Microsoft Windows XP and Media Player Case Study

Process

The Digital Touch

Industrial, brand, and digital designers worked together to identify a fresh visual language for Microsoft XP, marrying broad functionality with a highly stylized interface. For both the media player and taskbar UIs, frog defined a single, fundamental tenet: “softness.” By invoking forms and textures of the three-dimensional world, frog sought to render the digital space more approachable to users. We experimented with the textures of various metals, wood grains, soft velvets and coarse fabrics, brightly colored rubber and neoprene, ceramics, sandpaper, foam, and plastics to find the perfect visual match for this approachable new UI – a materials selection that would invite the user’s digital “touch” while exemplifying the highest standards of usability.

A Sense of the Real

frog’s design team assembled a rich palette of visual surfaces for the media player and taskbars, giving XP a unique, consistent design language that challenges the traditional digital media experience. Analog-style, “rubberized” buttons on the skin of Windows Media Player offer classic, intuitive navigation and avoid the hyper-technical feel of other online players. Brushed aluminum textures, rich colors, and dimensional lighting add a satisfying tactile quality to the user’s online interactions, lending the experience a sense of the real.

To ensure the success of the digital model, our designers constructed an actual, physical version – a “hard model” – of the redesigned media player, built to scale, using the very materials whose surfaces, colors, and dimensions had inspired the digital environment. The production of an object in tangible space gave us a true standard by which to judge the usability of the digital incarnation.

Looking Forward

With the product design in place, we turned our attention to the Windows logo. Its classic four-color arrangement of red, green, yellow, and blue tiles on a pixilated pennant was seen to represent both windows opening onto the world and flags of exploration and discovery. The Windows mark needed to maintain the brand equity it had accrued in its long history while expressing the evolution towards a more flexible, user-friendly brand. frog developed a slate of fifty new logos, ranging from simple to radical alterations, then presented the top three candidates to Microsoft for selection. While recognizably a descendent of its predecessor, the reinvigorated logo is distinguished by its clean lines, energy, and movement – a bright, forward-looking emblem of the digital frontier.