Microsoft Newsstand App

While working for Microsoft, I lead the UX design for a new newsstand app on the Windows platform. The user could purchase books and magazines through the online shop, and read their purchased titles with specially designed readers for both books and magazines.

This venture was a partnership with Barnes & Noble’s catalog and NOOK reader, which drove some design decisions.

Although the books and magazine purchasing functionality was incorporated with the OneStore when our teams were merged, the reading product was never released.

storeS

Books and magazines had separate landing pages featuring best sellers, new titles, samples, and the ability to shop by category. The purchasing functionality was later incorporated into the OneStore.

SHOP BY CATEGORY

Barnes and Noble had a complicated taxonomy, with many categories, subcategories, and tertiary subcategories. Since restructuring the taxonomy was not an option, we came up with a browsing function that would allow the user to easily drill down into each level, with the results dynamically refreshing in the background.

purchase a book

purchase a magazine

book Reader

The book reader utilized Barnes and Noble’s NOOK capabilities.

behaviors

Windows specific behaviors were integrated into the app.

CAROUSEL

Documentation of tab and arrow key navigation.

semantic zoom

Pinch-to-zoom would collapse the view into a more condensed view.

responsive behavior and snap mode

Windows snap mode allows the user to split the screen to multi-task.