Cooperative Design of Microsoft Office
Christopher Konrad and Peggy Angevine
Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond WA 98052 USA
+1 425 882 8080
[ckonrad, peggyst]@microsoft.com
In the past the Microsoft Office product group focused more on end-user needs than those of information technology (IT) personnel, the users that administer Microsoft Office. IT organizations must exhaustively evaluate, test and customize software prior to purchasing and deploying it throughout the enterprise - a nontrivial task. Moreover, they are responsible for maintaining that software, on the desktop, in an ever-changing environment. We recognized that in order to meet the needs of these users we needed to find a way to have them participate in the design of Office. We needed to learn more about these users and their work to improve the administration of Office. Our solution was to form an advisory council of key users in large organizations.
Fifteen IT professionals from different companies participated in the council. The council members are capable of representing the plans and concerns of their enterprise, and IT organization. They also served as the representative of the users in their organizations. The advisory council meetings provide one avenue for bringing users and designers together to participate in design. Bringing these groups of people together just to talk with each other was not adequate. For the project to be successful, we had to use design activities and exercises that would make users' knowledge and experience more explicit. We used structured exercises to involve them in the different stages of the development process.
The council members participated in 3 meetings at Microsoft. During the first meeting, the product group had been formulating focus areas and priorities for the product. It was critical to understand what the council viewed as important to ensure that we built a product that would be compelling and useful. To get that information we asked them to rank the product focus areas based on importance, prioritize and discuss fifty possible features/solutions, and generate user requirements, mock up designs, and conduct a usability study. The product group was in the engineering stage of the development process during the second meeting. Flow models were developed to represent people, their roles, relevant activities, movement or flow of work objects between people. The council, to show their view of the product direction, built an affinity diagram. During the third council meeting, the product team was looking to validate design decisions. A “stump the expert” panel was used to test the product team’s knowledge of what IT personnel know and their work.
The council impacted the product by sharing their knowledge with the designers. We learned about their work and how we could make improvements to the administration of Office. The designers have used that knowledge and applied it to the decisions that they have made regarding the product. Their participation influenced our development process by contributing to the product vision and priorities. They also influenced what we should communicate about the product and how to do it, as well as giving us opportunities to enhance intra-group communications. Our plans for the future are to continue with similar forums in which we bring together users and designers to participate in structured design activities.