Microsoft is Re-designing its Million-plus Page Website with Help from InContext

Microsoft is the worldwide leader in software, services, and Internet technologies for personal and business computing. The company offers a wide range of products and services designed to empower people through great software, any time, any place, and on any device.

Microsoft makes vast amounts of information available through its website, Microsoft.com, to attract potential customers, inform existing customers, support people maintaining Microsoft-based systems, and encourage communities to form around Microsoft's systems. The very richness of this site creates its own problems — it has grown from 100 to over 1.2 million pages in the last 7 years, and as many as 7 million people access the site each day.

Microsoft's Challenge

What do IT professionals, developers, and other professionals really need when they come to Microsoft.com?

How should Microsoft.com be structured to best meet user needs and Microsoft’s business goals?

What interaction design will improve information access, framework navigation, and content use?

Microsoft turned to InContext to study the usage of Microsoft.com and provide a conceptual design for restructuring it. "We wanted to start from a bedrock of good user data," explained Doug Pyle, Usability Manager for Microsoft.com. "Contextual Inquiry shows how people interact with the site and their real needs. That understanding would then inform us how to build the site. Microsoft decided to outsource due to the time investment and challenges presented by orchestrating the effort. When we outsource a project, I wouldn't think of going to anyone but the primary source. For Contextual Inquiry, our first choice was InContext."

InContext conducted field interviews to understand the roles, tasks, and needs of professionals using Microsoft's site; how the site supports the key tasks of development support, system maintenance, making buying decisions, troubleshooting, and learning; and how the site navigation and content supports or gets in the way of those goals. Based on this data, InContext recommended a cohesive site structure that supported the actual work practice of users seeking information.

End Users' Issues

By observing users working with Microsoft.com, InContext discovered the key challenges a website re-design would have to overcome:

Design Solutions

The InContext team used this insight to develop potential re-design concepts for Microsoft.com. The re-design brought key current information to the front page of the site, while organizing the front page by user intent. These concepts were tested and refined with users. The final design:

Users were very happy with the re-design:

"This is great. It eliminates eight levels of drill-down."

"The tech support page is a great idea. It focuses on what I do every day."

"Tailoring pages is great — I can really fit it to my job."

Delivering Results

This project gave Microsoft the new look at their own site that they needed: