Bringing Next Generation Inline Editing to the Microsoft Store

Microsoft

While conducting interviews and research that led to designing Microsoft’s product ingestion framework, the most common pain point with developers was some variation of  “I don’t know how my metadata is used.” From single-person hobbyist developers, to AAA games, to popular social networking apps, the refrain was common. It’s far from the most painful thing about selling products with Microsoft, but I was somewhat surprised at how ubiquitous the complaint is. There are a number of factors at play here: the Microsoft Store has numerous endpoints on several devices; the product detail page (PDP) changes layouts somewhat frequently; and the way developers craft this page is entirely through a form page. Compounding the problem is the catalog publishing pipeline’s slow speeds, making a mistake on the PDP an expensive one that could take hours (or longer) to fix.

I’ve proposed a three-part approach to tackling this, staged in order of “engineering cost”:

• First, provide partners with Illustrator, Sketch, XD, or Photoshop templates showing most of the available layouts and how images, videos, and text are used in the Store.

• Next, update the Dashboard help content to include visual guides to how metadata is used, and integrate this better content into the form page itself inline or using tool-tips.

• Last, and most ambitiously, allow developers to see the PDP (and edit inline) in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get preview feature.

This delivers a more predictable experience for partners, saves them time and effort, and increases overall confidence in publishing and selling products with Microsoft.

Video: Sam Weber