Microsoft home management applications

2006 | Microsoft's Home Management applications incubation project.

The family management applications project at Microsoft was a very ambitious incubation project with the goal of creating a set of management tools optimized for the scenarios of family use. This is certainly a very interesting area where many players have tried to come up with the perfect solution. Given that the complexity of integration is simply very large, no company has solved the problem completely. In this project I was responsible for a number of different features of the whole application which included the settings of the system, the First Time Experience, the Community site, a number of different modules like a gifting application, the overall Application's Help, and probably others I don't even remember. I led a number of designers to cover these feature areas.

I was particularly interested in understanding the overall structure of the application and the integration points which led me to the creation of several information architecture diagrams highlighting all the UI components and the different ways in which the data (that is: user's information) is transformed and shared.

The project has since changed focus but a number of learnings remain, in particular around the different approaches to home management and communication of information among family members. Many years ago we predicted that post it notes and paper would fall out of use. So far, this has not happened.