Microsoft Research showed off a lot of fledgling technologies at its MSR Roadshow this week. One that got a passing mention was "Sapphire," a new user-interface technology aimed at making more intuitive the process of storing and finding information.

Read PCMag.com's Report on This Week's MSR Roadshow

Lili Cheng, product manager with MSR's social computing group, explains Sapphire this way: "The prototypes we have developed automatically determine importance of items—what you care about—and relationships between items—what is similar based on current objects, context, etc. We base our design concepts on the way people think and feel (human cognition, memory, personality and emotion)."

See the MSR Bio Page on Lili Cheng

And the Page on Microsoft Research's User Interface Group

Microsoft Watch got Cheng to talk a bit more about the thinking behind Sapphire, user interface design theory, and her background as an architect and former Apple Computer researcher informs her work at MSR.

(This interview, which appeared in the Microsoft Watch newsletter last year, has been edited for length.)

MS Watch: Microsoft has a lot of social computing interfaces/next-generation user interfaces in the works—both in Research and inside the various Microsoft product groups. Where does Sapphire fit in?

Cheng: We've modeled the user experience after way people
think and feel, not after the way computer and networks are designed. This simple but fundamental change in perspective has caused us to rethink the fundamental way the system is experienced and designed, from the user experience, to the lowest levels of the system. It's been incredible how quickly people understand our design principles.

At this early stage, we don't want to define exactly how our efforts on the Sapphire project will impact Microsoft products. If we knew exactly what to do, it wouldn't be research. Research is the right place to try a big project like Sapphire, where the benefits may not pay off for five to ten years or more.

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MS Watch: What is the mission of MSR's social-computing user interface group, overall?

Cheng: My group focuses on social interaction and user interface design. The Social Computing Group is about nine people and is organized as a prototyping team, with a mixture of designers, developers and social psychologists. Right now our highest priority is designing a next-generation user experience, (meaning) better understanding of the individual and better ways of communicating and sharing.

The Sapphire project is a cross group project, and involves a subset of people from my group and researchers from other groups (such as databases, data mining, and other user-interface efforts). My group's expertise is rapid prototyping and the design of end user scenarios (people, sharing, personal photos, etc.). This vantage is essential for the Sapphire project as the user experience is driving the design of the infrastructure.

MS Watch: How does Sapphire relate to Sideshow, the task shelf that Microsoft is using in MSN and Longhorn?

Cheng: We often collaborate with the researchers that developed the Sideshow project—but (we) did not work on it. The ideas flow from one project to another, but there is no formal collaboration, nor shared code. Different groups and individuals have worked on the two projects, and they happened at different times.

For More on Sideshow, Read This

MS Watch: How did the idea for Sapphire come about?

Cheng: People often assume that there is a formal plan driving the next research project, cross-group collaboration, or product transfer, especially in a big company like Microsoft. This is not the case for the Sapphire project--and it actually started with a series of informal conversations between a few people in MSR.

The idea to re-design an operating systems is quite old. Most research centers had projects like Sapphire 10 to 15 years ago, and most of them had little impact on end users. We believe this can be different today, because people are ready. Today people are overwhelmed with the amount of information and communication they have to manage. This project is interesting because people are ready for change.

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MS Watch: In terms of user-interface design in general, what
is informing your work?

Cheng: I guess because I do user-interface work all day long, things outside the computer interest me most these days. I'm very interested in architecture. For example, a project done by Jeffrey Huang from Harvard, called the Swiss House, is inspirational for me. The Swiss House is a physical meeting space, beautifully designed, for distance learning and meetings. There is a lot of technology in the space but it doesn't interfere ... and people really use the space. He's an example of someone integrating technology in everyday life that isn't a computer scientist.

I'm also very interested in kids and teens. I have three boys, and watching them play computer games is fascinating and worrisome. Computer games are very interesting as they are highly structured and complex. I find them interesting because I dislike them. I see children today interested in chess and karate and reading comics ... very structured activities with a lot of symbols. Kids and IM and chat ...the next generation will meet new friends online that they never meet face to face, and it won't seem strange. We need to be designing systems relevant for them, not only us.

MS Watch: You came to Microsoft from Apple. Did anything you worked on at Apple influence what you are doing now? What do you think of where Apple is going with its own user-interface design these days, with projects like Jaguar?

Cheng: Joy Mountford ran the user interface research group
at Apple (during Cheng's tenure), and to some degree, I've modeled the Social Computing Group after that group. Projects like QuickTime came out of research at Apple. Seeing that success influenced me to take bigger risks. After all if (Microsoft) can't, who can?

Since most of my friends left Apple, I haven't been following their UI group. I have a lot of respect for the new products they've released, especially the fantastic hardware design which shows a great spirit. Apple continues to be a great company.

A bigger influence on me today comes from my background as an architect. I still work with the architecture community quite a bit, and look to that design community for innovation and new ideas.