In Seattle, an engineer thumbs through a Mumbai-based coworker’s edits while walking between meetings. In rural China, an artisan uses their phone to sell their creations. In Johannesburg, a lawyer texts back a client before catching the bus. These real-life snapshots show the diverse and evolving workflows of today’s 5 billion mobile users worldwide.
In many ways, mobile productivity is still a code waiting to be cracked. Beyond mobile-first and mobile-only markets where necessity mandates it, we can rarely accomplish as much on a phone as we do on our PCs. However, we believe in empowering everyone to be fully productive on any device. Our teams’ focus on emerging markets, inclusive design, and accessibility has broadened our aperture as we create more tailored, intelligent experiences across Microsoft 365.
Today, we’re excited to unveil redesigns to our flagship mobile apps! We’ve redesigned Outlook, OneDrive, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. You can also expect new versions of Teams, Yammer, and Planner soon. These redesigns contribute to broader company efforts to take mobile productivity to the next level. At Microsoft Ignite, we publicly previewed our beta Office app and Fluid Framework. Office combines multiple Microsoft 365 mobile experiences in one app, and Fluid is a new technology that breaks broad experiences into dynamic, real-time components ideal for mobile scenarios.
Beyond the public eye, we’re also conducting global research, designing a mobile-born version of Fluent, exploring scenarios for dual-screen experiences, and creating mobile UI toolkits for external developers to build this mobile future alongside us.
Read on for a behind-the-scenes look at our research, design process, and future vision for Microsoft 365 mobile experiences.
Design is becoming the heart and soul of Office. Learn how we evolved our visual identity to reflect the simple, powerful, and intelligent experiences of Office 365.
Whoever said that nothing is more intimidating than the blank page probably never faced a redesign.
The last time we updated the Microsoft Office icons was in 2013, when selfies were new enough to become Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year and emojis were new enough to be considered buzzworthy.
Clearly, a lot has changed since then — including how people get things done.
Over 1 billion people from vastly different industries, geographies, and generations use Office. They work on different platforms and devices and in environments that are faster, more distracting, and more connected than ever before.
To support this changing world of work, Office is transforming into a collaborative suite that lets you work together in real-time from almost any device. We’ve infused our tools with powerful AI: you can get insights from data with less effort, write a paper using your voice, or make your resume using LinkedIn insights. We’ve also added totally new apps to the suite like our AI-powered meetings and chat service, Microsoft Teams. In the end, it’s great design that makes these experiences fluid and seamless.
As a signal to our customers, we’ve evolved our Office icons to reflect these significant product changes. We’re thrilled to share the new icons for Office 365 with you today and tell the story behind their creation.
Carefully crafted designs that honor heritage and welcome the future
From the get-go, we embraced Office’s rich history and used it to inform design decisions. Strong colors have always been at the core of the Office brand, and new icons are a chance to evolve our palette. Color differentiates apps and creates personality, and for the new icons we chose hues that are bolder, lighter and friendlier — a nod to how Office has evolved.
We also used gestalt principles to further emphasize key product changes. Simplicity and harmony are key visual elements that reflect the seamless connectivity and intuitiveness of Office apps. While each icon has a unique and identifiable symbol, there are connections within each app’s symbol and the collective suite.
Flexible visual systems that work across platforms, devices, and generations
Today’s workforce includes five generations using Office on multiple platforms and devices and in environments spanning work, home, and on the go. We wanted a visual language that emotionally resonates across generations, works across platforms and devices, and echoes the kinetic nature of productivity today.
Our design solution was to decouple the letter and the symbol in the icons, essentially creating two panels (one for the letter and one for the symbol) that we can pair or separate. This allows us to maintain familiarity while still emphasizing simplicity inside the app.
Separating these into two panels also adds depth, which sparks opportunities in 3D contexts. Through this flexible system, we keep tradition alive while gently pushing the envelope.
Human-centered designs that emphasize content and reflect the speed of modern life
We all know modern life is faster and more connected: we’re living in it. Office supports this by making it fast and easy to express ideas, collaborate with others, and stay focused and in the flow. It’s why Office apps compose together, enabling users to open PowerPoint or Excel beside conversations in Teams or Outlook.
To reflect this in the icons, we removed a visual boundary: the traditional tool formatting. Whereas prior Office icons had a document outline for Microsoft Word and a spreadsheet outline for Excel, we now show lines of text for Word and individual cells for Excel. By focusing on the content rather than any specific format, these icons embody the collaborative nature of the apps they represent.
Similarly, we’ve changed the letter-to-symbol ratio. Traditionally, the letter occupied two-thirds of the icon, and the symbol took up one-third. We’ve changed this ratio to now emphasize the symbol because while the letter represents the tool itself, the symbol speaks more to people’s creations.
Being part of the design community
Our new icons will begin rolling out across platforms in the coming months, starting with mobile and web. They are the result of many iterations, a lot of research and testing, and plenty of late nights and weekends. They’re also part of an ongoing journey. As designers, we love the creative community’s ability to inspire each other and create momentum, so don’t hesitate to leave a comment below.
Is your research timeless? It’s time to put disposable research behind us
“We need to ship soon. How quickly can you get us user feedback?”
What user researcher hasn’t heard a question like that? We implement new tools and leaner processes, but try as we might, we inevitably meet the terminal velocity of our user research — the point at which it cannot be completed any faster while still maintaining its rigor and validity.
And, you know what? That’s okay! While the need for speed is valuable in some contexts, we also realize that if an insight we uncover is only useful in one place and at one time, it becomes disposable. Our goal should never be disposable research. We want timeless research.
Speed has its place
Now, don’t get me wrong. I get it. I live in this world, too. First to market, first to patent, first to copyright obviously requires an awareness of speed. Speed of delivery can also be the actual mechanism by which you get rapid feedback from customers.
I recently participated in a Global ResOps workshop. One thing I heard loud and clear was the struggle for our discipline to connect into design and engineering cycles. There were questions about how to address the “unreasonable expectations” of what we can do in short time frames. I also heard that researchers struggle with long and slow timelines: Anyone ever had a brilliant, generative insight ignored because “We can’t put that into the product for another 6 months”?
The good news is that there are methodologies such as “Lean” and “Agile” that can help us. Our goal as researchers is to use knowledge to develop customer-focused solutions. I personally love that these methodologies, when implemented fully, incorporate customers as core constituents in collaborative and iterative development processes.
In fact, my team has created an entire usability and experimentation engine using “Lean” and “Agile” methods. However, this team recognizes that letting speed dictate user research is a huge risk. If you cut corners on quality, customer involvement, and adaptive planning, your research could become disposable.
Do research right, or don’t do it at all
I know, that’s a bold statement. But here’s why: When time constraints force us to drop the rigor and process that incorporates customer feedback, the user research you conduct loses its validity and ultimately its value.
The data we gather out of exercises that over-index on speed are decontextualized and disconnected from other relevant insights we’ve collected over time and across studies. We need to pause and question whether this one-off research adds real value and contributes to an organization’s growing understanding of customers when we know it may skip steps critical to identifying insights that transcend time and context.
User research that takes time to get right has value beyond the moment for which it was intended. I’m betting you sometimes forgo conducting research if you think your stakeholders believe it’s too slow. But, if your research uncovered an insight after v1 shipped, you could still leverage that insight on v1+x.
For example, think of the last time a product team asked you, “We’re shipping v1 next week. Can you figure out if our customers want or need this?” As a researcher, you know you need more time to answer this question in a valid way. So, do you skip this research? No. Do you rush through your research, compromising its rigor? No. You investigate anyway and apply your learnings to v2.
To help keep track of these insights, we should build systems that capture our knowledge and enable us to resurface it across development cycles and projects. Imagine this: “Hey Judy, remember that thing we learned 6 months ago? Research just reminded me that it is applicable in our next launch!”
That’s what we’re looking for: timeless user insights that help our product teams again and again and contribute to a curated body of knowledge about our customers’ needs, beliefs, and behaviors. Ideally, we house these insights in databases, so they can be accessed and retrieved easily by anyone for future use (but that’s another story for another time). If we only focus on speed, we lose sight of that goal.
Creating timeless research
Here’s my point: we’ll always have to deal with requests to make our research faster, but once you or your user research team has achieved terminal velocity with any given method, stop trying to speed it up. Instead, focus on capturing each insight, leveling it up to organizational knowledge, and applying that learning in the future. Yes, that means when an important insight doesn’t make v1, go ahead and bring it back up to apply to v2. Timeless research is really about building long-term organizational knowledge and curating what you’ve already learned.
Disposable research is the stuff you throw away, after you ship. To be trulylean, get rid of that wasteful process. Instead, focus your research team’s time on making connections between past insights, then reusing and remixing them in new contexts. That way, you’re consistently providing timeless research that overcomes the need for speed.
Have you ever felt pressure to bypass good research for the sake of speed? Tell me about it in the comments, or tweet @insightsmunko.
