Microsoft Fluent for Enterprise
As part of a small but mighty cross-organizational virtual team within Microsoft’s Cloud + AI org, I helped craft the vision for applying the Fluent design system to all products within the enterprise realm. The team consisted of Jamie Young, Jesse Francisco, Josh Keckley, Josh Hinds, and myself.
When the first iteration of Microsoft’s design system Fluent gained momentum, there was an opportunity to explore ways of applying Fluent’s vision and principles to products for enterprise users and developers. Everything from Azure to Visual Studio.
After a large kick-off sprint with 30+ designers from various product teams, where we listened to presentations and workshopped ideas, a smaller virtual team was formed to design the path forward.
As a small virtual and highly collaborative team we started exploring designs based on canonical screens from a set of core products. What started as around six different directions whittled down to two: ‘Fyra’ and ‘Kyoto’, after three months of work and reviews with leadership.
My design direction ‘Fyra’ (Swedish for ‘Four’, which was simply the order it was in initially, but hey it sounded good too) ended up testing better than ‘Kyoto’ based on visual descriptors from respondents. ‘Fyra’ was deemed “Flexible”, “Familiar”, and “Expressive”.
From that point onward I developed ‘Fyra’ to cover all product screens and be the official Fluent for Enterprise design language that was pitched to the EVP of Cloud + AI, Scott Guthrie.