Outlook Mobile • Siddhant Mehta

Team and Culture: Over the past 2.5 years, I've been a part of the Outlook Mobile team as a Senior Product Designer. The team breathes a unique culture of operating like a startup at the scale of an enterprise.

Impact: I've had the opportunity to lead several large projects globally. I'm humbled to say that my work has contributed to increased productivity for millions of users, scaled business revenue, defined our enterprise story and improve remote collaboration.

Play My Emails:
Voice and Productivity

Incubation to production:Play My Emails started off with a small group of people exploring prototypes for effective voice-based consumption of email, geared towards visually impaired users. These prototypes led to a full collaboration between Outlook, Microsoft Search & AI, and Cortana to bring this to all our users.

My Responsibilities:Spearheading the design effort to production, defining a scalable language for email consumption through voice, incorporating research, liaising with multiple teams to define the scope and driving the end-to-end design process.

Personal Challenges:While this was an exciting project for many, it came with strong opinions and tough love from senior leaders. My biggest challenges and learnings involved setting expectations, stakeholder management, transparency and teaching non-mobile designers in partner teams to design for mobile experiences.

Invocation

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Flagging emails

Play My Emails:
Art and Motion Design

As a Product Designer at Microsoft, I had the opportunity to contribute to the end-to-end process, including how this story is shared publicly. In collaboration with brand designers, marketing teams and an external creative studio, we created minimalistic marketing material and a voice-driven video to tie it all together.

Behind the scenes

Upcoming Events in iOS and Android

Design Brief: People are often late for their meetings. When they are late, they do not know how to fail gracefully. In addition, people who turn off their notifications (with Do Not Disturb settings), see their event reminders too early or too late, or often miss them altogether. How can Outlook help them show up on time?

Current Research:
1. 1 in 5 Americans consistently arrive late to work (YouGov)
2. 37% of meetings start late (BPS Research)
3. It has a cascading negative impact on the day (Hawthorne Study)

Goal: Help people get to their meetings on time, by surfacing relevant event details where they spend most of their time, i.e. their inbox.

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Tap interactions

👉 Showing tap and swipe interactions for up next events

Multiple events

Android Widgets for Outlook

Design Brief: Past Outlook Android widgets, while heavily used, lacked vital information (full meeting name, meeting location) and required the user to tap on each event to learn more. In addition the widgets weren't updated in years, impacting performance, battery consumption and usage metrics.

User Needs:
1. Calendar widget should show meeting location and room numbers
2. Need for widget settings to match their device themes
3. Calendar widget doesn't update based on current time

Goal: Help people stay on top of their day and show up for their events without having to open the Outlook app. Performance upgrades should help improve battery consumption and overall responsiveness.

Grid structures

Early explorations

Final designs

Monetization: Native Ads

Business Need: Experiment with native ads in Outlook Mobile to increase Office's revenue. Native Ads is the only feature that our users haven't requested! How can Ads lead to increased Office 365 subscriptions without feeling invasive?

Goal: Increase app revenue while maintaining user engagement and retention rates. The churn caused due to Ads should ideally be negligible or non-existent.

Personal Challenge: This was a tricky feature where we had to balance the visuals to feel native enough but not too embedded into the message list. It was an intricate ask to adhere to the expected click-through rates (CTR) and adjust tap areas to reduce mis-clicks due to ads.

Final designs

Invasiveness

Dismissing ads

Enterprise Grade Security

Brief: To make Outlook Mobile viable for highly regulated industries like banking, governments and defence, we needed to build a solution that provided for 4 core security scenarios:
- Authentication via digital signatures ("Who are you?")
- Non-repudiation ("This email definitely came from you")
- Data integrity ("What you sent is what I received")
- Encryption for confidentiality ("The person I sent it to is the only one that can see it")

S/MIME (Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail) extensions is used by organizations to enforce data security on email messages. In essence, S/MIME is composed of digitally signing and encrypting emails.

Goal: Design a solution that is easy to use for mobile scenarios, responsive to encrypt and decrypt messages, and easy to troubleshoot for support.

Exploring motion

Maintaining consistency

Error scenarios

Additional Contributions

In addition to the ones shown above, here is a non-exhaustive list of some more projects I worked on over the past 2.5 years.
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- Security framework
- Classification, labelling and protection
- Shared and delegate Mailboxes
- Redesigning and optimizing onboarding funnels
- Scenarios for dual screen devices (NDA)
- Building design systems in Sketch + Abstract
- Leading and facilitating Weekly Team Reviews
- Streamlining marketing assets pipeline

None of this would be possible without a wonderful, loving, inclusive team of designers in New York, Redmond, San Francisco and Los Angeles. This picture was taken in 2018 and the team has grown since.