Microsoft is a typical IT company of the last century - a huge strength, but turned a little less sensitive. Now, Microsoft is trying to change the tradition of no connection between home desktop and mobile system developers, the best indicator of this effort is their design.

Microsoft products, especially software products, are now gradually using a simple, plain and neat appearance: Metro. But if you think the Metro is just on Windows 8, Windows Phone, the application market and Xbox Live, then in fact you should also see more things. Microsoft's designers explained in a recent discussion that the Metro had become a design concept, it transforms Microsoft products using their own five core elements. Designers involved in this discussion described the Metro as a transformation of Microsoft's product design philosophy, starting at the root and allows the product to get better.

Zune and Xbox experience development team leader Rochelle, Benavides, said that during the design of the Zune, they realized that the simple appearance of large blocks of color was a new symbol what they were looking for. The design style is now applied to a variety of Microsoft's latest user interfaces.

Stuart Ashmun, from the interactive entertainment sector, pointed out that this change actually means Microsoft is to make a change with the change in the way of interaction between the user and device. The designers have concluded that Microsoft's Metro design philosophy allows you to move less and  do more.

Interestingly, these designers have insisted that Microsoft's change is not influenced by Apple - although more or less we are able to see Metro's design style may work against Apple. Windows Phone design team member Jeff Fong talked about one of the design criteria of the Metro: Authentically Digital. Microsoft hopes to express information directly and concisely, the goal of Windows Phone as well as future Microsoft products is to allow users to quickly finish what they want to do and show the information what the user wants on the screen clearly.

Turning to the Apple UI, Microsoft's designers are quite disdain.  Jeff Fong described the Apple UI as "plus a lot of reflection, shadow and transform effects, people can not find where the emphasis is". From the entire interview, Microsoft's designers seem to feel Apple UI sucks

During this discussion, designers also mentioned the importance of cooperation between designers and engineers. In the future, Metro will gradually expand among Microsoft products, it could eventually become a sign of Microsoft's new life.

Reference : http://www.evolife.cn/html/2012/64639.html