Microsoft Designs

Microsoft Emoticons

When I was a program manager working on MSN Chat, the product team was rushing to catch up to the feature set of its competitor at the time, AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), ICQ, and Yahoo Chat as well as having to make continual infrastructure improvements to support our exponentially growing user base. The list of work was long, and the team was small so every feature proposed for addition was heavily scrutinized and debated. I proposed with my developer, Kelly Ward, to build a set of emoticons for Microsoft. I designed the first set that I thought were the top 10 emoticons that would be useful to communicate emotions to other users.

Why were emoticons so successful?  Because they helped people express emotions in the context of their textural messages, and emotions are core to the human communication experience.  Both email and instant messaging can suffer from misinterpretation because the context isn't clear -- a remark that was intended to be sarcastic is taken literally, a friendly suggestion is heard as criticism, a loving remark just doesn't seem all the intimate. Emoticons can alleviate some of the misinterpretations.

Many articles have been published regarding Microsoft Emotions in Business Week, books (e.g. Scenario-Focused Engineering - A toolbox for innovation and customer-centricity), and recently a Swedish textbook written by Daniel Hanberg Alonso.

Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7

As the program manager for Windows 7, I was one of the leads for the design of multi-touch, evangelizing the technology to major corporations like Apple, Adobe, Google, CyberLink, Mozilla, and all major hardware companies building touch devices for consumers.

One of the software packages we released was the Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7 to users with touch-screen devices. The Touch Pack comprises six applications designed to take advantage of the operating system’s multitouch capabilities: three games and three Microsoft Surface applications.

The games were Blackboard, Garden Pond, and Rebound, all of which involve touching elements on a screen in order to win; the applications are Surface Globe, which lets users explore an Earth rendered in either two or three dimensions, Surface Collage, a photo-manipulation program, and Surface Lagoon, which lets users interact with a “water simulation” that includes fish and rocks.

Other Projects

I also worked on numerous design projects throughout my Microsoft career including:

  • Automap Streets - Find an Address
  • Microsoft V-Chat and Comic Chat
  • MSN Chat, Messenger, and Communities
  • Tablet PC - Handwriting Data Collection
  • MSN Ads - Designed all new Ad Products
  • Speech Recognition - Contracts and Speech Data Collection
  • Windows 7 - Multi-touch as discussed above
  • Windows 8 - Sharing, Right-Click Menu, and Start Menu (8.1)