ROLE

Lead designer— UX, testing, interaction, prototyping

TEAM

1 designer (me) 1 design manager 3-4 program managers 20+ software engineers

This case study is:

1. Lengthy–might take atleast 20-25m of your time to read.
2. Optimised for viewing on large screens. It may not look good on mobile.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Basically.

Daniela is a product manager at Contoso, Inc. She's working on a new project with the UX, content and engineering teams.

**She needs to review a feature with the team, so she decides to setup her online meeting using Microsoft Teams. However, she finds it very difficult.

**Teams doesn't show her team’s availability or let her create recurring meetings. These are very important for Daniela's meeting.

**Being colour blind, she also finds it difficult to read the labels inside the form fields. **She feels incredibly frustrated and powerless.

**Upon a co-worker’s suggestion, she decides to create her meeting with Outlook. She finds it much more user-friendly and useful.

**From that day onwards, she used Outlook to schedule and manage her calendar. She organized all her meetings happily ever after.

Everyone, literally.

1. Framing the problem

Back in 2017

<aside> 💭 Along with Daniela, a large chunk of users preferred Outlook to Teams. Why?

</aside>

1. Fundamentally bad user experience: The old form had numerous issues which induced friction and hindered usability. Amongst the numerous, these were the top ones:

   1. Feature gaps:
      1. No way to create events for yourself
      2. No repeating events, file attachments or room search
      3. Subpar and buggy scheduling assistant
      4. Many visual contrast and finesse gaps
   2. Poor accessibility: Many keyboard and vision-impaired users had a strong repulsion towards creating and managing meetings on Teams due to its severe keyboard accessibility and visual contrast issues. Most users had gotten used to doing things a certain way in Outlook (which worked really well for them) that when their companies migrated to Teams, they were forced to use a product whose accessibility standards weren't as good as what Outlook offered back then.
   3. Built for simplicity: The old scheduler was optimised for small meetings and that was about it. It did not offer the tools that was needed to accommodate complex scheduling capabilities like recurrence, attachments, etc. It was also not built with collaborative scenarios in mind, ironic to how Teams was placed as a product.

2. Mental model mismatch: Imagine the ability to see wonderful things with your eyes, but not have the ability to describe it for someone else. Using Outlook meant you got that ability. Naturally, many Teams users flocked there for a combination of reasons:

   1. Familiarity: Teams was not only new, it was different. Many of the past design decisions led to Teams having a new but unfamiliar design which didn't really align with other scheduling experiences. This was both in terms of interface as well as behaviour. Being most familiar with Outlook's design, most users just preferred it to something new.
   2. Flexibility: Outlook also had a robust mobile calendar experience which had almost all if not more functionality than its desktop counterpart. This was a huge reason for mobile-only users to prefer the Outlook experience. Meanwhile, Teams on mobile scheduler was equally plain as the desktop counterpart, so that didn't do much in retention.

3. Strong verbatim from research studies

   Early qualitative research and telemetry indicated an alarming 80% drop-off from the event scheduling form. From qualitative research, most users confirmed that upon realising that Teams doesn't offer many of the functionality offered by Outlook, they preferred to complete their task there.

   Hell, even I was using Outlook to schedule meetings to discuss how to improve Teams scheduling!

2. Identifying the opportunity