Summary of work
2018-2020
Activity feed and notifications
The Activity feed is a horizontal feature of Microsoft Teams that allows users to access and triage their notifications across Teams, channels and all of the other apps within the product. This is a feature which drives more than 40% of the overall engagement of Microsoft Teams. As UX lead for this feature I worked on solving the current challenges of this area as well as creating a long term product roadmap for the Activity feeds on Teams.
1. Designed a scalable IA for feeds and notifications that could be reused by all second and third party partners
I did multiple rounds of iterations taking into consideration on all existing as well as future requirements from multiple partner teams who had their stakes in the solution. The overall format of feed item was changed to create a framework that worked for all partners and at the same time aided scan-ability by allowing users to anchor their eyes on the “reason” icon followed by the “actor + reason string” followed by a line of preview.
2. Improved triaging in feed
A major improvement targeted at the highly engaged group of users was the introduction of triage tools in the activity feed. We studied the triage behaviour of “zero in-boxers” from the email world and introduced triage features that catered to a range of users starting from the highly organised users to the more relaxed ones (who were the majority in numbers).
3. Driving engagement through Activity feed
Activity feed being the hub of engagement all across the product, it was important for us to ensure that new users are aware of this fairly new construct and were sufficiently engaging with this surface in order to ensure long term stickiness with Teams. When we analysed our engagement numbers for the activity feed we could map a direct correlation between reduction in the number of feed items and the possibility of a user turning dark. A large part of the problem was also that new user’s either had very few teams on his first day or were joining low engagement teams which generated very few feed items.
To solve this problem we came up with a solution whereby we bootstrapped the user’s feed volume by giving them suggested feed items based on a heuristic analysis of their proximity with certain teams and channels. This way in the first few weeks there would be sufficient feed volume to engage with and at the same time the user will become aware of the teams and channels where his colleagues are active.
Another way to drive engagement was to create a set of synthetic connections in the first few weeks with the user which would help them learn more about the unfamiliar concepts in the product. These synthetic feed items in conjunction with emails also promoted interaction with other colleagues by the use of contextual canned messages. I came up with a framework which took into account the user life-stages and the corresponding plan for synthetic engagement.
4. Synthetic feed
The existing design of the activity app was optimised toward the usage patterns and triaging behaviour of information workers whose work day communications are far more complex as compared to information workers. With teams expanding it’s customer base into companies where there is a lot of communication requirements from front line workers, I let a design effort to redefine the app to optimise for the linear communication requirement of front line workers while still remaining a powerful hub for organising the communication of information workers.
5. Activity “Now” view for first-line workers
The existing design of the activity app was optimised toward the usage patterns and triaging behaviour of information workers whose work day communications are far more complex as compared to information workers. With teams expanding it’s customer base into companies where there is a lot of communication requirements from front line workers, I let a design effort to redefine the app to optimise for the linear communication requirement of front line workers while still remaining a powerful hub for organising the communication of information workers.
Mobile platform
I lead the design for the app developer ecosystem for our mobile apps including Android, iOS and iPad. My team has played a pivotal role in converting some key partners from the prominent Fortune 100 companies contributing directly to the product’s growth.
2nd party and 3rd party design guidelines
In order to enable app developers from within Microsoft as well as outside the company to build apps for our platform it was essential to create design guidelines for our mobile developer ecosystem. I led a small team of designers who worked on creating UI component designs built in the react native framework for developers to reuse. These guidelines were eventually published and is part of our publicly available mobile app design guidelines for Teams.
Platform components
I worked on scaling the teams platform to mobile which included a series of system and service designs as well as UI framework components such as the bot framework, task framework, notification behaviours etc .
Devices
Since late 2018 I have also worked on the Teams devices project and have been leading design thinking around productivity across new form factors and reimagining Microsoft Teams for new and innovative work experiences. This has been one of the most challenging and fun projects to work on interfacing with new technological breakthrough and completely reimagining the modern workspace.
