Hardware

Seamless integration

Seamless integration between hardware and software is the measuring stick for the new age of computing – an age where it is possible to access the Internet from a television and retrieve e-mail from a digital phone. As interactions between hardware and software become more complex, delivering a best-in-class experience requires conscious collaboration among many design disciplines.

The Hardware User Experience team is an interdisciplinary group of designers, researchers and writers, who in the 20-plus year history of Hardware have applied our skills not only to mice and keyboard products, but a cordless digital phone, interactive children's toys, game controllers, and networking devices.

An underlying theme behind our work is that by driving innovations in hardware, we can enable new features and interactions in software that in turn impact the software industry. For example, adding force feedback to a joystick greatly enhances the realism of the game, and adding horizontal and vertical scrolling to the mouse wheel increases the user's control in graphics and spreadsheet applications.

Raising the bar
When a customer picks up one of our products, we want that first-touch experience to provide comfort, performance, style, and ease-of-use. We challenge ourselves to look at the system holistically. How can this device make it easier and more enjoyable to interact with the computer? How do the physical controls on the device interact with features in the user's software applications? How can the product's visual design language influence the way the person feels about their experience?

One of the challenges we face consistently is making sure that our customers have successful out-of-box experiences. While the ideal user experience is typically, "you plug it in and it works," this is often hard to deliver in a real world environment. In the case of our Broadband Networking devices, the setup process differed depending on a number of variables, including operating system version, the type of Internet connection the customer had, and many more. Enter the User Experience team. Working together, this group of researchers, interaction designers, industrial designers, and technical writers crafted an end-to-end solution by breaking down the home networking setup experience into simple, achievable steps. Not only did our customers benefit, we also raised the bar for ease of use and setup across the home networking industry.

Functional, beautiful, personal products
In Hardware, we're changing the way we approach product design. "As technology products become a larger part of everyday routine, people want options," says Ken Fry, Hardware User Experience Manager. Moving away from the "one-size-fits-all" design approach of the past, our industrial design team strives to deliver a range of products that appeal to a variety of customers.

Comfort and performance are design requirements for all of our desktop devices, but, to some of our customers, it's important that a mouse or keyboard express or extend their personal style. When designing for these users, we take inspiration from fashion runways, the automotive industry, and the latest trends in interior design, our industrial designers begin with a palette of hundreds of colors, graphics, finishes and textures, where nothing is off-limits. Through a refinement process of user research and design iteration, the final forms, colors, and materials are determined. The designers then work closely with our manufacturing partners to ensure that the original intent is expressed in the mass-produced final product.

Providing choices includes collaboration with external partners. We worked with Philippe Starck, a designer known for bringing design to everyday products, on a version of our Optical Mouse. Starck provided the inspiration and overall product vision, and worked closely with Microsoft engineers and designers to ensure that the mouse was not only eye-catching but comfortable and easy to use.