As soon as you open the door, the noise pummels you. It’s like the sound of a steam train, or even an experimental electronic music track. “Thankfully, no one needs to sit in here,” says the engineer showing us around. “You’d go crazy.”

This isn’t some kind of vast industrial production line – this is a laboratory at Microsoft’s otherwise sedate headquarters in Redmond, Washington. The extraordinary noise is created when button durability on dozens of Xbox controllers is tested simultaneously.

Tiffany Nguyen is a hardware reliability engineer at Microsoft. Her job is to oversee the testing of any accessory containing mechanical or electrical components that could wear or break during use. One of the most important devices they work with, and one that suffers enormous rigours in everyday use, is the Xbox joypad.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trying times … inside the Microsoft test laboratory. Photograph: Keith Stuart/The Guardian

Right now, Nguyen and her department are analysing the new Xbox adaptive controller, a device designed for people with disabilities. “With this controller we have a broader range of users who may have limited mobility, so they may use [it] differently,” she explains. “It might be mounted on a tripod, used at a different angle, and some people may use their wrist, their elbow, even their feet.”

The Redmond campus has two labs where joypads are tested. In the measurements lab, there are huge work desks loaded with contraptions, tools and eviscerated controllers. Here, the general functionality of every device is analysed before being passed on to “the noisy place”. “We measure 14 or more different things about every single button press,” says test lab lead Robert Silbernagel. “We measure what each button press looks like in force, in travel and how it clicks, which is a very important part of every button press.”



Everything is tested by strange, small, skeletal machines built in-house for specific applications. One machine inserts and removes a 3.5mm jack into the adaptive controller, over and over again – just to make sure the socket holds up. This is a place where detail is everything: where things are tested by robots, but where human interactions must be simulated properly.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Smashing it … joypads are tested at the Microsoft headquarters campus. Photograph: Microsoft

As Silbernagel explains, “For round connectors like power jacks and these audio-style jacks, if you simply insert and extract that lead thousands of times artificially in a lab, you just develop a big flat spot on the head of the jack. That’s not reality; when people do this, it gets rotated randomly, it spreads out the wear. So what we did was, we added a little stepper motor to the test fixture so every time the jack retracts, it rotates a little and spreads that damage out, better simulating what happens in the real world. When we measure these forces now, we do a much better job of matching reality.”

Elsewhere in the room is a “torture test” unit, which pulls at the lead going into a controller to see if it snaps, and a unit that knocks a jack plugged into the pad up down, left and right, over and over again to see if that breaks the socket. In one corner, there is a darkened booth where staff test the brightness, colour and uniformity of the LEDs on the Xbox controller. There are environmental tests, too. Engineers test the durability of the pads in contact with at least 13 different common chemicals, including those found in skin lotion and perfume.

But the noisy room is the button-pressing lab, where huge banks of units test bays of controllers. A central computer runs a proprietary gameplay simulator, and all the pressure units then start pushing buttons. Each unit has an array of prongs powered by air cylinders, allowing testers to control the exact forces exerted. Over the course of designing a controller, they’ll run through hundreds of prototypes.



Jason switches the units back on and the noise starts up gradually before the piston-like plungers go at full tilt. “We spend as little time in here as possible,” he yells. “These systems are smart – they know when a failure occurs and they can flag it. So we can set it to run, go home for the night, come back the next morning and be ready to take a measurement.”

Right now, with the adaptive controller, the team is carrying out crush tests, destroying the devices to make sure they don’t fragment into anything sharp or dangerous. They’ll also be dropped from a variety of heights and at different angles. The lab is filled with stacks of these things in various states of annihilation. Nguyen surveys the laboratory with quiet pride. “I break things for a living,” she says.