The company’s principal creative director on how the small-team model works inside a big company with such a global reach and why the team’s ultimate goal is bona fide, possibly-quantifiable user love.
When you think of design-driven software companies, Microsoft won’t likely be the first that comes to mind.
You might want to reassess your biases, though, because it turns out that Microsoft has been picking up some of the best design talent in the game for several years now, and its design-forward attitude shows no signs of abating.Dave Nelson, Microsoft’s principal creative director, is one of the design team’s brightest stars and is a key player in this seismic shift. Training in calligraphy at the age of 12 made Nelson realize that he would one day work in design. He studied under former students of luminaries Paul Rand and Katherine McCoy, receiving a rigorous design foundation before breaking into the commercial world. Nelson has been a catalyst for change at Microsoft by adopting a small and agile team model that not only forces designers and developers to collaborate, but also requires that every team member interact directly with customers in the field so they can witness how their products work in the real world.
By moving toward these small customer-centric teams, Microsoft has been changing the way it approaches product development. Having learned from past mistakes, the team has also reprised its design system Metro; it recently announced the launch of its successor, Fluent, which it created with the intention of adapting to today’s world, including the introduction of 2-D and 3-D capabilities for AR (augmented reality) and VR (virtual reality) interaction.
99U Contributing Editor Dave Benton recently sat down with Nelson to find out why curiosity is the number one prerequisite for his staff, how the small-team model works within a big company with such a global reach, and why the team’s ultimate goal is bona fide, possibly-quantifiable user love.
When did you realize design was in your blood?
I always knew I wanted to be a designer. My grandmother got me into calligraphy in middle school, and it got me hooked on the graphic quality of type in communication. This led to the idea of advertising and commercial design, and then I knew I wanted to go to design school. My academic design career in college was extremely rigorous and very traditional. One of my teachers studied under Paul Rand and the other studied under Katherine McCoy.
You started your career as a Flash developer and designer. How has that influenced what you did later?
I stumbled into the Flash thing out of curiosity. In fact, curiosity is probably the one thing that has tied my career together. Insatiable levels of curiosity are key to me and my teams. Stepping into something you don’t know and trying something new – that’s important to me. When I got into Flash, it was a real do-it-yourself time in digital design. Through Flash I built a strong technical understanding that I now use on a daily basis. I learned how to push design with code, and gained the ability to talk to more technical people and bridge the gap between ideas and execution. Look at Charles Eames: He had to sit down with manufacturers to see how far they could bend plywood. Great print designers work the same way. Flash really helped me to fully understand materials and how to flex things as much as possible. I got interested in type and image and motion, but the kinetic quality of Flash is what drew me in. It allowed me to make things come alive and get rich feedback from screens, which were traditionally hard to interact with.
Do you feel that in-house designers are getting their seat at the table, whereas agency designers are still left outside?
When you’re a hired gun, you just have a piece of the journey and don’t have the same skin in the game to fully see a product through. When you build something and stay on track to make sure a product works the way it should, you are earning your seat at the table. Design has typically sat closer to the top of the iceberg, but we are now deep into the bottom, as there is a lot involved in making a successful product at scale: It’s the long game. A designer from an ad agency has their metaphorical muscles built as a sprinter, but here you have to slow down and work out that the impact of what you do today will come several months down the line. You have to be a marathon runner to work on product.
What are the unique issues and opportunities of designing for three-plus billion people?
Tactically, my team struggles with the localization of interfaces. It’s hard enough to describe a great experience in English on one platform. Mix two different platforms and multiply it by hundreds of languages – these are our current struggles. We need to make sure we are designing with a very focused perspective while keeping a universal one at the same time. Most recently I have been working with non–information workers. This forced us to get out of our comfort zone and hang out with people. We spent a lot of time trying to learn about people who don’t stand in front of a computer all day long.
We are talking about the front-line workforce that doesn’t sit in an office; we call them desk-less workers. These are the baristas in a coffee shop, construction workers, health care industry workers. People who are on the go and working from multiple locations and are on their feet all day long. People interacting human to human. So you are building experiences to connect people and bring them closer together while they are working to be happier and healthier and more focused on what they are doing at work.
Finding the balance to go broad enough and serve the needs of lots of people is always a challenge. You have to find the balance of designing for a human versus designing for a system of people. Take the coffee shop barista. You are looking at a system: a group of people working together. We are essentially working on solving for the hive and how people work together collectively. It means you can have a huge level of impact on how you are changing the workforce. This is a sector that has been ignored to date, and much of their work is done on paper, so I also get excited about the potential reduction of waste. We are going to be able to reduce a lot of paperwork globally. One of our pilot customers became an early fan because the scheduling tools we built for her team have taken away 25 percent of the time she spent on creating schedules.
What is the biggest change you have seen at Microsoft in the…
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