I joined Microsoft about 6 years ago fresh out of grad school. I was a student of rhetoric and spent most of my time studying the rhetoric of visual communication. When I was offered a job with the Office User Assistance team, they asked me if I wanted to write about Outlook or PowerPoint. I choose PowerPoint because that was a visual, presentation app. A presentation app must be visual, so this seemingly leveraged my visual communication skills. That's all and good, but where I went wrong here is that what I really enjoyed was designing user experiences--not just the visual layer or "look" of things. Outlook had just as much if not more experiences than PowerPoint. It is just because I got stuck on the type of tool vs. the experiences presented by the tool. Since then, I've realized this and I've seen Outlook improve its experiences dramatically over the last couple of releases.
Another aspect of this is that I didn't really think Microsoft presented much of an opportunity for me to use my visual communication skills. After all, my perception was that Microsoft was not about design...that was Apple's world.
But now, bigger things are going on. Users are demanding better experiences. It's like we've rolled out the technology and people were satisfied for awhile, but now that that flurry is over, they are challenging us to improve the experiences. I love that I'm at the company now because we are listening to this demand and responding to the challenge! I'm not pretending to be the first person to say this, but we are on the verge of a new era at Microsoft. Would we have even considered dedicating resources to a site like Microsoft Design just a few years back? Would we have laughed at the idea? And what about MIX? Never thought that'd happen, did you?
So why am I writing this on a blog on MSDN—a site designed for d-e-v-e-l-o-p-e-r-s? Because things are changing. I'm starting to embrace the notion that a co-worker of mine has (well, embracing to a certain extent) that MSDN really represents development in it's truest sense...that it is just now starting to gain its full meaning. Designers are developing. Makes sense. They just might not be developing using code or speaking necessarily using a common vocabulary. But there is a nice dichotomy here where both are working towards the same goals. We certainly shouldn't force developers to be designers or force designers to be developers. They are unique audiences. But we can get them talking. We can get them to understand each other better. We can get them working better together.
My co-worker is more of a developer and I more of a designer. But, we can learn a ton from each other, and as we work on Expression Interactive Designer (oh, is this the first time I'm mentioning this lovely tool?), we realize that we need to learn from each other to provide our users with better experiences--with each other, with the product, with content, with producing for our users customers, and so on.
Ultimately, it is all about designing great experiences for users. Experience does matters. Just look at what is happening...
Xbox. Windows Vista. Office 12. Expression. Start.com. Live.com. Media Center.
And much more I left off this list out of ignorance (hey, we're doin' a lot 'round here...I'm pretty sure I've left off a ton of work by the hardware teams!)...
And much more to come I'm sure...