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Gary
So, before I get into my questions, can you explain a little more about your position of Director of Design at Microsoft? Is this the same thing as a Creative Director or Art Director?
Christina
I believe that to be very similar, but I have never worked outside of Microsoft, so I have to explain what it means and you have to put some color into it and tell me if it’s the same thing! So my standard title is Principal Director of User Experience and I often simply abbreviate it to say, Director of Design, short for UX design and the responsibilities that fall under this job function at Microsoft, they’re two major categories: one is user research, so anything around qualitative and quantitative research. Qualitative, like the need finding, behavioral research, standard usability studies, benchmark studies, all those kinds of things and then on the design side, it’s all with initial brainstorming, what should we be doing, what is this product like, who is it for, storyboarding, napkin sketches, wireframing and then slowly moving more into mid-level fidelity into hi-fi visual design, branding, all of that gets processed and click-throughs; sometimes we create CSS, sometimes it’s just red lined final art and of course all the style guides around it, so those are kind of the two big functions that almost anybody like me at Microsoft has, those two roles, the user research part and the design part and the standard title is Principal Director of User Experience.
Gary
Yeah, that sounds like a Creative Director, but one thing I wanted to follow up with that wasn’t in the initial list of questions and it’s something I’ve been recently working with my students on is, as an educator, I give them a project, but the parameters are pretty clearly defined: I pretty much tell them exactly what they need, so they never have that discovery phase that you just talked about where you’re helping through the ideation, is this the appropriate…can you describe a little bit more what that process looks like or maybe in the context of for graphic designers and how prepared they are for that initial phase?
Christina
That’s a really good question. It’s tough because it’s kind of standard product development, and you’ve got to figure out when you want to venture into a particular area what that area is and I think for students, the best thing to immerse themselves into an exercise like that would be to volunteer with any start-up that needs visual or interaction design, which they always do, they’d be so grateful for anyone who comes out of your program to help them. So, immerse yourself in one of those activities because a start-up always has to figure out exactly this: what is it what we want to do? We have an idea; who is it for, what is the competition like in that market, what are the other players doing? Is there really an opening in the market, is there an addressable market for target users that would like this product or this idea, this system, this whatever it is, and how can we tease that out. And I think what students will find, once you’ve been through that process once, you would know how to do it again the next time and a lot of that is the classic, I’ll call it’ the Steve Blank methodology, or Eric Ries, the start-up methodology of customer development, and reading up on that, learning about that, practicing that is a real strong muscle to build.
Gary
So, it’s not a huge detriment then, when students walk into…when new, young designers walk in, that’s not a huge detriment that they aren’t adept at being able to help out, pitch in, draw things out in those meetings, in those initial meetings?
Christina
I don’t think so. I think they’ll learn this very quickly.
Gary
OK, it’s something you get better at the more you do, and you’re there to kind of help guide it anyway.
Christina
Yeah.
Gary
OK, so, I’m also curious a little bit about, again I’m thinking in the classroom, we’re so used to the teacher, the instructor is the everything and the designers is kind of like, they don’t get a sense of what a real working environment is like. So, what exactly is a Project Manager, in the context of Microsoft, what exactly do you do as a Project Manager?
Christina
Yeah, that’s a very unique function at Microsoft and a little bit different in other software companies, so I’ll give you a little bit of the makeup of what the teams at Microsoft looks like and I think they are similar in some of the other big software companies and they may be a little bit different in other types of companies. In a typical engineering team, and design is part of engineering at Microsoft, you have Program Managers, we call them; we have Developers, that’s our programmers, but we call them Developers, and then we have Designers, and under Designers we have both Design Researchers, Interaction Designers and Visual Designers and in that combination of people, you have some roles and responsibilities and you’ve probably seen in my profile that I’ve worked a number of years as a Technical Program Manager at Microsoft, all the ways to even managing teams and program management in entire projects that way and the biggest different for me, comparing my role as a Program Manager, as a Principal Group Program Manager versus what I am today, a Principal Design Director, is that I am no longer in charge of the schedule, the release of the overall product. While a lot of the functions are hand in hand there’s a lot of overlap, but I am not preoccupied with shipping this to market on time, or releasing this update if it’s a service, on time.
Program Management still takes care of that and has always done that and that’s a real differentiation, right? So as such, Program Management compared to my current role has to work harder on design trade-offs; the Program Managers, they’re always…they have the tough but see that needs to apply the understanding of the timing and rationale for design choices. I happily sit there and go…I push as hard as I can for all of the things that I care about, make the optimum user experience that they all make it in, into a particular release, and so they have to fight me and eventually of course, because I have a lot of empathy for that role, I will say, OK, I’m good, or I’m backing off; let’s go ahead and get this release out and incrementally add the other things in that didn’t make it in the next weeks. But that’s a key differentiation and I’ll give you, likewise, something that strongly overlaps with my role. Customer market and insight. As a Program Manager I would sift through market data and apply lots of research methods to gather additional data where we would need it in order to make good decisions and that really strongly overlaps. I think sometimes it’s like the Program Management Team has time for it and then they’ll take care of it; sometimes I have time for it and I’ll take care of it, so there’s lots of roles, lots of responsibilities in our roles that are really similar and then there’s a few distinct differences.
Gary
That research that you just talked about: was that the market research or was that the design research and the user research? Are they different?
Christina
The one that I just talked about is the market research and that will get taken care of in a combination between Program Management and Design. In some teams, Design does it, in some teams, Program Management does it. When it gets to really the user research, it’s almost always the Design Team or the User Experience Team that takes care of that.
Gary
So, what is that deliverable, the latter that you were just talking about, that the Project Manager will be putting together? What does that look like when you give that to the Design Team and how does it help them or what do they glean from it or what should they be looking for?
Christina
Can you specify exactly what aspect of it you’re interested in?
Gary
The marketing one.
Christina
OK, got it. For example, my team did an entire competitive deep dive into a large number of competitive tools, open source tools, in the particular technical area that we were investigating and often, my team took care of it, all my designers I gave one product to each designer and say, use it, install it, play with it, create something with it, do heuristic evaluation and then let’s do a one day debrief on the whole thing, right? Typically you could totally do that on the Program Management Team, because it’s more of a hands-on kind of thing, so it falls in between the two disciplines really, so it also speaks to an aspect of skills that I’m looking for in designers, that designers, if they work in software, designing software, that they are at any given time fit to be assigned such a task where I say, please go ahead and use…I’ll use an open source as an example, use our studio to create a small data wrangling project in which you’re loading data from this public website, like data.gov or something like that, and you’re creating a few basic transformations over the data and outcomes and newly created dataset, and then take good note of your entire experience as you’re doing it and then entire workflow you’re going through and any sort of sharp edges or moments of delight. And so this type of task is squarely in between program management and design and frankly any program manager, product manager or designer should be able to do such an activity.
Gary
You know, that perfectly leads into my next question which is, when it comes to design education, we don’t assign projects like you described, like re-design the Microsoft Word Menu Bar or what should this console interface look like or how do we extract this data into this other interface, so we stick to branding, print and web projects. So, how prepared are young designers coming out of print-heavy or print-only programs for the type of work that you just described?
Christina
They are a little bit less prepared than some other students so it’s almost like what you’re hitting on here for me is, it depends exactly what the student studied in University, right? If they chose a track in which they were hoping for a job later and the career to have a position maybe in a magazine and print design, then all the things you mentioned are perfectly appropriate for that, right? A company like Microsoft does some print design somewhere, but most certainly not in the core engineering function, in the software engineering teams; it’s a different type of thing, it’s a different type of job, so I think for me the question is like this: if as a student you don’t know about these differences and you find out later when you’re already done with your College degree, you kind of wished you had done a little bit more HCI, Human Computer Interaction, but you’ve studied more print and traditional visual design, what can you do to supplement that? Because again, students may be perfectly happy with a job in print somewhere, that’s what they chose as a career and that’s what they’d like to go to. If they change their mind a little bit later, it’s very easy to acquire some of those HCI skills; there’s a wonderful course on corsara.org taught by Scott Klemmer, he’s Associate Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science and I believe currently it’s hosted by University of San Diego, the Human Centered Design course, it’s an introduction course. Any student who has basically finished their visual design degree, for example, could go through that and get all the basics done in a matter of a few weeks. They go through even an entire real world project and they have something to show in their portfolio, so I think it’s really not such a big deal to acquire a little bit of that skill, on top of all the awesome branding and print and web design skills that the student already comes with, which is a super-awesome foundation.
Gary
Yeah, it’s interesting because I’ve never really thought about assigning that as a project. I think even just making students aware of it in the classroom will be enough, at least to get them going in a different direction. Another question I had is, again, this is when I’m in the classroom, I always start off with, we’re designing something from scratch, that’s always the project and in regards to the Cortana Analytics Suite, there’s already branding set, there’s already a systems and software and products in place. How do you go about designing for that, for something that’s already in place versus designing something that’s…imagining something from the ground up? Is there a different process at some point in there?
Christina
Yeah, I think that the process is a little bit different between the two but it’s also similar. I think designers will always find themselves in the same situation: either they are getting assigned to a project that has already an established brand, or it’s a brand new thing and they have to start from scratch, and in my team it’s a mix of the two, it’s one or the other and they kind of alternate, so the designers never have to work only on one or the other. So, when they work with an existing brand they first need to familiarize themselves with the established branding guidelines and then when they work on a new project, they will be part of the team that establishes those guidelines, in accordance with the higher level Microsoft overall brand guidelines and these overall brand guidelines, the collaboration happens with our Corporate Branding Team.
But in my case on the big data analytics products, we do have a lot of freedom to create branding materials. We do get very key aspects of the identity signed off by corp branding, by the Corporate Branding Group, but the day to day stuff is pretty much up to us and by the way, the term brand even is a little bit tricky here. Microsoft only has a few official brands but every product sort of ends up accruing value into supporting those major brands with its own identity and so in other words, to summarize it, students should be able to do both and never have to worry about how hard or inconvenient it is to be consistent with an existing brand: a lot of materials are always there. In our case we have major style guides for all the existing products and coming in new is not going to be a problem as long as they can read style guides they’ll be just fine. I think personally it’s always harder to come up with something from scratch so I think it’s great that you’re mostly doing stuff from scratch, actually, so that’s my opinion.
Gary
The reason I wanted to ask that question was, in print design, once you send it off to the printer, it’s done. You could re-design it and re-print it, but it’s done. With digital design, especially the web, it’s never done; you can always change something, you can always fix something and so you can always iterate and I have kind of a hard time helping students realize what you perceive as the finished product is actually, we’ve just gone through Alpha to Beta and now this is Release 1.
Christina
It’s a point in time; it’s merely a point in time, you’re right.
Gary
And so I was wondering, what is that the same kind of thinking when you have to re-brand something or continue on a project as opposed to starting it up from scratch? Does that make sense?
Christina
Yeah, it does, yeah.
Gary
All right. So, another question is, how involved are your designers with the developers in regards to both basic, everyday decisions, do they work in tandem? But also in regards to performance. How well does the software perform or application or whatever it is?
Christina
For me, this comes down to the Ten Usability Heuristics for User Interface Design which was originally published by Jakob Nielsen in 1995 and it’s still spot-on today, I believe and we’ve used those usability heuristics throughout every project that we’ve worked on and we’ve added a few additional things to it, so we’ve extended it a little bit and one category we added to the ones that Jakob Nielsen published is called Speed and Harmony and so in Speed and Harmony, I look for a few things that I ask all of my designers to keep very close attention to. For example, is the perceived performance of the system fast enough that the user isn’t waiting for it to catch up? But if the users have to wait, do they know for how long they have to wait? And then the other things that have a little bit more to do with speed and harmony together: is the right information shown at the right time to the user. Those types of things. But specifically to your question about performance: perceived performance is the part that I’m really keen on that all designers keep an eye on that so when do we see that? Well, often it’s when the first time we get an Alpha to test with, because up until that point it’s all prototype work, it’s design work, it’s wireframes, it’s stuff that runs in our design systems and not in the actual code and so once we see it running in the actual code we do a run-through ourselves and then we’re often of course initially disappointed that it’s a little slower than we thought it would be and then we go, OK, then we’ll point out the areas in which really the perceived performance, the user sitting there looking at it going, what? I just clicked this! Is it done? Is it not? This is kinda slow, that we poke into those areas and point those out because in the end of the day, that is part of user experience design.
Gary
And so do the programmers, depending on what you’re working on because I would assume that software that’s native to the computer versus a web application, performance would have two different approaches, so I’m curious more maybe more on the web side of it. Would the developers sit down and look at mock-ups and designs that the designers are working on and say hey, that could be trouble down the road. Do they have the dialogues early in your model or do they happen waterfall approach?
Christina
Later. Both things happen and I believe it is often the case of the experience of the developer, having seen or done something already, and the other component that matters here is, how crazy did we get in our design? I say this half way funny on purpose because sometimes you come up with some designs that are a little bit out there, meaning there may be motion graphics in action or there may be fluid UI interactions that look amazing when you get them right but they’re more taxing on the system and then all of a sudden you have to have those kinds of conversations so when it’s all standard stuff, you don’t have many of these conversations but the moment you’re bringing in animations or heavy movement.
I’ll give you other examples out of my technical area here: data load, in the big data analytics, all of my users of my system immediately load some data and that can be gigabytes or terabytes of data and that’s a heavy tax on the system and so we come up with a lot of things, how can we page through things or how can we partially put a result on the screen for the user, even if it’s just a few records, so that they have something to look at and decide whether they even loaded the right thing before we make them sit there and wait too long. And those are kinds of conversations we have with developers early on and then we do have to trust them that their assessment is right when they say, look, this can’t be done, or only at significant cost and often we also go back and say yes, there is significant cost but the value’s very high; let’s build that muscle up a little bit, maybe we need to add another one or two developers in that area so that we can have the more fluid interaction, but everything is subject to negotiation, you probably already get that sense: nothing is ever black or white. Everything is something that we discuss a lot, we collaborate a lot over, everything is done together and never in isolation so it’s never like the developer gets to make the decision and then pushes it back to the designer who goes off and does stuff. Everything is sort of together and often. We all try to do a best work and we go to executive level design, like the VP of all of these products gets to see it and says, well that’s kind of slow here, you guys. We already tried to do the best we could but then we do go back to the drawing board and push it further at that point.
Gary
I love the problem that you just posed out there as a potential project for students, because again, we never think about this type of design, but you mentioned we’ve got this huge dataset that’s going to take forever to load, but once they click load, they have no idea if they’re loading the right dataset, so that’s amazing just to think about, OK, so let’s design some kind of warning that hey, this is what you’re loading, while it’s loading in the background, so they can at least get a sense of what it’s going and so that…I’ve just never thought about that as a project, but that’s really interesting.
Christina
These are the projects of the current time; people are drowning in data and every company has to process data and one way or another, you probably process a lot of data in your spare time and in your professional time too and it’s a very common problem; you know it’s taxing on the system, you know your users are going to wait there for something: what can you display to them? Ideally in a combination of hey, this is going to take a little while but look what we already got for you here, and so it’s an interesting area in general and we are very, very keen on always having that in mind with everything that we do in our software.
Gary
Something I’m going to think of to throw into my projects! So, I’ve asked this question many times before without getting a definitive answer, and there probably isn’t one, but I’m going to ask away: what type of work in a student’s portfolio gives you the best indication that they will be successful as an interactive designer at Microsoft?
Christina
So, portfolio, that is often a quite generic piece and, it’s very interesting what you go through as a potential hiring manager, what you’re looking for. Number one, the first thing that I want to see is if I go to somebody’s portfolio, I want to have a little bit of an emotional experience and I want to have an emotional reaction to it. Call it a little bit of a wow effect; I click on something, the first thing comes up and I go, wow, that looks awesome. That feels really good, no matter what the pieces are that are in the portfolio, but that first thing of I click on a link and something comes up and I go wow, that looks nice: OK, so digging further, peeling the onion, if it’s a website that I’ve clicked on, typically I click on websites, I don’t get anything in print, I’ve never seen a print portfolio in my life and I don’t think I will see one in my career! But that’s all right, it’s on the web and that’s where it lives and I do want to get a feeling for how much of an effort that candidate made, even to design that website. And I don’t care if they took a template to start with and just started modifying it or feeding it their own stuff; I want to see how well it’s composed and I want to also kind of be able to judge whether that entire thing right away looks professional or more amateur, both in the way it looks and also how it functions, how the website itself functions and so there’s that. And if all of the samples that are in there are completely fictitious I get a little bit nervous, so if I can see right away they’re all just student projects, then I get a little bit nervous because I’d like to at least see one or two examples where the candidate did some real work for someone; volunteering is just fine, but I’d like to know that the real work made it out into…like a real product, no matter how small. Could be like an e-book or a website, web app, mobile app, client app; it doesn’t matter, but it’s got to be out in the wild.
I always give extra points for motion graphics in a portfolio, if somebody made an animation or a little bit of a small video with something nice inside it, because I believe that motion will continue to play a stronger and stronger role in the future of interactive design and we’ve applied it a few times in our applications to communicate highly complex processes in quite elegant visual ways, so students who have built out a little bit their motion graphics knowledge, that is a big plus. And then, so I give you one more thing that I don’t see in the portfolio, but when I see something in the portfolio I go, there could be something there; before I decide to formally interview a student, I do give them a design exercise and in the end of the day, this exercise is the single one thing allows me to decide whether the candidate is going to be a great fit and a great hire for my team. And believe me or not, this exercise is a very simple little thing. I give them a brief that draws a little bit of a real world scenario; in my case I use a coffee ordering scenario. I draw the scenario of a real world user, this user’s called Julie, she’s a busy working professional and a mom, she drinks coffee to get her going in the morning, she has a particular coffee shop she loves going to, the lines are often very long when she gets there 8:30 in the morning and then I continue drawing the scenario where she has this crazy day, stuff happened at home, she gets there, the line is super-long, she has to leave the coffee shop without getting her coffee and she has to dash to work, and that first meeting really doesn’t go so well, she’s not quite on because she hasn’t had a chance to have a coffee, and so then I ask the candidate to provide a solution to that problem and it all leads to the design of a little coffee ordering app and you know, all I’m looking for is how the designer breaks this problem apart.
Are they following a standard HCI process, do they start with the user, do they do a little bit of their own research? Did they go in a coffee shop and observe what’s going on, talk to barista or to customers? Can they prototype after they interviewed some users, how are their wireframes looking, did they capture the essence of what is needed here? Did they even test the prototype with a target user and then I usually only ask them to do one or two screens of a visual comp, like a hi-fi comp, because I don’t want people to spend too much time on it. I can see from the portfolio how good their visual skills are and from this little exercise, I see how well can they pry apart what really is a user need and can they structure it and feed it back to me in a way where I go, you know, they got it. They got it, they have empathy for their user, they have empathy for the problem, they didn’t jump to conclusions too prematurely and they worked their way through it and so they present this back to me in a pdf form and a little click-through, we’d talk about it on the phone and based on that conversation, I can make a very good call whether or not we’d like to move this candidate through a formal interview. And you know what? I even utilize this again, if I do invite them to a formal interview, I set aside an hour and a half in my interview loop to have them debrief it with us, I pull in a few more people from my team and I even say look, we make this collaborative; you get to share with us what you did for our customer Julie, the busy mom who didn’t get her coffee that morning, and then we sit in a room and we let them present what they’ve done with it and then we kind of pry it apart and we say, what if Julie did this and could we do that and we really act for an hour and a half like we are a team already and we’re trying to make it better for Julie and also that helps me to see how this candidate interacts with a team, with a group of people. Can they think on their feet? Can they listen to feedback? Will they be able to turn something around? Will they interact with us in a way? And I don’t look so much for things that people have done twenty years in their career: no. It can be very much a fresh perspective but I do look for that group thing, the group collaboration, the way they feed off of people, all of that. It’s very important to me.
Gary
I love…the idea that popped into my mind and I’ve done this before and it’s always been really better, but I don’t do it consistently and that’s instead of giving them a project, give them a scenario, just like you said, and I think all of us need to do that more, but really I think you explained that out, that idea a little bit better; this is the scenario, this is that person, how can we make their life better? And that should be the basis for just about any design project, I think that’d be helpful for both for you…
Christina
That’s how I see it, yeah, that’s exactly how I see it too.
Gary
All right well we’re almost out of time here so, Christina, before I let you go, is there anything you are working on that you would like to share or something you want to promote or maybe some final advice?
Christina
You know what? I’ve already had the opportunity to share with you a little bit about the products that I work on and so for me, it’s always…I guess something I would love to plug is that students that are coming out of School, no matter which one, visual design, interaction design, HCI, to not think that they can’t do it because they haven’t studied something in depth and to also to not discount something that on the surface may look very geeky and very technical to them; I’ll be very explicit here. I’ve hired some fourteen people in the last…gosh, two years, and they’re very diverse and I don’t look for…there’s not a particular profile I look for. I look for a lot of raw potential and I’ve noticed a lot that people sometimes don’t even want to apply for a particular position that I have because they think it’s maybe aiming too high or maybe this is too geeky for them, this is too technical.
All I need is people to have curiosity and empathy for users and at that point, it doesn’t matter if the user is Julie, the busy mom who needs a coffee in the morning, which would be a fun consumer app to design, or in my case, my users are data scientists with a PhD that need better tools and better systems to create predictive models, and that may sound kinda scary and students may shy away from applying to positions like that, but in the end of the day, it’s the same thing; it’s users with a problem and all you have to have is curiosity about that problem and don’t be too nervous about the fact that you can’t relate to the problem yourself. You may be able to relate to the coffee problem if you’re a coffee drinker. But if you’re not, you already can’t relate to that anyway, so I don’t expect you to be a PhD in data science to be able to relate to that user, and that’s my plug. Understand that there’s a lot of interesting positions in enterprise application design that may sound really hard on the surface, but day to day there’s as fun as making coffee ordering apps for Julie.
Gary
What was I going to say? It just escaped me there for a minute. But I think that’s part of that problem is with design education, that we just don’t promote these kind of problems; visual problems that if we were to do a better job of saying that…oh no, it’s the user research, that’s what I was getting at, that’s where the user research comes in. No, they don’t need to be a PhD; they do research, they’re getting the information that they need! That’s what I was going to…
Christina
And to immerse yourself. If you’re not nervous about immersing yourself into somebody else’s shoes, that’s what it takes. I think that’s the kicker; you will always stay a little bit on the outside if you’re not willing to deep dive into somebody’s shoes but if you’re curious and you are willing to do that and sit with people, if they are willing to show you how they do their work and from that you can glean opportunities of improvement, how you can get them from A to Z faster and gosh, that was a clunky step and did you see how long it took for them to wait for the result to pop up? All those kinds of things, if you have that curiosity, any position, no matter how complicated it sounds like, is completely doable and as a designer, you can work some magic to make people’s lives better and that’s really my plug here, to consider those types of roles. Don’t worry that they may sound overly complex, you will be just fine if your curiosity is big and you let yourself be open to be inspired that way.