Glossophobia (n.): fear of public speaking, speech anxiety.

For some of us, public speaking can be torture. What if you trip on your words or your mind goes blank? Studies show that when you rehearse, in advance and multiple times, your credibility increases and the impact of your presentation skyrockets — and yet, many of us don’t.

But why?

This was what Principal Design Manager Robin Troy and her team at PowerPoint first wanted to understand. And then, they wanted to know how they could help.

Approaches to (not) rehearsing

When thinking about why people rehearse, Robin initially thought there were only two types of presenters: those who rehearsed and those who didn’t. However, after she began talking with customers, she discovered that the truth was more nuanced and uncovered two types of “non-rehearsers” and two types of “rehearsers.”

1. Non-Rehearsers

• Eager: Doesn’t rehearse because they feel they perform better without rehearsing
• Nervous: Doesn’t rehearse, but said they knew they should rehearse

2. Rehearsers

• Eager: Rehearses in advance because they take pleasure in the preparation
• Reluctant: Unenthusiastically rehearses, only because they think it’ll help

When she reviewed her research notes with her team, Robin was concerned that the feature wasn’t something people wanted. And that’s because more than half of the group didn’t like to rehearse. But a closer look showed something surprising.

When Robin and her team looked at the group as a whole, she noticed that three out of the four groups felt they should rehearse. The data led to an exciting idea. How could the team create an experience that would make it less painful to rehearse and that’s enticing to use? Robin and her team saw this as an opportunity to create a feature that would genuinely help customers feel more prepared.

A path to confidence

Why do our customers rehearse? What do they get out of it? Why do they want to be better presenters?

Through their conversations with customers, the PowerPoint team found that people want to look calmer to appear more confident and credible to land the message with the audience. By looking nervous, they lose credibility even if the content is excellent.

As Robin and her team learned what motivates people to rehearse, they saw a clear path to help customers feel more confident in the process. Robin explained, “We just needed to make the experience fun, non-threatening, and beneficial — like having a supportive coach by your side.”

Making a feature that doesn’t feel like a chore to use — one that could help reluctant rehearsers and even non-rehearsers — was the team’s next challenge.

When Robin and her team designed the first version of Presenter Coach, the right technology to build that kind of intelligent experience didn’t exist yet. However, when the PowerPoint team started making Live Captions & Subtitles, a feature in PowerPoint that transcribes a presenter’s words in real-time and presents them on the screen as captions, it laid the groundwork for the broader vision of people interacting with PowerPoint using their voice.

Enter Siliang Kang, who iterated on the research and refined the design. “We wanted to experiment with voice technology, like creating technology identifying people’s speech and different voice signals,” says Siliang. So the team built an initial prototype on top of the Azure speech service.

The separation is in the preparation

Currently available for public preview in PowerPoint for the web, Presenter Coach gives you real-time feedback as you rehearse by analyzing three key parts of your presentation: pace, slide reading, and word choice.

When analyzing pace, Presenter Coach detects how fast or slow you’re speaking. It then recommends changes to your speaking speed to help your audience retain information.

Presenter Coach can also detect if you’re reading your slide word for word. Audiences can lose interest in a presentation when the words on the slide are the same as what the presenter is saying.

Word choice not only tracks filler words — like “um,” “ah,” “like,” or “actually” — but also notes culturally insensitive phrases people use. For example, if someone says, “the best man for the job,” the app provides more gender inclusive word suggestions like “the best person for the job.” When you finish rehearsing, you’ll see a summary of suggested changes to make your presentation stronger.

As Presenter Coach detects one of these common pitfalls, it uses your general speaking pattern to intelligently decide when to best provide the recommendation.

Words matter, especially as we try to build a more inclusive world. Microsoft believes designing for inclusivity helps us build better experiences for people and more accurately reflect the world around us.

Senior Writer Roger Haight, who helped develop Presenter Coach, says, “We’re not trying to tell people what to do. We’re trying to gently nudge people to take a moment to think about what they’re saying and how they’re saying it.”

“People might not even be aware of the language they’re using,” reiterates Robin.

Presenter Coach was designed for the modern workplace. And part of what it means is collaborating with people that might have different life experiences. Program Manager Angelo Liao adds, “We recognize that in the workplace, you need inclusivity to engage your audience. Everyone wants to do well and work well with other people, so we’re helping them with that.”

Practice makes perfect

Siliang says Presenter Coach is something she herself would use. “I want to be a better presenter, but I don’t have someone that can spend an hour rehearsing with me when I’m in a pinch. With Presenter Coach, all I need is an empty room, my laptop and 30 minutes. The app can tell me what I can’t figure out myself.”

We all tackle presentations differently, but we all know training and feedback are vital becoming more effective presenters. And for people with glossophobia, Presenter Coach is precisely what the doctor ordered.

To stay in-the-know with Microsoft Design, follow us on Dribbble, Twitter and Facebook, or join our Windows Insider program. And if you are interested in joining our team, head over to aka.ms/DesignCareers.

Designed to Level Up Your Presentations (and Confidence) was originally published in Microsoft Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Did you know that someone designs the emoji you send to your friends? 😲

Before words, humans communicated through pictures to tell stories. We still do this today with emoji. We use emoji to help add expression and personality to text, but you might be amazed at how much thought and design energy goes into making them.

“Emoji transcends culture,” program manager Judy Safran-Aasen says. “It’s actually becoming its own writing system.” Judy’s team creates the design for each emoji available in Windows. “Our emoji design and creation process juggle many implementation and creative considerations to create emoji that work at a global scale.”

A 🌟 is born

What happens if the emoji you want to use doesn’t exist yet? You can submit a proposal for a new emoji (bubble tea, anyone?) to the Unicode Consortium. The Consortium is a nonprofit made up of tech companies and others that help promote, develop, and maintain consistency of writing systems across all software products. They review and vote on the emoji proposal. If they approve a new emoji, tech companies begin their design work.

It’s up to each company to interpret how an emoji will look in their design style. At Microsoft, our emoji are unique because they’re vector-based font glyphs. The font stacks the glyphs on top of each other to compose the final design. This allows for reuse of the same glyph for different colors like the skin tones. Our emoji font is scalable just like a text font so as you get larger the images will remain crisp and clear.

Still, a crucial part of emoji design is legibility at small sizes. “Because emoji are typically used at small sizes, it can be difficult to include enough detail to make them recognizable at those small sizes.” explains Judy. “For example, many emoji faces have only minor differences between them. In certain instances, the design will need to exaggerate certain features to make them distinct..”

For designer Mike LaJoie, designing emoji ties back to his roots. “I was a skateboard designer 20 years ago. That experience came flooding back when we were figuring out how to produce these complex emoji into a font. Vectors are what we used for skateboard screen printing, and layering vectors together is how we create emoji, too."

Keeping it 💯

When Unicode’s list of approved emoji included a skateboard, Mike knew that he had to get the design right. “Skateboards are near and dear to my heart, because I have so much experience designing them. It allowed me to explore outside of the box — from mild to wild.”

“The sample images from Unicode and others showed the top of the board with the grip tape,” Mike recalls. “Showing the top means you’re looking at a solid black object, especially in our style. I wanted it to have an interesting graphic on the bottom, because when you buy a skateboard, the design on the bottom is an expression of you, not unlike using an emoji.”

“It’s the little details that make all the difference and make it look right. The trucks needed to face the right direction and have proportionately sized wheels,” describes Mike.

As part of the design process, Mike and his team usually create four or five versions of an emoji before narrowing it down to one. In this case, they created around 20. Mike had a few ideas: a plain skateboard, one at a different angle, one referencing a classic 1980s design, and ones with different patterns and colors.

One challenge that emerged during the design phase was figuring out the best shape for an emoji skateboard. Mike drew both a classic “pool” shape and a more modern “street” style design. In the end, the modern design won. “Straight angles work better at small sizes. And it’s the skateboard shape that is more popular these days.”

The design team also had to figure out what designs on the skateboard would work at such a small size. The team considered putting Ninja Cat on the bottom of the skateboard, for example, but it was too small to be legible at the typical emoji size.

“We ended up with a skateboard design that has geometric pattern at the bottom. It’s not too outrageous, and the lines give a sense of depth on the board,” says Mike.

When it came down to either red or blue for the color, the design team looked at the whole emoji set. “You don’t want your emoji set to overuse a particular color and we realized that we needed more blue. If you have too many emoji of the same color, it’s difficult to differentiate them,” Judy says.

The 🌏 roll-out

After the emoji has been reviewed internally and approved, we introduce the emoji in the next Windows release. This involves making sure the new emoji appears in both the touch keyboard and the emoji panel.

For Mike, one of the most important parts of the emoji design process is the sheer scale of the decisions he and his team make. “Designing emoji for an operating system that has billions of users is just mind-blowing,” he says. “It’s incredibly humbling to be able to design anything for that broad of an audience. And to design things that people can express their emotions, or have fun with? I love it. That’s one reason why I keep doing it. Being able to design things that people find useful, hundreds of times a day, for years, is really cool.”

Emoji continue to change how we communicate. Once reserved for informal texts and social media, they’re becoming increasingly common across all parts of our lives. More and more people are using emoji — so it’s a good thing we have designers sweating the small stuff for us.

Running Windows 10? Press the Windows key + period (.) or Windows keys + semicolon (;) to launch the emoji panel on the desktop. Happy World Emoji Day! 🎆🎉🎊

To stay in-the-know with Microsoft Design, follow us on Dribbble, Twitter and Facebook, or join our Windows Insider program. And if you are interested in joining our team, head over to aka.ms/DesignCareers.

Inside the Microsoft Emoji Design Studio was originally published in Microsoft Design on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.