Creating a User-centered
Development Culture
arnold (arnie) m. lund
Microsoft Corporation | [e-mail]
“However beautiful the strategy,
you should occasionally look at the
results.” —Winston Churchill
[ 1] Hill, C. and Jones, G.
Strategic Management:
An Integrated Approach.
Boston, MA: Houghton
Mifflin, 2001.
May + June 2010
The Microsoft IT organization—
including the division I’m in—
creates the tool employees use
to develop Microsoft’s products,
websites providing the connec-
tion between Microsoft and its
partners, and solutions that sup-
port customers’ needs when they
use the products from Microsoft
and its partners. It has approxi-
mately 6,000 full-time employees
and a similar number of contrac-
tors and vendors. Even more than
other parts of Microsoft, IT has
an engineering culture where the
primary goal is to ship bug-free
code on time and on budget, and
to do it in a predictable, measur-
able way. There isn’t a lot of toler-
ance for the mess of the human
and the creative. When I joined
the organization as an experi-
ence architect, at most a handful
of human-computer interaction
(HCI) professionals and I were
being asked to raise the quality
of the interfaces being produced
and to transform the way the
organization was thinking about
what it was creating from util-
ity to relationship. I remember
one designer asking, “Why would
anyone want to take on a task
that impossible?” Thinking about
the opportunity to influence
every product that Microsoft and
its partners create, with virtually
all of its revenue passing through
the systems, and the possibility
to improve customer experience
worldwide, how could one resist?