Maps in Excel.

How might we democratize maps using the most ubiquitous, accessible data platform on the planet?

Problem

When I joined Office Design in the fall of 2014, I was lead designer on the team that shipped the first new chart types released in Office in 18 years. After we shipped these new visualizations, we shipped choropleth maps or “Fill Maps” in Excel. One of the biggest design challenges when building these new chart types involved pushing the innovation envelope while designing within established UI systems and patterns preferred by millions of people. “Give me new stuff, but don’t move my cheese!”

Microsoft had a 3D maps plugin, Power Map, created as a Microsoft Research project. However, it was a completely disjointed user experience in Excel, running on its own code base and not integrated with the native chart experience let alone the entire Office suite. It employed a slightly different design language, requiring extra effort by our users to first learn that it existed and to then install it on top of Excel. Based on user requests and our overall business strategy to continue to democratize data visualization through improving charting in Excel, we built choropleth maps (labeled in Excel as “Fill Maps”) as a native chart type, fully integrated with Office.

Actions

I was the lead designer on all of the new chart types, including maps, working with a principal Program Manager lead, a senior PM, two principal engineers, and a few junior engineers. I also collaborated across divisions with designers on the Office Shared, Bing Maps and PowerBI teams to ensure as consistent an experience across Microsoft products as possible. I worked closely with PM and Engineering on solving technical issues related to the design, a lot of that focused on how to design the best experience possible given the many constraints posed when working on a large, complicated ecosystem like Microsoft Office.

I inspired the team to work in a way that incorporated design from the bottom up, given that Office changed its triad model from “Dev, Test, PM” to “Dev, Design, PM”. On paper, this sort of organizational change looks straightforward and simple, but in practice, changing culture is hard. It can be messy, tense, and political, especially in a large organization like Microsoft, where people are used to doing things a certain way for decades and see no reason to change. My job as a senior designer on this team was to help change the culture through building strong relationships and showing the value of good design through effective collaboration, strong design practice, and business results.

Additional design exercises that fell under maps was the design of a new color-by-value control in Excel that would scale to be applied to all chart types in later releases. I was also instrumental in working through design, engineering, and more significantly, political challenges related to the map icons we used in the Office UI. We worked with Microsoft’s legal team to ensure that the icons we designed for maps would not create any geopolitical upsets or result in legal challenges for Microsoft because we presented a map in such a way that it upset the Chinese government, for example.

Lastly, I spearheaded our team’s conversations with renowned GIS experts to ensure that our default choices for map projections and data bound color applications were in line with current best practices in mapping. Feedback we got from GIS professors around Power Map was that it was a cool tool, but they would never use it for teaching purposes because it didn’t meet best practices for mapping or 3D visualizations. I was very cognizant of this with the design of our new maps, doing everything I could to help steer the team toward best design practices. Excel is a tool used by millions of people and consequently, people form mental models, sometimes incorrectly, based on the way the tool is designed. One of our driving design goals was to help users form the right mental models about mapping by default.

Results

The result of this work is satisfying and noteworthy. Inc.com proclaimed it the best new feature Excel has added in years. In terms of business impact and how it’s affected subscriptions for Office 365, I don’t have specific metrics for maps, but the addition of new chart types was listed via industry blogs as one of the reasons to upgrade to Office 2016. Additionally, the response from the academic community was ecstatic. Binding data to maps in a meaningful way requires either intermediate- to high-level coding skills and/or expensive, specialized software. Being able to do this in Excel, a tool readily accessible to everybody, is game changing.

Supporting Design Documents
Map UI Blue Sky flow
Map UI MVP flow
Color-by-value MVP flow

Tempered Radicalism: A philosophy for changing design culture
The Tempered Radicals
Radical Change, the Quiet Way