Windows AERO

In the early 2000s I was the Product Unit Manager for the Windows User Experience team at Microsoft. I led a team of designers, user researchers, technical writers, and program managers defining the AERO desktop user experience. This was the desktop user experience in Windows Vista and remained relatively unchanged for Windows 7 (though I had left the team for that release). Being a part of the team that helped improve the core OS user experience for hundreds of millions of users was the biggest project I’d ever worked on as well as a huge honor. Incidentally, during my time at Microsoft, the success of that team was a factor in sparking a new respect for design at Microsoft that endures to this day with hundreds of talented designers working on projects at Microsoft as diverse as XBOX, Hololens, Office, Windows, and Azure.