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Core and Personality, Shared Design / 2014 - 2017

ROLES

// Contributed in the branding, visual, and interaction patterns and consistency across multiple endpoints, apps and platforms
// Led the development, implementation, and maintenance of the Office Color System
// Led the visual refresh from Office 2013 to 2016
// Led the design of the Office collaboration features
// Led envisioning projects that guided the direction of the future of Office and productivity

(From left to right) Microsoft Word '94, '07, '13, '16. There are many other ommited versions in-between.

Microsoft Office is an industry leading suite of productivity products used and loved by over 1.2 billion users worldwide. From as early as 1989, Office products have been evolving to better serve its consumers and businesses who run on their productivity solutions. Starting from the home field of Microsoft Windows, over the last decade, Office has expanded to meet user needs in most highly used platforms including Mac, iOS, Android, Universal, Web, and more.

As a part of the Office Core and Personality and Shared team, I was instrumental in auditing, defining, and implementing a core set of common controls used across multiple endpoints and all Office Suite apps. More specifically, I led the visual evolution of Office 2016 from Office 2013 including implementing the new default Colorful theme, enhanced dark themes, ribbon updates, and touch mode enabling.

(Top layer) Word '16, (Bottom layer) Word '13

Collaboration corner in Microsoft Word 2016. (Top row) Co-author gallery, Share/Activities/Comments  (Bottom row) Collaborator people cards

Collaboration and Co-authoring

Starting from Office 2016, users can easily collaborate and co-author contents in real time using the new collaboration features. I led the design and the implication for the “collaboration corner”, which includes the updated cloud sharing options, personas, and the persona information cards.

(From left to right) Microsoft Word 2016 white, gray, dark, and colorful themes, created using the Dynamic Color System.

Office Dynamic Color System

One of my core contributions at Office was the creation, implementation and maintenance of the color system. The dynamic color system was created to bring visual consistency across all apps as well as allow designers and developers to create new features without having to separately consider accessibility, visual alignment and theming that has traditionally been a lacking element in Office products. With Word, Excel, Powerpoint on the universal and desktop platforms as the anchor, the system expanded into supporting android and some parts of the web. The system is still in use to power all colors and theming for the desktop apps, and served as an important foundation for colors and theming for the Microsoft Fluent Design Language.

Details are protected under NDA (Non disclosure act) and images are only representative.

Abstracted exampe of text and push button styles adapting to the UI background color using the Dynamic Color System.

Sample UI, interaction, and pattern designs of the project

Project Collab DB

from 2015 to 2016, I led the branding, visual and pattern design of Microsoft Collab DB, a project management online app, from incubation to product release. The product was unfortunately shuttered in 2016- however the product legacy lives on in the new Office Project Online.

The Future of Office and Productivity

Created concepts/directions for the future of Office and productivity that was presented to both Satya and Bill Gates, resulting in long term project funding as well as the restructuring of the entire Office product group around it.

Details are protected under NDA (Non disclosure act) and images are only representative.

Microsoft Envisioning Center located in the Redmond Campus, WA.