Having come from a start-up that had been bought by the company its existing system was close but not quite fully cohesive with the rest of Microsoft. At my time of joining the Fluent system had become a larger push at the company. I’d just come from IBM and my time on the Analytics Platform group where I had seen the importance of having some sort of cohesive design system.
On day one in MyA and WpA I only had prior designs, an incomplete color palette and some rules on typography that were in flux.
Initially the goal was purely documentation and refinement of existing components. When I joined the team this really didn’t exist, so simply having a library to look to, to see when and where we weren’t being consistent was needed.
Their implementation in the product were inconsistent and resulted in a wide spectrum in how patterns were used. My manager at the time was overwhelmed with pushes from Project Management for the addition of product add-ons rather than improvement of the existing product design. Fluent was being pushed across Microsoft, but the steps for this had passed by my team and without steps the product would continue to fall behind.
This was work that I was able to continue to expand upon alongside my other primary product work, partly because it improved my own process and speed and partly because I had seen how beneficial these steps can be for a design group from prior teams.
The rules behind the new system were not complex, just simple, minimal and systematic across all the components in the product. I continued to build upon this and refine it, alongside IC work, during a time that my manager and the other FTE in the group left for other products, and I had a period of being in charge of 4 contractors and working alongside multiple remote FTE designers from Microsoft’s India based design studios. This work helped build cohesion across our process.
A deeper dive was taken during this phase to really look into all the components and patterns we were using in the product.
As the new set of FTE’s started adding to the product, the new system has been implemented across every facet. Now both MyAnalytics and Workplace Analytics will have a look and feel that match each other and match the rest of the Office Suite.
This is one of my examples where the success of the steps is hard to quantify. I would like to believe the overall improvement in aesthetics and minimalistic style influenced the increase of usage that has occurred in the product. Within the design and PM teams the success was easy to see. New designs moving forward have a clearer set of instructions on what the product should look and feel like, and more time is spent on interactions and new flows rather than just fixing visual bugs.