Peter Ponomarev

Background

I joined the Windows UX design team in 2007, roughly one year into the release cycle for Windows 7. I was assigned to Sticky Notes, which was already under development. The application was being developed by a team in India. It was that team’s first project with a high-profile utility in Windows that would be used by hundreds of millions of people.

INCEPTION

When I first joined the project, it was in disarray. In particular I encountered:

• An over-featured interface.
  In an effort to impress on their first high-profile project, the project team had added numerous features that one would not associate with a Post-It note. There was a mini toolbar with text formatting. There was a pagination control at the bottom of each notes. Notes could be set to be independent or in a booklet. Notes could have varying levels of transparency.

• A cultural divide.
  Besides the time difference between the US and India, there was a cultural disconnect between the teams in each country about what constitutes a “delightful” product.

• Internal divisions within the UX team.
  The User Research team was demanding the inclusion of extraneous features, such as a “cork board” surface to gather all notes.

Clearly, the entire team needed a common goal. Building on our UX evaluation principles, we came up with the primary UX goal of “Creating beautiful notes quickly on the desktop that don’t disappear”. This agreement was an anchor point in the decisions to follow.

ELABORATION

With the new goal of “Creating beautiful notes quickly on the desktop that don’t disappear”, I set about sketching new models for the interface. I initially tried to work around the existing concepts of having a formatting surface and a gathering surface. It was unwieldy.

Once these approaches had been vetted, there was still a collective disappointment that we had not reached our goals of simplicity . I had expected this, as I had been working with the team in India to get buy-in on some of our core UX principles such as “reduce concepts to increase confidence” and “solve distractions, not discoverability”.

With departmental support and our principles in mind, I began reducing concepts to their bare minimum:

There was still some dissention within the team, so I worked with my lead to demonstrate what a beautiful note could look like. We built a near-fully functional prototype using C# and Expression Blend (similar to Flash). Notes were simple and beautiful. All you had to do was type. Once the mouse left the note, there were no controls.

The prototype made such a positive impression that upper management demanded that we build the real application to match the prototype. The dissention was over.

CONSTRUCTION

With a simplified model in place, most of the work in the construction phase was to remove unnecessary features and extensively polish what remained. Getting the note colors and gradients just right for a range of screen qualities was tricky and required multiple iterations.

DELIVERY

Sticky Notes was a polished, delightful product in the end. We held firm in our belief that cutting features was better than cutting corners. To this day I can introduce myself as the person who designed Sticky Notes. The only request I ever get is “I wish I could change the font”, to which I reply, “So do I, but we couldn’t do it elegantly in time.”. A happy user wanting more is always better than a disappointed user.