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I worked for Microsoft designing for Services Hub, their enterprise support portal for cloud products/services (MS Azure, MS Dynamics, MS Office 365, etc).
For any given Microsoft Services Hub organizational customer account, there are many users performing many time-sensitive transactions, the results of which can significantly impact their business. Services Hub wanted to move from its traditional email-only means user communications to an in-application notification system to enable users to view more instant, in-context messaging and to allow users to more effectively manage those communications and their associated tasks.
As the single UX Designer on this project, I worked closely with the product owner, the lead engineer and a dedicated researcher to understand user needs; to define scope and requirements; to establish design principles; to create workflows; to do all interaction design and UI/visual design; to vet work with larger Design Team, Content Lead, Accessibility Lead and Localization Lead; and to validate design work.
Customer feedback had made it clear that Services Hub users desired a more effective manner of application communication, and the project came to me with a very simple set of requirements.
Notifications systems are a relatively ubiquitous feature, and their range of functionality and respective design patterns are generally well known — users already have strong understanding and expectations of notification systems, as established by their experience with other websites and applications.
I performed a comparative analysis on existing notification systems both inside and outside of Microsoft. I researched user feedback for Microsoft notifications systems in their HITS and UserVoice repositories. I reviewed various public user research outcomes from other non-Microsoft notifications systems. I organized these inputs and used them to construct a list of design principles for our notification system, and used those design principles to build out a full set of user stories. As a team we negotiated which stories we would tackle and in what order.
The researcher, product manager and I worked together to develop a survey to collect user feedback on the usefulness and particulars of our selected functionality, and to understand what types of situation users desired to receive notification for and in what manner. The researcher executed that testing and we used that data as design input specific to our particular notification system.
Shown below are samples of visualizations representing discovery and project definition work:
The project team came to agreement on specific scope, requirements and scheduling, and we performed design exercises maintaining tight team collaboration and working through rapid iterations of sketch to reach consensus on what we would build.
Immediately below are sample images of sketch work:
We made a first pass on high-fidelity design, which we used to define the questions we wanted to get answered by users. We worked together to develop a prototype and test script to accommodate getting answers to those questions, and the researcher executed the test plan.
Immediately below is a screenshot of summary results from that testing:
Appropriate changes were agreed on and made, as informed by test results, and final design work was done. I translated design across all responsive breakpoints and produced a final specification.
Sample images from the final specification are shown immediately below:
This MVP release received very high feedback from users generally, but [as expected] also revealed many problems to be solved with regard to the categorization, nomenclature and presentation of specific notification types. There was also a large backlog of important functionality that had been deferred from the MVP. I had resigned prior to the beginning of design of a second iteration and do not know its status
