In my foreword to Bill Scott and Theresa Neil’s great book, Designing Web Interfaces, I outlined the role of design principles in the software development process:

“Design principles are the guiding light for any software application. They define and communicate the key characteristics of the product to a wide variety of stakeholders including clients, colleagues, and team members. Design principles articulate the fundamental goals that all decisions can be measured against and thereby keep the pieces of a project moving toward an integrated whole.”

I also detailed the need for design principles to help teams make informed decisions in my recent Parti & The Design Sandwich presentation. So naturally, I was excited to find several examples of design principles in use at Microsoft.

While Microsoft itself admits to design challenges in some of their products, the places where I saw design principles in use produced some pretty interesting product designs. In particular: Windows 7 Desktop, Office 2007, and Microsoft Surface.

For the Windows 7 desktop design, Stephan Hoefnagel showed the following principles in action:

• Reduce concepts to increase confidence
• Small things matter, good and bad
• Solve distractions, not discoverability
• Time matters, build for people on the go
• Value the full lifecycle of the experience
• Be great at “look” and “do”

For the Microsoft Office 2007 redesign, Jensen Harris illustrated how these “design tenants” helped the team make effective decisions:

• A person’s focus should be on their content, not on the UI. Help people work without interference.
• Reduce the number of choices presented at any given time.
• Increase efficiency.
• Embrace consistency, but not homogeneity.
• Give features a permanent home. Prefer consistent-location UI over “smart” UI.
• Straightforward is better than clever.

For Microsoft Surface, Joseph Fletcher mentioned how a set of principles for Natural User Interfaces (NUIs) and “super principles” for Microsoft Surface helped the team design.

Natural User Interfaces should be:

• Evocative: Principle of Performance Aesthetics
• Unmediated: Principle of Direct Manipulation
• Fast Few: Principles of Scaffolding
• Contextual: Principle of Contextual Environments
• Intuition: Principle of Super Real

Microsoft Surface should be:

• Social: multiple simultaneous users
• Seamless: digital & physical combined
• Spatial: kinesiology

If you have other examples of using design principles to help shepherd a software development project toward a holistic design- let me know.

Luke Wroblewski

Contact Info: luke@lukew.com LukeW is an internationally recognized Web thought leader who has designed or contributed to software used by more than 600 million people. He is currently Senior Director of Product Ideation & Design at Yahoo! Inc. where he leads the design of the world's most accessed Web page (Yahoo.com) and many other popular products including My Yahoo! and Yahoo! Buzz.

Luke is the author of two popular Web design books: Web Form Design (2008) and Site-Seeing: A Visual Approach to Web Usability (2002). He also publishes Functioning Form, a leading online publication for interaction designers. Luke is consistently a top-rated speaker at conferences and companies around the world, and is a co-founder and former Board member of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA).
 

Previously, Luke was the Lead User Interface Designer of eBay Inc.'s platform team, where he led the strategic design of new consumer products (such as eBay Express and Kijiji) and internal tools and processes. He also founded LukeW Interface Designs, a product strategy and design consultancy, taught interface design courses at the University of Illinois and worked as a Senior Interface Designer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the birthplace of the first popular graphical Web browser, NCSA Mosaic.