on these experiences, however, are the brand promise and the aesthetics of the experience that signal what users should be expecting. While organizations are not necessarily motivated by theory, they are motivated by sticky ideas, stories, and images that grab their attention and shape their view of the world. The experience vision, therefore, provides messaging that we drive through our communications across the organization as well as how we define the tactics that implement our strategy.

Photograph by Julien Gong Min

deliver and inspire
In the first year of our existence,
my team faced pressure to avoid
supporting specific projects
and instead simply concentrate
on creating standards for user
interfaces. The best standards
and guidelines are grounded in
successful design, not pulled out
of the air. We have persisted,
therefore, in pushing to ensure
that the UX teams are focused
on the most strategically impor-
tant projects within those areas
of the organization where UX is
part of the critical path to suc-
cess. In addition, we continually
search for the difficult business
problems facing the organiza-
tion and identify and provide
breakthroughs for the problems
within the set centered on the
experience.

motivate

Inspiring design and a compelling vision are two forms of motivation that move teams to aspire to better experiences. But Microsoft IT is an engineering organization, and the kind of motivation that works its way through the genetics of the organization completely depends on metrics that matter to the organization, that will be tracked, and for which people will be held accountable. The model within the overall vision identifies satisfaction at the heart of what we want to measure. Fortunately, Microsoft has adopted a standard satisfaction metric that it uses broadly, across products, which has been built into the compensation of many senior executives. However it has not been used as consistently across operational or other IT interfaces, so we are attempting to evangelize a more