A behind-the-scenes look at designing the new Hotmail: part one

Talking to customers gives us great ideas about how to make Hotmail better.

One of the things we hear about the most is inbox overload: folks want to find important emails quickly. Whether it’s an important back-and-forth conversation with friends or a YouTube video that brightened your day, it can be hard to find the messages that matter most. When we set out to design the new Hotmail, our main goal was to solve the problem of too much clutter.

In addition to cleaning up the inbox, customers also told us they want to save time doing email. In response, we designed the email interface to make your message content come alive so that you can enjoy it from right in the email itself. For example, when your sister sends you a link to photos on Flickr, you won’t actually have to go to Flickr. When you buy a package online, you can see where it is from inside your shipping receipt. When you’re collaborating on an Office document, you can do it online without having to install Office. Our goal was to make these features natural and easy to use by putting a lot of careful thought into a clear and uncluttered design that would save you clicks and work without getting in your way.

Our design and research team is made up of people who’ve spent years learning about what our customers care about and how they expect to interact with services on the web. Over time, we’ve developed design principles to make sure we do what’s right. These principles, the Windows User Experience Principles, are intended to make changes feel smooth, not like a sudden “big bang.”

We realize that change is hard for our customers, so we don’t take it lightly. Any change we undertook needed to have clear purpose and a worthwhile payoff.

Questions we asked:

• Do we fully understand the strengths and weaknesses of the previous experience?
• Have we considered all the drawbacks of the change?
• Will people thank us for making this change?

We need to make the hard design choices so that our experience is natural and intuitive at the right moments and trust that people will explore the rest.

Questions we asked:

• What is the experience going to be great at?
• Are we presenting interface elements when they’re relevant?

It’s easy to get excited about making every possible thing new and get carried away refreshing or rethinking every last detail, but that doesn’t always make for good design.

Questions we asked:

• Are we reducing what's unnecessary in our design?
• Are we reusing what works and reinventing only when needed?
• How is any new concept justifiably different from what's already there?

In my next two posts, I’m going to give you a behind-the-scenes peek at how we arrived at particular designs for some of our bigger changes in the new Hotmail. I’ll be showing you ideas and concepts that we debated and discussed with Hotmail customers along the way so you can see the range of options we considered and evaluated with real-life customers.

Michael Kopcsak – Senior User Experience Lead, Windows Live

UPDATE: We’re working hard to get the new Hotmail rolled out to the rest of the world. Read this update post for news on the rollout, and once you have the new Hotmail in your hands, look for parts two and three of our look at the design process.