Mobile platform UX vision
The platform is Microsoft Teams' ecosystem offering which allows 2nd and 3rd party partners to build applications on top of Teams. The goal of this space was to create an opportunity that was valuable enough to kickstart the partner ecosystem to build high-quality applications for Teams.
When I started to lead the design for the mobile platform there already was a functioning desktop platform that had been available for partners to build their apps for two years. But the challenge was in getting mobile developers to invest in a nascent platform while they had already invested in creating their own native applications for mobile.
In order to bootstrap the mobile platform, my approach was to start with an audit of the existing gaps in the mobile platform UX:
How do we improve app quality?
Templetization of Platform UX
The first step in the process of improving the platform UX was to enable 3rd part developers to be able to create low investment applications with high quality and consistent design.
The proposal was for the platform team to enable easy creation through a set of pre-existing controls and templates which could be reused by partner developers based on their scenarios.
There are 3 levels of templatization to be available to the third-party developers:
1. Primitive components
2. Composite controls
3. Composite app templates
How do we turn the mobile platform into an opportunity?
Mobile-first experiences
As Teams Mobile app usage and adoption grows, developers will seek to invest in building rich native, mobile-first experiences for Teams Mobile + Mobile-only users across key customer segments such as IWs, FLWs, and Consumer
These extended experiences will be natural, in-the-flow and optimized for Mobile users
How do we make the mobile platform discoverable?
App discovery experiences
Once the mobile platform is kickstarted it is critical to deliver seamless Mobile-optimized app discovery through multiple in-context entry points while not competing with the OS's own store experience. In order to understand how other existing platforms achieve this we did an in-depth competitor study of WeChat's mini program ecosystem.
