time to do that. Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it. They just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after awhile. That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people. Unfortunately, that's too rare a commodity. A lot of people in our industry haven't had very diverse experiences. So they don't have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions, without a broad perspective on the problem. The broader one's understanding of the human experience, the better design we will have."
- Steve Jobs, Wired, March 1996
it led him to explore other resources, such as How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built by Stewart Brand and Film Directing Shot by Shot : Visualizing from Concept to Screen by Steven D. Katz:
The following quote was also recommended as inspiration for interactive designers trying to fathom the ocean of human experience:
"Interaction design cannot dispense with scientific method and engineering knowledge; indeed, familiarity with computing technology is as essential to an interaction designer as familiarity with building technology is to an architect... [but] interaction design is more of an art than a science. Its ultimate subject matter -- human experience and subjective response -- is inherently as changeable and unfathomable as the ocean."
- from Bringing Design to Software, Terry Winograd
Oswaldo Aquique, an intern at Microsoft, is driven by two words: natural interaction. He said he just wonders "what I have to do to do something in real life. That's what I try to recreate into the application. It's not something related to time. UI design is an art of understanding the human kind."
Scott Berkun explained that his inspiration is "to get the hell out of the way; I want interfaces to not even register as a distinct entity that people notice. There should be no separation between what the person wants to do and getting it done. What gets me up in the morning is the belief that the work I do will help make that separation fade away and disappear."
Research, usage, and exploration of competitive products can be inspirational and motivating. Scott Randall commented: "We'd be lying if we said we were not inspired to do great things before someone else did."
Team communication in meetings, in the hallways, or through e-mail provides a source of inspiration for many decisions or design ideas at Microsoft. Scott Randall pointed out that "even before prototyping, just talking through tasks in a casual manner with teammates weeds out bad ideas and creates new ones."
This rings true in other teams at Microsoft. One of my favorite quotes I found while researching this article came from the BackOffice & Servers Interaction Design Group. Their group motto: "Together we design excellence."
Even the tools people use can inspire them in their day-to-day work. Whether it is a simple graphical filter effect or a complex, layered composition, one tool that stands strong among designers here at Microsoft. Scott Randall summed it up: "Whatever gets the job done, and I'd die if you took away Adobe Photoshop."
Liam Friedland, program manager on the SQL Server team, finds the universe an insanely elegant design solution at any level of granularity. Randal Mundt finds his inspiration in dreams. "My dreams are vivid and full of inspiration, they lead me to do things I would not have thought possible. Dreams are my wildest inspiration."
Other topics that people find inspiring here at Microsoft include urban planning, maps, Feng Shui, architecture, and not getting a barrage of support calls.
Edward Tufte's books are a must read. I especially enjoy the self-published copy of Envisioning Information including a three dimensional model represented just as it was in the 1570 edition of "Euclid's Elements". Books by Kevin Lynch, such as The Image of the City , and the Paul Arthur and Romedi Passini book Wayfinding: People, Signs, and Architecture are inspirations for Monica Granfield.
Donald Norman recommended his book, The Design of Everyday Things , and Film Directing Shot by Shot : Visualizing from Concept to Screen.
Scott Berkun commented that Katz's book "explains a robust way to describe ideas, and plan how to implement them in movies. I wish we had as robust a way to define and describe the end-result of what we want for software, as they show for movies. Also the language and technique of storyboarding shown made me think about the way we do software storyboards a lot differently."
Nadja Vol Ochs is the design consultant in Microsoft's Developer Relations Group.
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