Page 1 | Showcasing interactive technology with the Microsoft Lobby Experience

Showcasing interactive technology with the Microsoft Lobby Experience

At Microsoft, we host nearly 400,000guests in our corporate lobbies each year.They might be interviewees, customers, friends, or family. And, as the saying goes, we have onlyone chance to make a good first impression with these guests.Each guest typically spends eight minutes in our lobbies. We’re using that time to inspire our guests and share our passion with hands-on opportunities that showcase Microsoft interactive technologies.

Microsoft IT, working with Microsoft Real Estate and Facilities (RE&F), seizedon an opportunity to build the company brand and showcase interactive technologiesthrough streamlined, engaging, and unique visitor experiences that we call the Microsoft Lobby Experience. We created three distinct and accessible experiences—Arrive, Stay, and Depart—to addresspeople, technology,andthe physical environment.

Our latest Windows interactive technologies permeate the Lobby Experience. We used modern engineering design principles and agile software development methods to create an experience that is configurable, accessible, compliant, extensible, and resilient. It scales easily, is managedcentrally, and can be deployed anywhere in the world.

Above all, we wanted our lobbies to reflect that Microsoft is a technology company. We wanted to showcase our own interactive technologiesand help build our brand.

Arrive, Stay, and Depart—the Lobby Experience

We focused on the experience of a typical guest at Microsoft asthey arrive, stay, and then depart our offices. Our Lobby Experience incorporates these three experiences, as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1.Our redesigned lobbies focus on three parts of the guest experience: Arrive, Stay, and Depart

Arrive

Our Lobby Experience includes new approaches to interactivity. We wanted to create an inviting environment—with a flavor that’s uniquely ours—to make our lobbies memorable for guests and employees.

When aguest entersa lobby and approaches the reception area,they can identify themselves in two ways: ask the lobby host for help, or enter their email address on the Arrive Surface Pro at the reception desk. When they are not working at their elevated desks, our lobby hosts come out from behind the desk to interact with and help guests.Lobby hosts can guideguests through our Arrive, Stay, and Departprocess.

If a guestenters their email address in the Arrive Surface Pro and they have been to our offices before, the system auto-populatesa registration form with saved information, such as theircar license plate number to validate parking.The guest is asked the purpose of their visit, and whomthey are here to meet.

The guest choosesan avatar for a biodegradable,temporary visitor badge—on a lanyard—and completes the check-in process. The lobby host verifies their government-issuedidentification, gives the guest their visitor badge, and notifies theMicrosoft host that their guest hasarrived.

Arrive, behind the scenes

When a guest arrives, two pieces of software are at work. One is the Windows 10 Universal Windows Platform Arrive app on the Surface Pro at the reception desk. The other is theVisitor Management System (VMS), which is used primarily by our lobby hosts.VMS can also be accessed by emergency management or security teams in case of an emergency or during investigations. VMS, the Arrive app, and their associated services are all hosted on Azure, which easily scales on demand. VMS and the Arrive app on the Surface Pro share a common security system in the background, where we can:

  • Determine host availability.
  • Find out if visitors are on a watch list.
  • Delegate host duties.

Stay

After our guests check in, they’re encouraged to try the Stay experience area of our lobbies. We’ve enhanced the lobby environment by making it more well-lit and open, andby giving it an inviting ambiance. A kiosk with a55-inch interactivedeviceand modern seating are grouped in the Staylobby area. On the kiosk, guestscan explore:

  • News. A variety of Microsoft newsstories from the official Microsoft blog are shown on the screen. Guests can choose to send themselves a link to an article through a mobile SMS message or an email.
  • History.Microsoft history is presented on a visual timeline through a selection of archives.
  • Campus.A map shows the corporate campus and identifies nearby interesting buildings.
  • Games.This section has jigsaw puzzles of digitized artwork from the Microsoft art collection.

Because it’s multi-touch, our guests can open a video, for example, and then resize or pause it and open other pictures. Another example of multi-touch functionality is in the game section, where multiple pieces of a digital jigsaw puzzle can bemoved at the same time.

Stay, behind the scenes

We collaborated with Intuilaband Run Studios, our digital media production partner, to create the Stay experienceand to make it a truly accessible digital experience. Touch-based navigation moves up, down, right, and left—with just a gesture—to move between the four areas of the interface.

Depart

For our departing guests, two 42-inch displaysoffer a transportation hub. On one kiosk, a touchscreen, guests can request shuttles to other Microsoft buildings and check traffic, real-time transit options, flight status, and so on. The other Depart screen showsincoming shuttles. After our guests choose their destination, they can choose a transportation option.

When a guest asks for a shuttle, the Departexperience suggests nearby campus cafes and displays current menus. They can receive an SMS message with the address of their next destination.On most mobile phones, a guest can simply click that SMS link to display the destination on a map. If the next shuttle destination is within about a mile, a “Healthy” suggestion presents a walking route to the next destination.

Depart,behind the scenes

The Departkiosk hosts a Windows 10 universal app. It consumes eight cloud services on Azure, including the MSN Weather API, the BING Maps API, public and private transportation APIs that are readilyavailable and extensible, and Microsoft-internal dining APIs. It’s a web-hosted app model, so the Depart kiosk has a thin client.

Planning the Lobby Experience

The Lobby Experience project is a major investment for Microsoft. It’s a global rollout thataffects Microsoft real estate holdingsworldwide. The team created a charter to support the project during design and development. Extensive user research helped us define concrete goals and align stakeholder support as the project progressed.

We piloted the project in a single lobby. We received positive feedback there, so we engaged with RE&F to expand to other buildings. This dovetailed with RE&F plans to refresh some of our building interiors. When RE&F communicated with employees about building remodeling activities, we encouraged them to participatein the Lobby Experience.

Our goals when planning the Lobby Experience were:

  • Create a charter to drive prioritization.Wecarefully created a charter over two yearsto help make the project a success, and to be clear about what we were building and trying to change. Merely saying that we wanted a great guest experience was not specific enough.
  • Reflect technology. At the outset, we knew that we wanted our lobbies to reflect that Microsoft is a technology company. Everyone on the project understood that concept. We wanted the new lobby environment and guest experiences to be high-tech, and we wanted our lobby hosts to be approachable, engaging, and helpful.
  • Visualize the solution. The team considered what people would say if we were very successful—perhaps recognized in a popular technical blog—and built backward from that vision.
  • Do the research.We had to sift through lots of research to pinpoint the goal.We dove into competitor analysis, user shadowing, and user videos. Multiple research angles let us pinpoint what we were trying to change, and that groundedus.
  • Understand the problem.We needed to findour pain points and understand what our competitors were doing well. We knew that when people visited Microsoft, it didn’t feel like a technology company. Our lobbies were closed-in, and they weren’t engaging. Our reception staff sat behind an imposing, tall counter, and they didn’t wear clothing that identified them as Microsoft employees. We wanted to incorporate our modern brand into our lobbies, to better reflect who we are.
  • Seta planning schedule.Our research and planning process lasted six weeks. At that point, we defined our desired features and functionalities.
  • Collect and prioritize requirements.Weknew that we wanted to showcase the newest Microsoft technologies, including multi-touch. In line with the overall vision of Microsoft, we wanted the solution to be cloud-first and mobile-first.In addition, we wanted to digitize common functions likeguest registration and conform to future-looking privacy policies by collecting the least amount of information from our guests.
  • Global considerations.Because this is a global solution, we knew that it had to be secure, centralized, easy to administer, automated, and accessible.

Empowering people of all abilities

From vendors, customers, and potential employees to friends and family members, our guests are a diverse group with individual needs. We reimagined our Lobby Experience to be inclusive and accessible for everyone. When we looked at the Lobby Experience through an accessibility lens, we saw an opportunity.Our experience showed that when we designed for all guests, we could increase the reach and use of our Lobby Experience.

We worked with Intuilab to customize their product, IntuiFace, and add more accessible features to our Stay experience.We also worked closely and continuously with the Accessibility team at Microsoft to make our design inclusive and to increase guest satisfaction.For example, the Stay kiosk audibly informs guests that an accessible version is available and how to access it by touching theAccessibility button. Every possible navigation action is read aloudwhen a guest lands on a page. In addition, all our Stay experience videos on the 55-inch kiosk screen include closed-captions.

Personas and technologies

We focusedfirst on people with limited vision and scenarios that would affect them becausevision impairment affects the most people. We worked through a spectrum of abilities from sight through touch, hearing, and speech.

Table 1 lists these personas, along with some of the technologies that we used.

Table 1. Personas and Lobby Experience technologies

Persona / Technology / Benefits
Sight / Screen readers with logically mapped navigation / Stay includes audible guidance for every screen, and speech navigation moves the guest between significant page landmarks.
Mobility / Kiosks slide up and down / The Arrive and Depart devices slide up and down on the wall so guests can adjust the height of the device.
Touch / Touch gesture-based navigation / The Stay kiosk screen moves up, down, right, and left with just one finger.
Hearing / Closed-captioned videos / Stay experience videos are closed-captioned.
Sight/Touch / Cortana / All interactive Lobby Experience screens will include Cortana for voice integration.

Lessons learned

By using the persona spectrum, our solution helps people with specificimpairments that affect many people. Approaching accessibility in this holistic manner pushed our technology to the next level. We’ve learned some lessons along the way:

  • Relate personas to specific scenarios. For example, if a guest has had Lasik surgery, or a procedure that may temporarily affect their vision, how would they use Stay?
  • Put yourself in your guests’ shoes.Can software engineers use their own websites without visual cues? Testing different scenarios helpeddesigners quickly understand accessibility nuances. For example, sites need a screen reader to help users navigate. But a screen reader that has logically mapped navigation orients guests to where they are on the site and makes navigation optionsmore obvious. Our engineers also used voice activation to test the system without touch. We quickly realized that simple tasks can be difficult for some of our guests.
  • Get information fromlots ofpeople. We had many conversations with many people with a range of abilities. We asked peopleto show us how they navigate a phone if they are visually impaired, and to describe how they envision a phone could work for them in the real world. Then we reverse-engineered the findings into our Lobby Experience apps.

For more information about the accessibility aspects of the Lobby Experience project, see Making the Microsoft Lobby Experience more accessible.

Modern engineering design principles and tools

For the Lobby Experience project, like other Microsoft projects, we used modern engineering principles and tools. The resulting experience is:

  • Configurable. Lobby Experience features can be switched on or off at individual kiosks. By using Azure Resource Manager and SQL Azure Database, we cancentrally and remotely configure kiosks. One business requirement was to build our system as modularly as possible, so that components can be used—or left out—for any locality.If we want to make specific changes to appearance and configuration, it’s easy to make changes to a web app that’s pulled into a shell. Our code is modular and,with every build, test scenarios run automatically.This modularity helped us reflect the voice of the customer. In a single sprint, we reconfigured the Arrive app and created a feedback mechanism into the process. After our guests checkin, they’re asked to quickly rate theirexperience by selecting an intuitive emoji.
  • Extensible. The transportation components of the Departexperience—campus shuttles and transit options—were designed primarily for the Puget Sound area. If a Microsoft lobby in Silicon Valley wants to use those components, we can useAPIs from local transportation service providers. And if we deploy the Depart experience to a lobby in London, it can be quickly configured to show a Tube (subway) option.
  • Resilient.The server-side components of the Lobby Experience are geo-distributed to multiple Azure regions. The configurationsupports automated failovers and load balancing in case of regional system failures. The app itself has customized, built-inincidentmanagement that triggers automated alerts—such as emailsor phonecalls—to supporting engineers in the affected region.
  • Data-driven.We use Application Insights to collecttelemetry data,which helps us manage app features and application health. For example, feature utilization data helps us learn how to improve Stayor Departexperience features; it also helps us decideif we should consider retiringcertain features.
  • Responsive. We developed a Single-Page Application (SPA) web app for the Arrive and Depart kiosks—it’s based on an AngularJS JavaScript client-side framework, which gives us a fluidity and responsiveness.
  • Secure. We implement robust security in several ways:
  • We use Microsoft Azure Active Directory authentication as well as an added layer of custom token-based authentication and certificate-based authentication.
  • We use assigned access, which limits access to only the Lobby Experience. Our hybrid model hosts a Windows 10 Universal Windows Platform app, and the app launches a website internally. Lobby guestscan’t access anything else.
  • We use representational state transfer-based services to communicate between kiosk apps, websites, and cloud storage areas. Our Lobby Experience kiosks connect securely to the Microsoft guest network.
  • Centralized. Microsoft Intune deploys bits to all kiosks in different regions and geographic locations.
  • Localized. Azure Resource Manager stores text strings that need to be localized. As we deploy to global lobbies, any displayed text can be translated to the local language.
  • Scalable. Azure and our platform as a service (PaaS) cloud-based architecture scaleeasily. Lobby Experience components are deployed in multiple Azure regions to seamlessly give a high-performing experience to guests anywhere in the world.
  • Modern engineering tools. We use Git for source control and Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) for requirements gathering, development, automated testing, continuous integration and deployment, andmaintaining a feature backlog. VSTS helps us monitor sprints and delivery and contributes to agile software development.

Distributed infrastructure for global performance

Our SPA-based architecture is highly distributed, and it uses Azure Traffic Manager to ensure that pages come up quickly, no matter where they are. Lobby guests interact with a Windows 10 universal app that’s based on model-view-controller application architecture. Figure 2 shows an overview.

Figure 2. Lobby Experience architecture

Windows Intune distributes software to Arrive, Stay, and Depart kiosks, and assigns access limits functionality to the Lobby Experience. The web app and web APIs are hosted on Azure in Europe and the United States. Two instances of Azure Traffic Manager ensure a distributed architecture, and maintain connectivity. For example,if the web APIs hosted on Azure in Europe become disconnected,theycan still connect to the Azure instance in North America. The system is self-healing andredundant,and it sends alerts when any node is down.

Agile software development methodologies

When we developed the Lobby Experience, we focusedon learning fast and iterating. We used agile development methods, worked in two-week sprints, and developed a distributed architecture with modular code and automated app testing. Using agile methods was straightforward, but the approach meantcommitting to a feature backlog to prioritize feature changes or additions. The feature backlog needed true buy-in and commitment from business partners and stakeholders.