One area targeted for expansion is interaction design, which pertains to designing the actual interaction or structure of an experience rather than just designing the onscreen pieces. A goal is to better tie , the company's diagram drawing software used by many interaction designers, to Expression and the company's Visual Studio software development platform.

While Expression is for application designers and Visual Studio is geared toward the coding side of software development, Key said some features of Expression would turn up in Visual Studio. Software developers would want to use Expression, he said.

The planned "Orcas" version of Visual Studio, for example, includes the same design surface for Cascading Style Sheets rendering as the Expression Web product, Key said. Orcas also has XAML capabilities, which are featured in the Expression Blend product.

"There are some features that are only in Expression and vice versa, but we are really focused on giving all features to both audiences, just doing it in a role-specific way where everyone can be more comfortable and successful with the solution they are using," Key said.

Microsoft believes in collaboration between designers and developers to build user experience-based applications and content, Key said.