Microsoft · 2008–2012

Four years building a thesis about connected entertainment. Then one release to test it on.

I ran research programs for eHome, then wrote three-year visions for Microsoft's biggest product groups, then joined 343 Industries to find out whether any of it held up inside a shipping product.

Speaking about using social-cultural trends as a catalytic innovation tool during Engineering Excellence week. June 2011.

Halo 4

the entire Halo Waypoint release, generated from the 3-yr vision

D.I.C.E. award

Outstanding Achievement in Connectivity, 2013

TLDR

What I was there to do: run research programs for eHome, then create multi-year visions for Microsoft's biggest product groups in the Connected Strategy Studio, then own 343's connected companion platform, Halo Waypoint, end to end: the vision, the strategy, and the design of the release it generated.
Who I led: the Waypoint experience charter as UX Lead, managing the UX team in Seattle and three vendor studios in Los Angeles, San Diego and Montreal. Earlier, the global research and social-cultural trends programs for eHome and the Connected Strategy Studio.
What lasted: the methods, tools, and techniques. They did not start at Microsoft: discovery deep enough to build on, and the vision and strategy that turn it into something a business will fund. Microsoft is where I took ownership of them and ran them at a scale and consequence I had not had before. Trendency is the tool I carried out, and the methods and techniques are what every chapter since has run on.

Two years of watching people use connected TV before I had opinions about it.

I joined Microsoft in 2008 to run research programs for Windows Media Center across Vista and Windows 7. That meant owning it end to end: a recurring study cadence, a beta program with a scoring model that picked participants against personas instead of taking whoever volunteered, phone ethnography in other countries, desirability tracking across OS versions, and a weekly quality gate on every feature. It also meant Catalina, a set of concepts that put NBC, Netflix and Hulu into the Media Center channel row in 2008. Everything I argued for over the next four years came out of those two years of watching people try to use a connected living room before one really existed.

Streaming channels in Windows Media Center. Microsoft, 2008.

Three screens and a cloud, written as three-year visions.

In 2009 I moved into the Connected Strategy Studio, the group that wrote long-horizon experience visions for Microsoft's product organizations. I worked on Three Screens and a Cloud, the framing for how people would move between phone, PC and television with their identity and content following them. Then Apollo X, the three-year mobile experience vision, with field research I ran in London, Germany, Brazil, China and India. Then Thunder Bay, the three-screen strategy for the merged Media Center and Zune organizations; and P10, the case for how Xbox would become input one in the living room. I was a core researcher and product strategist across all of it, work that was multi-year and company-wide.

Apollo X, the three-year mobile experience vision. Microsoft, 2010.

We built an instrument for spotting where culture was going.

Trendency started in 2009 under Preetham Kolari, co-created with Anton Andrews and me. It was a book and it was a process: a systematic way to spot socio-cultural trends, catalogue them, and track how they moved year over year. Brand Me was mainstreaming. Real Virtual Blur was in the first set. The part that made it useful inside a company that size was that it taught teams to run it themselves rather than come back to us for answers, so we took it on the road. The workshop at the 2010 worldwide CMO summit was that summit's highest-rated session. Then the TCN UX community event, the EMEA summit, workshops in Norway, Germany and Spain, and a Trendency website funded by the CMO organization. When Preetham left Microsoft in 2011 I took over the initiative. I was a core researcher on the first edition, lead editor on the second, and the core author of the 2012 edition.

Trendency. A trend book and a process for running one, four editions between 2009 and 2012.

The room. Engineering Excellence week, June 2011.

343 had to prove Halo could survive Bungie. I went there to test a thesis.

Halo 4 was the first Halo made without Bungie. 343 Industries had been stood up to carry the franchise, and this was the release that would say whether that could work. I joined in late 2010 as the UX Lead for Waypoint, the connected layer around the games, with a charter to create and execute its three-year experience vision. My reason for going was narrower than the studio's. I had spent two years arguing about where connected entertainment was heading, at a scale where nobody would find out for years whether I was wrong. Waypoint was one slice of that argument, on a real roadmap, against a date that was not going to move.

Talking about Waypoint in 343 Industries' studio documentary. Microsoft, 2012.

The four pillars of the vision were four trends from the book.

The Waypoint three-year experience vision, "Your Gateway to the Halo Universe," came out of a mind-mapping session in January 2011 and went to 343 and Xbox leadership for greenlight that March. It opens by arguing why trends apply to a game franchise at all, and then builds its whole structure on them. The four experience pillars are four Trendency trends: Uniquely Personal, Captivating Consumption, Socialtainment, Creative Influence. Under each sits a set of themes, and under those the focus areas we brainstormed around that became features. The entire Fall 2012 release was generated from that document.

The four experience pillars of the Waypoint three-year vision. Each one a Trendency trend. 2011.

Waypoint on phone, tablet and web. The Fall 2012 release.

The instrument is the thing I still have.

The award came in 2013, for connectivity, on the release that had the most to prove. The patent has my name on it. What we built on Waypoint moved the standard for multiscreen play in AAA games. What came out with me was the instrument. I rebuilt Trendency in 2026 as Adaptive Humans in Intelligent Systems, and I have taken the same method into every problem since: aerospace, spatial input, healthcare billing. The trends change. The way you find them and use them does not.

"Your work of taking Trendency into a blog/database and the tag clouds are already showing how you can translate horizontal data into knowledge for the individual businesses."

Preetham Kolari, Design Leadership, Microsoft

Microsoft. February 2008 to October 2012. Research lead in eHome, then product strategist in the Connected Strategy Studio, then vision and strategy lead for Halo Waypoint at 343 Industries, running design across four platforms with an internal team and three external agencies. Ran research programs for Media Center on Vista and Windows 7. Co-created Trendency and was core author of its final edition. Authored the Waypoint three-year experience vision, greenlit March 2011, from which the Fall 2012 release was generated. D.I.C.E. Outstanding Achievement in Connectivity, 2013. Named inventor, U.S. Patent 9,597,599.