UX DESIGNER 2 | MICROSOFT, REDMOND WA
I had the opportunity of working at Microsoft as a UX Designer from April 2018 - November 2019. This is a collection of work I did during my time there that’s shipped and released to the public. My role was designing for Office, focusing on the future of productivity in; Word, PowerPoint, Excel and partner applications.
Reply to @mentions
Respond directly from Outlook to @mentions from documents with new context previews and actionable message notifications.
The challenge: Triage mindset and loosing focus
One of the biggest painpoints encountered by users when triaging through email and getting document notifications was the lack of context. They would get notifications like “You’ve been mentioned by Mary in docx” without any additional information. Our goal with this project was to reduce the amount of back and forth between doc and email allowing users to carry out micro tasks directly from their inbox like replying to a comment or providing small bits of information when requested. Comparisons shown below.
Updated PowerPoint desktop notification card showing context preview and quick actions
Updated notification cards with context preview shown on desktop and mobile
Mobile cards showing context from left to right: Word, PowerPoint and Excel.
The design direction is reflected on the right. Due to technical constraints and urgency to ship we released an MVP for beta shown on the left.
Awesome video produced by Nando Costa and the office brand team to help tell the story of our feature in a creative and engaging format. Tasks video shows a couple of snippets of how @mentioning helps provide quick collaboration enhancing productivity in an organic way.
Editor AI
Re-imagining word’s most famous feature: spelling and grammar. Leveraging AI to help you write with confidence.
Why fix it if it ain’t broken?
Short answer, it was broken. Using traditional right click interactions and having ever growing context menus to accept suggestions was becoming extremely overloading for users. Accepting a single spelling correction required users to navigate through a plethora of choices including, copy, paste and countless new features added into the context menu. The way this project was born was by re-imagining contextual menus and what it would mean to have the left click only show what was relevant at the time. During user testing, we learned that once users discovered the left click interaction their workflow became significantly faster.
Updated left click contextual card
Suggestion States
New Contextual Menu Interaction
Awesome video produced by Nando Costa and the office brand team to help tell the story of our feature in a creative and engaging format.