How I became a better designer during my time at Microsoft
This past summer I had the unique opportunity of being a designer at Microsoft for their Garage internship program. It was a rewarding experience where I grew as a designer and learned how to lead a team under tight deadlines.
When I first accepted the position with Microsoft, I was simply hoping to contribute towards an interesting feature or product. Instead, joining the Garage program, I was given a challenge far greater: the opportunity to be the lead designer of a team that took an entire product from ideation to launch. Microsoft’s Garage program is structured to put together small teams that design and build a product from the ground up and take it to production all within 4 months.
The program began with our team sponsor, a senior program manager from Microsoft, setting our goal to build a product that increases user engagement within Office 365 subscriptions for macOS users. My team, which consisted of 5 developers, a program manager, and myself as the lead designer, were ready for the challenge.
The problem given to us was certainly interesting but was too high level and didn’t suggest any particular solutions. There were so many different ways we could approach the problem that we needed to first narrow our scope and set a focus. To do so, we held multiple brainstorming sessions, poured through all of the data provided by our sponsor, had a number of meetings as a team, and spoke to other employees at Microsoft.
In the end, we decided the best way to engage users on macOS was to offer them quick access to their Office 365 products through a menu bar app that lived in the macOS system tray. We called our app My Workspace and it focused primarily on Outlook calendar events, OneDrive files, easy access to account settings and launching Office 365 apps.
Throughout the entire process, I was required to design rapid iterations of our ideas and test them with real users. We would complete many cycles of iterations and continued to do so until the very end of the project. This was challenging as every cycle needed to be completed quickly, but each one further built our knowledge around the problem and helped us gain conviction in our solutions.
After 4 months of hard work and constant iterations, we were able to successfully launch our My Workspace to the general public in early September and received positive reviews from various press outlets. You can read more about the app itself on my design portfolio here.
I gained a lot of experience as a designer through my time building My Workspace and compiled together the top 5 lessons that were most significant for me and that helped me grow as a designer.
(1) Be comfortable re-examining the target audience
Initially, we had agreed to focus our target audience to 3 main types of users based available subscription tiers: Personal, Student, and Enterprise. However, after the first round of user testing, it became clear that student and personal users of Office 365 would not find immediate value for our defined set of features and had far more wide ranging goals. I realized that having too wide of a target audience would dilute our experience and so I decided to re-examine the user base. After some research we decided to change our focus to only enterprise users.
I learned that it’s important to be comfortable changing your goals and targets as long as there are meaningful reasons to do so and it leads you to a better designed product.
(2) Learn to manage various stakeholders while keeping project in scope
Managing the scope of the project and juggling feedback from various stakeholders was a constant challenge. People were excited about My Workspace and so new feature ideas and requests were always coming up. We had to balance the ideas from our team, sponsors, fellow Microsoft employees, and managers. I was responsible for understanding suggestions people offered and considering them for our roadmap. I learned various ways to include people in the process and found that one of the best ways to do so was to rapidly prototype suggestions and then get feedback from our engineers around how much effort each would take. This helped us get a far more realistic understanding of the engineering time required so we were better able to understand how every suggestion fit in our team’s timeline.
(3) Get a meaningful understanding of user needs constantly
Each week we conducted new rounds of user tests and shared various iterations of our final product. I learned how valuable it is to have a constant cadence of testing to ensure that mock-ups and app quality are headed in the right direction and are on pace to reach our goals. It not only helped evaluate our conceptual designs but also helped us better understand what areas to focus on that were already in development.
(4) Make an effort to build real relationships with your developers
I was fortunate to work in a team with strong developers that collaborated constantly with me. The key to our success was how well we were able to communicate with one another and how involved we were in each other’s processes. I would attend every development meeting I could and I would make sure I was aware of any technical difficulties that arose. The developers would always be involved in the design process, from sharing feedback, to helping run user tests, to even wireframing with me. I learned that having this level of collaboration on each other’s work and building real relationships with developers led to fewer surprises between team members, aligned us constantly on common goals, and built a sense of real appreciation for each other.
(5) Learn quickly, iterate quickly, build quickly
My biggest takeaway from my experience was learning how to work in a fast paced environment and really adopting an agile workflow. We always tried to learn quickly by iterating quickly and getting the product in front of people. Through our fast paced cycle of ideation, user-testing, and iteration, I was able to build stronger conviction around my design decisions as I gained a deeper understanding of our problem and our users. I learned that iterating quickly actually helps build confidence quickly as you gain more and more data points around your user’s experience and constraints. It made me a more confident designer and leader and is something I’ll use in all my future design experiences.
I really enjoyed and valued my time at Microsoft and learned a lot from their design and product development culture. Rapidly iterating, managing various stakeholders, and working in a leadership position, helped me grow and taught me lessons that made me a better designer. I’ll always be thankful for my experience and all the things I learned while at Microsoft and I look forward to my next adventure where I can learn even more.
For a more comprehensive look at my process designing My Workspace, a Microsoft Garage project, check out my portfolio: mehvash.com
