Windows 11 Settings Homepage
Designing a control contract for partner teams you'll never meet.
The Windows 11 Settings Homepage was my team's focus for roughly eight months and ships to over a billion devices. My measure of success wasn't my own shipped pixels. It was whether partner teams could build their cards on top of the framework without needing me.
The central piece was CardView. Its first version was largely a replica of the EntityItem control it replaced, sharing much of that code, and shipping it there would have been defensible and fast. I chose instead to keep iterating the contract against partner feedback and against use cases that hadn't arrived yet, ending at an architecture simpler than EntityItem's. The reason to spend that time is specific: replication carries the old surface's constraints forward into every card any partner team builds for years afterward, and an API you can still simplify before adoption is one you can never simplify after it.
I also delivered the Personalization Card, one of the first three cards on the new homepage, including the setting handlers behind it, plus InfoBar. This was the most detailed UI work I'd done: previously I mostly consumed existing components correctly, and here I worked directly with a wide range of designers and PMs from mockups through production. I demoed the new experience at our organization's Demo Day.
At that install base, API design is risk management. Every public contract echoes through partner teams for years. This is where I learned to design for consumers I'd never meet.