Microsoft Analog

In 2012 myself and other leaders at Microsoft built an entirely new group called Microsoft Analog to develop some of the company's most ambitious products. The group grew from 30 people when I joined to over 1,000 in just a few short years. My role was to build the team of 21st century designers builders and makers and lean into this new space more like Silicon Valley and less like Redmond. When Satya Nadella became Microsoft CEO he assigned his “high value scenarios” throughout the company. The most ambitious scenario - More Personal Computing - was assigned to Analog as a mandate to create more fluid, frictionless and human product experiences based in sensors, machine learning and high definition output. But sensors and AI are just one part of the equation. The expectation of bigger tech brands like Microsoft is that our ever-growing list of distributed offerings will be held together by a solid design and that our "ecosystem" will be a good thing for consumers and not something we and they are constantly banging our heads against. I've found both these kinds of design challenges put many designers in an unexpected and sometimes unwanted place. Ecosystem design is hard and few people have real ecosystem experience. But there are those who obsess over the elegance of a system and try and attain whatever skills necessary to design for it and put technology to work for their cause. And these are the kinds of designers I sought out for our group. Analog’s charter has given me much more direct influence on not just what we make, but how and why we make it. In addition to bringing together and leading the designers to do this work I have also been in charge of defining and telling Analog's story to engage and inspire the larger group to stay on mission and keep reaching higher.

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This new problem/opportunity space has required me to hire an entirely new design team with cutting edge skill sets, most of whom came from outside the company. It wasn’t easy to convince a group of highly intelligent and creative people, some of them industry rock stars, to come join especially when I could not divulge the product concept. But with the help of some very hard working recruiters and a lot of interviewing and socializing we built the better part of our team in 6 months. 

Analog has come about at an interesting time in Microsoft’s evolution. As the CEO was breaking down walls in order to bring all the people and pieces together Analog was asked to both strike out on our own but also integrate deeply into the company. This has required us, especially my team and I, to do some pretty sophisticated storytelling, branding and socializing. The Microsoft machine can be an anchor or an accelerant and so while we’ve had to project a clear and singular image we’ve also had to present ourselves as a positive projection of the company’s future and not a different place entirely in order to get others to join the movement or help advance the cause.

In addition to building a new team inside a company as it was transforming itself, this radically new space has required us to lead much of the tool development as well. When we began there wasn’t a Sketch, OmniGraffle or proper IDE for making holograms and so we had to string together a number of disparate tools as well as make our own in order to keep us fast, fluid and productive.
 

Details

My Role :

Team Leader, Hiring Manager, Designer
 

Tasks and IC Participation :

Communication Design, Storytelling, Art Direction, Writing, Branding, Budgets and Operations

Our HoloLens announcement included several media artifacts. My favorite, "Possibilities," is B-roll view of the Analog vibe directed by Morgan Neville. This video which my team helped develop, captures the positivity, fun and egoless tenor of Analog.

In 2014 we launched an internal campaign promoting the Analog Design principles throughout the company and greater Analog team. The campaign included videos, attract screens, books and posters. 

Analog ”Synth" is a spatial UX tool my team created to allow our designers and PMs to be fluid with system and UX concepts. Though this was originally meant for desktop screens we can now view our holographic 3d wireframes in the HoloLens. 

Before Microsoft's recent themes and campaigns were shared publicly, my team along with director Andrew Stringer created this MS internal anthem video to inspire an entirely new take on the Windows operating system and the company as a whole. 

Once we had a basic understanding of the medium we would allow ourselves to detach from it a bit and think out the logic of holograms, space and interaction in 2d. Our UX design process to date has involved a constant back and forth between the two. In the beginning the medium was too slow for us to innovate quickly and so to accommodate fast creative minds we built a our 2d 3d tool "Analog Synth" (see above) to free up our process. The trick for me as design leader on HoloLens and as we get into new territories, is making sure the team knows what's a map and what's the reality. 

One of first UX and product story tasks Analog did was to glean Windows 8, Microsoft's core OS, for core concepts that would translate into Windows Holographic. While we found very little to work with in the end and an entirely new OS was being designed anyway, this work set the tone for how we scoped and shared our system concepts with partners.