123599 Windows Insider Podcast EP45 Sheetal Agarwal Hanna
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Windows Insider podcast EP45 – Designing for a Billion Guests: Sheetal Agarwal, Hanna McLaughlin Windows Insider podcast -- Episode 45 – Designing for a Billion Jason Howard (host), Sheetal Agarwal, Principal Design Research Lead (guest) Hanna McLaughlin, Senior Design Lead (guest) [Music] JASON HOWARD: Welcome to the Windows Insider Podcast, where leaders from Microsoft and Windows Insiders discuss tech trends, careers, and innovation. I'm your host, Jason Howard. This is Episode 45, Designing for a Billion But first, if you're not yet a Windows Insider, head over to our website, insider.windows.com and register for free. Insiders get access to upcoming Windows features before they're released to the public, plus exclusive opportunities to experience all Microsoft has to offer. As we get started with this episode, take a moment to think about the concept of “a billion”. It’s a big number, but can we really conceptualize how big it is? One of the largest sports stadiums in the world holds approximately 130,000 people. It would take nearly 7,700 copies of that stadium to hold a billion people! Keeping that in mind, how does one design an operating system that will be used on over a billion devices? Where should the design begin? What’s the right way to make it work? Who makes the decisions on what it should look like? There’s a lot that goes into the decision-making process, especially with such a large visual rejuvenation across so much of the operating system! And with the first preview build of Windows 11 out the door to Windows Insiders, joining us today to talk about these changes are Sheetal Agarwal, Principal Design Research Lead and Hanna McLaughlin, Senior Design Lead. Without further ado let’s jump right in! [Music] JASON HOWARD: Welcome to the podcast, Sheetal and Hanna. I appreciate you both making the time, especially given your hectic schedules. I really appreciate you coming here to share all sorts of goodness with the Windows Insider audience. As we get started here, it would be great to do some quick introductions. So, I’ll ask that each of you take a moment to share a little bit about your role and what you do here at Microsoft. Sheetal, how about you go first. SHEETAL AGARWAL: Hi. I’m Sheetal Agarwal. And I am very lucky to lead the Windows User Research team. I work with a brilliant group of eight researchers whose whole job is to make sure that we are keeping customers at the center of our product-making in Windows. We do everything from running qualitative research to quantitative research, doing in-depth interviews, in-home studies, as well as large-scale surveys, concept validation – all that kind of work. Just regularly bringing in customer insights into our processes. And we also work with our design and engineer partners connecting them with customers just to make sure that we’re driving empathy so that as we’re all building Windows together, we are centering ourselves in the realities of the people we are building with and for. 1 Windows Insider podcast EP45 – Designing for a Billion Guests: Sheetal Agarwal, Hanna McLaughlin JASON HOWARD: Excellent. Hanna? HANNA McLAUGHLIN: I’m Hanna McLaughlin. I have the privilege of being a designer on the Windows team. There are six design teams, a creative direction team, and Sheetal’s fabulous UR team. We all get to work together to create intuitive and beautiful experiences for more than a billion customers. It’s such a privilege. I lead an amazing team of designers that works on how Windows experiences can tailor to specific audiences, form factors, and workflows. And I’m excited to share some of that work today. JASON HOWARD: Well, I will say, once again, I really appreciate both of you making the time. Obviously, the podcast goes live after we’ve recorded, that’s always how this works, of course, and today – the day that we’re recording – just happens to be the day that we’ve done the big announce for Windows 11. Super excited, finally get to let the cat out of the bag, so to speak. It’s been a long time coming. A whole lot of work has gone into this. Obviously, we’ll spend some time talking today about these very things. You’ve both done introductions, talked about the teams that you worked on, but I would love to take a moment and dig a little more deeply into the respective areas of discipline. We’ve kind of hinted around it kind of through some of the Insider stuff in the past. We did have a webcast that talked about some of the user research things that we’ve done in relation to the broader CustomerUp efforts that we’ve had in place for the Insider Program, but I would love to hear more about what these disciplines encompass, especially about the overall scope of the design team and the user research teams. So, Hanna, could you start us off? HANNA McLAUGHLIN: Yeah, happy to. So, from a design perspective our goal is to really envision and then create seamless, elegant, and impactful design solutions. There are many phases to the design process, so we work from conceptualizing initial ideas all the way through crafting detailed product roadmaps and even implementing with developers. And of course, each of these phases is really collaborative with partners across user research like Sheetal at both the beginning and the the initial exploration and validation stages, understanding user needs, marketing teams, PM teams, engineering, and even more. So, there are many phases, many partners, and then even within design, there are many roles and expertise that are captured under this umbrella of design. So, we have motion designers, visual system designers, user experience designers, design developers, prototypers many more. And over the course of a product lifecycle, we always are leaning on each other and each other’s superpowers to bring the product to life and to be making these incremental decisions along the way. And so, it’s always amazing to reflect on what a balanced and powerful design team and research team our leadership has built. The tasks in a day are really varied and vary greatly depending on what phase of the product we’re in. But the things that remain constant are things like collaboration, supportive of each other, and kind of like an iterative process all with the goal of, simplifying the complex and delivering these intuitive experiences. JASON HOWARD: Wow, I might have to change careers here. That sounds super fun. (Laughter.) Sheetal, same question to you, please. 2 Windows Insider podcast EP45 – Designing for a Billion Guests: Sheetal Agarwal, Hanna McLaughlin SHEETAL AGARWAL: Yeah, so, as Hanna said, user research and design are two human-centered disciplines. And the specific kind of view and perspective that researchers bring to that is really as behavioral scientists. So, we play this critical role of really developing an understanding of human behaviors and practices, not just from here and there interactions, but we can apply rigor and method to that to really help unpack needs and wants, pain points that customers may feel in a given experience and we do that using our different toolkits with the methodologies I mentioned earlier – qualitative and quantitative. Importantly, we work closely with design and engineering partners to actually bring those insights that we develop into the product-making process. So, we really try to activate our learnings by working side by side with our design and engineering partners, really across the whole product cycle. And what I mean by that is if you think about the beginning stages of product development, there is this opportunity – often, you can go into product-making with a lot of assumptions about what we need to build and what needs are out there for the customers. But rather than basing that on assumptions, we should go learn and understand, what are these problem spaces our customers are having? So, we do a lot of generative research to address that question of what are the problems to solve and what are the right things to build for? Generative research helps us answer those kinds of questions. We often come up, work with designers, come up with some concepts that once we’ve identified a set of problems, hey, maybe these are some solutions to it. We go out and do some concept testing and validation, learning, again, directly from customers, not trying to ground it in what we think they want, but hearing and learning from them directly. And then – and then we move into the second part of the cycle. So, let’s say we’ve landed something. We’ve started to get clarity or signal that, hey, yeah, this thing that we’ve conceptualized here is – has value for the customer. Then, we move into the stages around, okay, now, let’s land the thing we’re designing. Let’s make sure that we’re building the thing right. And so that’s where we use a lot of evaluative research methods. That’s where we go after usability. Is this an easy experience? Is it easy to learn? Is it accessible? Are we creating delight for the customer? And so that’s just some of the ways that we kind of work across that product cycle, bringing things through, from the beginning through the end. In fact, continuing – you know, we can continue and iterate ongoing almost endlessly, I suppose. (Laughter.) So – JASON HOWARD: That’s the joy of Windows; it never ends.