After innovating at a customer-centric company that captures VOC feedback at scale, I’ve honed a few new tricks. My short answer is understanding customer needs based on a deep empathy and providing solutions to improve people’s lives. Do you need someone who takes a customer-first approach, understands business goals, and knows how to advance them with great design? By thinking beyond the ordinary, I produce visionary ideas that can make your product a game changer… that’s my mission.
Experience Maturity When UX is empowered to influence product decisions by listening to internal and external customer opinions, it can translate those voices visually back to the business. High-performance teams are customer-focused and can prioritize the roadmap from an informative, customer-centric POV.
Customer Synthesis Build customer relationships and loyalty by conducting 30-minute interviews to validate small features quickly. Nothing beats talking to your target audience. The insight you gain is priceless, and no amount of quantitative data can match the same level of understanding.
Customer Advisory Board (CAB) I’ve presented high-level product features through UX storytelling to enterprise customers, ensuring product success. This open forum allowed customers familiar with the product to share their opinions on the qualities that are most important to them.
Customer Insights I prefer to use several SaaS feedback tools to better observe customer behaviors, frustrations, and usage patterns. I’ve created sophisticated queries and funnels to gain deeper insights into the customer journey and help inform product decisions.
UX Agile Methodologies Recently, I was certified as a ScrumMaster™ to facilitate better and increased efficiency for a fast-paced software-focused agile team. My process simplifies overly complex feature initiatives into manageable delivery sprints that deliver business and customer value throughout the delivery lifecycle.
Featured Product (DD) Process My process starts with the customer and works back to the business. As my workflow diagram illustrates, I prefer working within the double-diamond design process, which enables the team to achieve a consensus on the product more quickly.
Design Thinking Methodologies To be a product expert, we must understand what customers want, not what we think they want. My UX aims to build experience features that benefit both the customer and the bottom line.
As the retail media landscape evolved, so did the Best Buy AdTech platform. I’m the lead UX designer for Best Buy Ads, a self-service advertising reporting platform. I am directly responsible for redesigning and modernizing the customer experience to be on par with the best ad tech platforms. All customer journeys are focused on intuitive, user-friendly workflows that efficiently complete customer tasks.
Summary Dashboards: Campaign Performance Reporting. Aggregate dashboards that measure campaign performance and ROAS across all campaign vehicle types (channels). The platform serves internal stakeholders and external vendor customers by allowing faceted queering and dimensional analysis across all campaigns and drill-downs to individual campaign performance reporting at the SKU level.
Coming Soon As a UX Lead Designer, I was directly responsible for shipping over fifteen features developed over 3-6 month development sprints. UX system model features include SSO, Customer Onboarding, Account Management, User Management, Campaign Creation, Campaign Management, Scheduled Reporting, Notification Systems, knowledge base (KB) System, Finance/Billing systems, and Summary Dashboards. The platform initially started as an internal-facing solution and then scaled to a public-facing one, serving hundreds of daily users.
Amazon’s software development team is unlike any I’ve worked with. I was genuinely amazed at how fast my UX solutions could be implemented. After I presented my solutions to leadership, my features were shipped within a few weeks or months. One of Amazon’s principles that always stood out for me was the “Disagree and Commit ” principle, which helped the team make faster software decisions.
Responsible for contributing to the FY21 platform strategy. Dashboards – Predictive analysis dashboards using ML/AI technology to analyze vendor relations for new customer opportunities and increase business efficiency and monetization. Experience improvements that keep the mothership flywheel offering increased transparency for (internal/external) customer relationships on a customer-focused high-performance software team.
Becky Scott, UX Manager Quote: “Geoff was the sole designer on a product that helped us manage our Vendor relationships. He was asked to deliver several features but also took ownership of user research and suggested additional user delight features. He was responsible for every aspect of the design and prototyping for testing and presented his work to leaders in design and products.”
Customer interviews Responsible for conducting 1:1 interviews with vendor managers to validate the experience hypothesis. Customer feedback directly affected the product roadmap, and some features in the PRFAQ were challenged by customer feedback which influenced future product decisions.
Customer Quotes from UX findings: Nine feature areas received positive feedback from customer interviews. • “Frequently amount of codes are created by a different team, and I had no idea.” • “Proactive suggestions would be great.” • “The chart would save me time than going to Excel.”
Customer Journeys – e2e Workflow Prototypes The trend line represents suggested business decisions and missed opportunities. Amazon’s speed and development are unlike any other product or machine. I was consistently shipping new feature improvements.
Customer Relations At scale, the knobs that control the underlying business algorithms that directly affect vendor promotions through multiple systems, channels, categories, and classes. Using AI/ML alerts vendors to increase operational efficiency and new customer opportunities to increase sales.
Vision OP1: Retail Media (CO-OP Incentives) I presented a deck to leadership that directly contributed to OP1’s future innovation features. The deck described why we need to improve the experience. I also created a functioning prototype and UX/UI outline spec advocating for these product shifts. My solution was to improve FCF from additional funding captured by lowering the number of tickets to reduce vendor funding leakages.
Systems UI Kit (NEW): Amazon was on a mission to transform internal platforms to reduce costs and increase digital efficiency. I was on point to level up the platform and pressure-test Amazon’s system patterns and components library, which is designed to scale for enterprise platforms. Amazon’s principles and UI guidelines were so detailed and robust that they made it easy for me to figure out how best to solve the UX problem.
Discovery – Beta Site UX Challenge: Based on the documentation, experience workflows, UI interactions, data, and customer interviews, I developed a hypothesis. The experience goal is to simplify the overly complex to decrease missed opportunities and increase future monetization opportunities.
The Beginning: The Plan (PRFAQ) The Amazon Way (Working Backwards): My journey starts with a PRFAQ, a verbose document that explains the “what” and “why” the business needs to invest in new feature improvements. Working closely with the PM, I received a rough wireframe as part of the product requirements documentation.
Digital Feedback – (Mobile Apps, Web Apps, Kiosks, QR codes, APIs) Apptentive’s suite of products was complete after launching the Web SDK. The next step was to join Fan Signals (Love Dialog) with customer sentiment. Running the open-ended feedback through AI, we analyzed customer data and augmented it with Fan Signal to give customers clear insights into their customer segments.
WEB SDK – Usage Examples I can install the Web SDK for any web app in under five minutes. I worked with a developer 1:1 and modified the JavaScript source code to trigger the love dialog with any feedback form initiated by the QR code. Supporting QR codes for mobile phones was gaining popularity, and Apptentive had the technology to track customers’ insights from a simple QR code.
GTM – Customer Love Summit The Customer Love Summit is a yearly conference that showcases Apptentive’s latest products. I improved the event by showcasing future product feedback interactions in real-time, powered by attendee participation. The event’s CEO could switch to a dashboard displaying the number of people who participated. This was a huge success, all thanks to a hackathon project.
Demo Table I was responsible for the customer summit demo table, spearheading a variety of feedback devices, including my hackathon hardware project using a Raspberry Pie OS., iPad (Kiosks) Table Tents (QR code), and an Amazon LTE Device.
The Results – Customer interactions, participation, and enthusiasm were high. Everyone involved loved the feedback mechanism, from customers to the CEO. Prospect customers (attendees) were sending feedback in real time. Investors and attendees gave the demo table high marks by watching the GeckoBoard live.
Customer Love Summit Using the platform’s Web SDK, I customized different feedback types once a participant triggers the dialog window from the QR code. For example, I coded the QR code, “Did you love lunch?” Each lunch table at the event had a table QR code to see real-time triggers at the conference on the monitor.
Hackathon – How does a hypothesis become a product? I participated in a company Hackathon. Using the new Web SDK, I conceptualized, designed, and built a responsive web app to complete the project. I called it a progressive survey using skip logic. Customers can iterate through various modal windows that use hardware buttons to capture binary Yes=True and No=False feedback questions. Using some of my coding skills, I used a Raspberry Pie OS and video game hardware buttons connected through GPIO ports to complete the hackathon project.
Customer Feedback After successfully shipping the WebSDK e2e experience, I transitioned to customer interviews to get honest customer opinions to validate the business value.
The Results—Six months after launching the WebSDK product, sales could close new revenue deals, and the business could support Mobile Apps (iPhone/Android) and Mobile Web, completing the product suite across all form factors.
New Product Opportunities: (Mobile Web, Kiosks, QR-code) I was on point to design the first WebApp SDK to influence the platform’s capabilities using the new APIs. As a product producer, I worked with the Devs 1:1 to create product parity in the platform to support all the new features, which allows customers to customize the feedback forms to match their brand.
The UX Proposal: Appentives’ company’s core business is a customer feedback business that should be dogfooding its tooling. The original feedback button looked amateurish. It had a picture of the office and one contact form field, which was hard-coded. I proposed that the product team invest in a WebSDK for broader customer reach and feature parity with the MobileSDK (iPhone/Android). The business agreed to do the work.
Results – Sold for 16x Designing a new platform from scratch in two years is hard work. Still, by implementing design-level thinking methodologies and modern design principles, I delivered a modern, intuitive platform that could be a game-changer for the IT industry.
Seattle Business Magazine I was on stage when BitTitan won #1 for the best company to work for. The team culture and product focus were some of the highest-performance software teams I’ve worked on. As employee #24, I helped the company grow to over 200 people and managed four designers.
Dominic Pouzin – CTO Quote: “Geoffrey is a very talented senior UX designer and would be a huge asset to any company, especially those with a focus on enterprise products. At BitTitan, Geoffrey helped our product UI evolve from “amateurish” to professional / on-par with top SaaS solutions. Geoffrey’s key strength is creation of new UX concepts and high-level look-and-feel experience for enterprise products.
Public Launch (GTM): 4/2017 As the lead design manager, I was responsible for the entire experience. I owned key platform features, and once the UI Models (MVP) were in place, I interviewed and hired 3 UX Designers to hand off new features to quickly scale the platform. Then I focused on updating the Dashboard, Delivery center, Entity management, Activity feed, Subscription billing, and 3rd party OEM task workflows.
Beta Launch: 10/2016 Among the improvements adopting the new UI-Kit were the Dashboard, Service Center, Activity feed, Subscription billing, Delivery Center, and Cost Reporting, and around 20 new IT service solutions were implemented.
Systems Library – Integration Once a new UI kit was implemented the platform began to come to life. The new kit helped speed up design/development time since UI systems patterns and common controls were consistent across the platform. We made additional layout changes to simplify the experience by introducing detailed fly-out panels and inline accordions.
Systems Library – Redesign One challenge was designed in an old UI kit. I knew I had to modernize the platform to help BitTitan served as a trusting SaaS application. I made it a company commitment to drive a modern UI Kit–the existing grey navigation and the overall site felt like a typical Seattle day to me. I always knew the future of the site would need to be something much more modern.
Preview Launch: 7/2016 Once the platform MVP framework was in place, it was time to start integrating new feature services and onboarding new customers to the platform. The first step is to go external and start dog fooding the product to get real customer feedback. This was an exciting time for the company to be on a fast-paced high-performance phased agile development team. The culture/collaboration fostered solutions for the greater company interests. BitTitans’ motto was: “Get Shit Done!”
New Feature Development: 7/2016 Once the platform MVP framework was in place, it was time to start integrating new business service workflows into the platform. One challenge was designed in an old UI kit. I knew I had to modernize the platform to help BitTitan serve as a trusting SaaS application. I started visually exploring new designs and hired a few rock-star UX designers, while we also turned our attention to designing new features such as Dashboard, Service center, Device management, OEM services, and Activity center. The product machine was in high-performance mode using remote development shipping features in 2-3-week sprints.
Alpha Platform (Customer Onboarding): 1/2016 After multiple requirement meetings, presentations, and wireframes, we shipped the Alpha platform UI, building the minimal feature requirements to meet an MVE. At the same time, I supported a host of new services being developed on the old platform. The system had to scale for new services while App-Switching (drop-menu) into MigrationWiz, Sales Automation, Deployment Pro, Data Encryption, SSO/Registration, User Management, App Launcher, Purchasing, and innovating new Cloud Services.
The Big Picture (Discovery): 10/2015 A lot of research went into understanding the new business direction. BitTitan’s flagship product MigrationWiz (MW) had six-plus years of technology behind it, including multiple types of Migration services, Shopping Cart, Licensing, Support, SSO/rBac, and Account Management. It would be too risky for the company to build on the current MW platform to avoid service disruptions.
The Process: The decision was made to create a new platform from scratch, use the latest framework (ember.js), but still be on a cloud platform (Azure). The wireframe below shows the initial breakdown of how the two platforms could co-exist as features need to be migrated or re-architected to the new platform. We needed hooks to other systems using Federated SSO while being Hippo compliant. This was a data migration platform that migrates Fortune 500 companies. Customers wanted to reduce costs by switching cloud providers seamlessly.
The Business Pivot The CEO made a business decision to leverage MigrationWiz (cash cow + partner base) and pivot the company to Managed Service Provider (MSP). This was perfect for enterprise customers needing a way to migrate legacy data to the cloud to be on a modern tech stack (AWS, Google, Azure, etc.)
The Collaboration – CEO The CEO had a clear vision of the business and understood the landscape of On-Premise computers will be phased out, and the future would be cloud computing and AI. I didn’t have the technical background, and he knew that. So he took the time, and we were locked in a room for two weeks with the designers, and we mapped out the entire vision for the platform. We presented the vision to the dev team with InVision prototypes and gave the dev team a review. Then, they started to disagree and commit.
The Collaboration UX design was embedded in the development team. I asked the CEO if we could buy a large-format printer to print out the experiences based on the dev sprint the team was on. We were shipping features every month. I took this picture when the developers collaborated on the floor on how best to solve the development challenge. It was incredible that we were shipping features every month.
MigrationWiz: UX/UI Refactor My solution is redesigning the task management workflow to be a vertical list on the left navigation rail to track completed steps. This has been highly successful, reducing the number of support tickets and increasing customer confidence in achieving a migration. The introduction of the left navigation for task management provided the baseline for future workflows for MSP Complete.
The Platform – Discovery The original MigrationWiz functionality was a wizard-type UI model. The amount of customer confusion and support tickets was a real pain point for customer support. The platform served well (initially) as an email migration service. However, the UI model was never expected to scale beyond that as the business grew. The UX started to break down when new features were bolted on. I was the sole designer responsible for re-architecting and modernizing the migration workflow experiences.
The Beginning When I joined the company, the original MigrationWiz platform looked amateur and was built on a dated tech stack, which slowed innovation. The business decided to redesign the tech stack using a more modern framework.
Windows Store App Publishing Platform. Microsoft was feeling pressure from Apple regarding their App Store. Microsoft made the business pivot to modernize its own Windows OS and build an App Store to compete with Apple. I was hired to be on the Windows 8 design team and relocated to WA.
Lead UX designer for the first public release of the Windows 8 App Store publishing platform. Responsible for adopting the Metro Design language and many core feature e2e experiences.
The Experience Design Research (XDR) team’s core responsibility was modernizing Microsoft Windows OS. Each designer had a researcher counterpart to conduct deep customer research and to validate a scenario. Designers would prototype an experience, and research would bring customers into mirrored, fully furnished rooms with eye-tracking software. Within 5-10 customer interviews, I would receive a full breakdown analysis report. Viewing and listing customers talk about the experience gained valuable insights. One of Windows’ principles was “Change is bad unless it’s great.” We used this principle to move forward with development
APP ONBOARDING PAGES Responsible for shipping the app submission onboarding workflow pages to publish a Windows Store App for free or a paid download.
Customer Feedback Feature — From the App Store, a customer could have two-way conversations with the App Developer by allowing the customer to send a private message. The goal was to help developers improve the quality of the App. I prototyped the idea and pitched this leadership as an innovation to improve product experience.
The Insights – From my own experience publishing Oscar’s Adventure as an early adopter, I received a few negative comments. I would have liked to be able to respond to customer feedback.
· Reduce the amount of negative app feedback shown in the app store. · Reduce the perception of poor Windows App Store becoming a bug triage location.
The concept – In the Windows App store, a customer can communicate directly with the developer and get real-time customer feedback under Ratings and Reviews. From working with researches this made me think of could this be done through software.
Problem Statement – The Windows App shell/SDK (tech stack) was still in early development, causing Apps to crash, which wasn’t necessarily the developer’s fault. App crashes were hard to test in the production world since Windows was in private beta mode, thus driving customers to write public feedback through ratings and reviews.
Business Partnership Due to the number of images and time I could spend on the application, I orchestrated an advertising partnership with dreamstime.com. In exchange, I had full access to their entire illustration library. I also gave them splash screen advertising throughout each game transition. This was a significant business deal and a win-win for both parties.
Taking Initiative While working on the App developer publishing platform, I was curious about publishing my Windows app and better understanding the customer pain points. I contacted a developer, and we agreed to build Oscar’s Adventure, a children’s learning app for ages 3-6. We successfully designed, built, and published the app in less than a month. The process helped me understand the customer journey, enabling me to influence product decisions since I was a customer.
Oscar Sketches – Some early concept sketches of Oscar the Otter to the final .svg variations.
WINDOWS OS – DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
WINDOWS – Metro Design Language When I was on the Windows Design Team (XDR), the team was on a mission to re-image every customer touchpoint digitally for the Windows OS and Web Apps. Part of the team’s responsibility was to introduce the Windows 8 Design Principles and Metro Design Language as the foundational building blocks to modernize the system patterns, and I was able to leverage the UI Kit library elements for the Windows Developer Platform.
The Vision Through consolidation, Microsoft can build an App Store marketplace by supporting various technology platforms. A newly re-imaged App dev center could onboard Windows XAML apps, Xbox, Win32, Web Apps, and Android through a unified ingestion pipeline.
The Insights Apple leads the industry with great design, and the Windows organization was pressured to attract the cool kids back to stay relevant. The chatter is that if Apple allowed its OS system to be installed on any PC hardware (hypothetically), how detrimental could this be to Microsoft’s Windows OS cash machine?
The Beginning – Design Challenge When I joined the Windows App Store team, a product manager from the India Development Center (IDC) presented me with a PowerPoint concept deck showing the dashboard. I spent the next few years art directing and influencing product decisions while working with the remote team.
App Analytics – Dev Portal After completing the development platform, I was moved to the App Analytics team. The Developer Platform needs a way to measure App Analytics, and I was responsible for designing the first App Analytics application journeys. The team wanted the App data to be transparent so marketers could see their application’s success.
App Analytics – Pivot Pages I shipped all the supporting analytics pages in less than a year. The platform has various key App analytics pages, including Downloads, Usage, Purchases, Conversions, In-app Purchases, Financials, App Quality, and In-App Advertising. The data needed to show analysis/insights on a much more granular level, including source path tracking, store listing pages, Store spotlight pages, and Social references, while aggregating the data from top locales.
Metro UI Kit – Loading Spinner My contribution to the Windows 8 Metro UI kit was the loading spinner. The original 8-24-bit (.gif) loading spinner was dated technology. I partnered with a dev 1:1 to update the dated loading spinner with the new Windows 8 (OS) operating system loading spinner. Millions of people have seen the Windows 8 loading spinner for the web at one time.
MICROSOFTS DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION
WINDOWS – METRO DESIGN LANGUAGE When I was on the Windows Experience Design Research Team (XDR), part of the team’s mission was to digitally reimagine every customer touchpoint for the Windows OS and Web Apps to modernize those experiences. The entire Windows Design Organization was responsible for introducing the Windows 8 Design Principles and Metro Design Language as the foundational building blocks for modernizing the Windows ecosystem.
App Analytics – The Beginning After designing and shipping the app developer platform, I created the initial style guide for all histogram charts, including Line, Area, Bar, and Pie charts, to be used across the platform.
Design Challenge When I joined the Windows Store Dev Portal, an India Development Center (IDC) product manager presented me with a PowerPoint concept deck showing the dashboard and described the vision. I spent the next few years art directing and influencing product decisions while working with the offshore team. The other change was having to refactor the systems library UI kit. At that time, Microsoft didn’t have any prebuilt react component libraries. We had to build the systems library besides building the technology. Luckily has already worked on the framework Windows Metro Design Language.
WINDOWS (XDR) RESEARCH CASE STUDY
Windows Apps API Documentation To personally tailor our documentation to the developers’ needs and requirements, thus improving app quality. Let developers set their preferences so the developer documentation can deliver an experience that meets their individual needs, regardless of whether they are first-time visitors or have been developing on Windows for 10+ years.
Re-architecting the navigation would increase productivity and reduce developer frustrations. Developers will have more time to focus on important tasks such as writing code, instead of spending extra time scouring search engines, hubs, blogs, and MSDN looking for software APIs.
Navigation starts with the Superset/Subset filter controls. A drop-down menu is used for the Platform, and the other is for the Presentation model. The initial version will include the Windows 8 App platform using the following presentation models JavaScript, HTML5, XAML, and DirectX.
Conceptual Overview My proposal is a complete redesign of the navigation and functionality based on filter controls (drop menu) + Subset controls + Hide/show disclosure triangles. The outcome is a complete overhaul to a dated tree model structure and the use of modern web controls. In a world of object-oriented programming, the tree navigation model (Parent/Child nesting) is unintuitive for development, especially when the associated (siblings) APIs drop out of context.
In the proposed new navigation tool, the APIs seamlessly bucket together and vertically grouped. A dev can expand and scroll through every level of the TOC without navigating up or back down – all while using fewer clicks and keeping corollary APIs visible and clickable. I built POC prototypes to present concepts to internal developers to validate the model UI model.
Concepts & Prototypes Supersets/Subsets: When a filter is selected, the navigation control loads associated namespaces (the primary subset). Then when a namespace is selected, the APIs within that (the secondary subset) are displayed, so that the secondary subset is based on the Primary selection:
Comparison with existing tree UI navigation model: The following diagram shows the current model and the new model side by side. In the current “tree” model, you have to expand parent nodes if you want to see neighboring (aka “corollary”) APIs. The expander must be clicked every time you load a new page. Many developers are unaware that the expander exists; without it, you must navigate up a level (reloading the page) every time you want to see APIs alongside the one you landed on.
Top Customer Pain Points The current reference section TOC frustrates developers and hinders the development process. As hundreds of APIs continue to come on board, the TOC will grow and the current tree UI model will continue to be cumbersome for developers trying to find specific APIs.
P1 – I need the Dev Center to retain basics about my dev environment P1 – Show me related classes, properties, and members without losing context P1 – Context is lost if levels are hidden and neighbors as reference P1 – I want to sort/filter APIs by language P2 – Currently fixed page width is restrictive due to lengthy documentation
Developer ResearchFeedback 1. I wish the Dev Center could retain basics about my dev environment, and when I search for content, the site should reflect the primary language I use.
2. Need the ability to filter on platform development – I want to see related classes, properties, and members without losing context. The TOC control takes a lot of time to load and find related APIs.
3. Search results are not what’s expected – Searching for an application programming interface (API) often doesn’t land within the top search results. There is a lack of trust due to cross-site navigation doesn’t behave as expected.
On-Premise Field Research I was lucky enough to have a dedicated researcher assigned to understand the developer’s pain points. First, I outlined two likely scenarios in the ongoing search for the proper API.
Developer 1 needs to identify and learn the right JavaScript API to accomplish a specific development task. He starts by investigating which API is right for his needs.
He’ll first search using keywords in Google until he finds an API that strongly resembles what he needs. He’ll then forage by browsing reference pages (and all related “See Also” pages) for sibling APIs to build a mental map of the API surface. Ultimately, Dev 1 wants to be confident that he’s using the optimal, best-matched API for the task. For example, in implementing a fly-out menu, Dev 1 reviewed related APIs to check whether the best solution may be a subclass of the API he was looking at.
Then, he’ll learn the API and follow the link from the API page to the applicable code samples, download them, and play with the samples to learn the API space – and confirm he’s indeed found the right API. About 80% of the time, he’ll find what needs to identify the right API and know how to use it through this strategy.
Developer 2 starts by finding the right class/API. When he isn’t sure what JavaScript API or class to use, he’ll start by typing stuff into Visual Studio to see whether IntelliSense helps him find it. But often, it just gives a list of every object available – this doesn’t help him.
If he can’t find the proper API or class using IntelliSense, he’ll next search his browser bookmarks (via autocomplete) and then search MSDN via Google. He’ll pick the class or function that looks highest-level or most relevant and browse through the QuickStart, Code Samples, and Guides to understand the API.
If it’s still unclear how the API works, Dev 2 looks harder for code samples. He’ll start with a Samples Gallery search, and if that doesn’t work, he’ll search through a downloaded .zip file of our code samples. If Dev 2 isn’t sure how to use the API to implement his feature, he’ll try searching Google and/or Stack Overflow more broadly. He’ll abandon implementing the feature if he still can’t figure it out. Dev 2 has also abandoned less essential features that would have added improvements to his app – such as a neat visual effect or transition – when it’s unclear from the online docs what he needs to know to implement them.
Improve Search – MVP This section describes a typical usage scenario for a developer arriving from a search landing (parachuting in) on a deep API reference page and adding checkboxes to the navigation control to quickly and easily navigate to a different presentation API.
Overview & Scope: Windows store APIs are the backbone of any app. For Windows apps to be successful, developers must be able to quickly and easily find relevant APIs, thus improving app quality and speeding up development time.
Research: From developer feedback, the AppBar API control uses similar namespaces for two different platforms; devs are frustrated by not being able to quickly pivot to their type of platform from so many languages (VB, XAML, HTML, JS, C, Win32 + DirectX, etc.) when searching. Research validated that developers are confused by the MS namespaces and are not finding the appropriate APIs for their application.
Hypothesis: Developers have difficulty finding relevant code examples quickly. The dev content resources are spread over multiple sites, making it virtually impossible to find them. App quality suffers due to a lack of needed documentation. Plus, Windows has numerous dated support systems.
