Last week, Microsoft completed its relaunch of its Microsoft.com website, based on the company"s Modern UI that it is using for several products, including Windows 8. Now one of the people involved in the creation of the new design talks about how the team at Microsoft came up with the new look.
In a post on his personal Rainypixels.com site, Microsoft Web Strategist Nishant Kothary said he first became involved in the new design due to his wife, who was put in as the Director of Program Management for the Microsoft.com team. She asked him to talk to his team about modern web design. That evolved into working even more with the team and even with an outside design firm, Paravel, Inc, who helped to create Microsoft"s BUILD 2012 website, among others.
Kothary writes that the team that designed the Microsoft.com site sometimes used ideas that came from the "gut". He states:
Designing from the gut is a radical concept. It is generally met with a tremendous amount of friction in most software circles that tend to rely heavily on "logic and data" for all decisions. This is not to say that there isn"t a place for telemetry or usability studies in the act of designing software. It"s simply a question of when and where.
One of the big major changes that came late in the design process was using one "hero" image on the main Microsoft.com page, as opposed to pages in earlier preview versions that had a number of logos and images, as seen above. Kothary states, "The Microsoft.com team had the ability and freedom to make gut calls like this one, and this brings to the foreground the final and most important ingredient of this project that I can fit into the attention span of a Web reader."
Source: RainyPixels.com | Image via RainyPixels.com/Microsoft