Microsoft - SharePoint Authoring Home
Project Overview
It’s an app for newsletters. A newsletter could be regular reports, status updates, thought memos, leadership notes, personal stories, opinion pieces related to work etc and its all powered by SharePoint
The Problem
Creating a single landing page with the ability to create new content or see and review existing content. We are aiming towards new customers that have never published content before all the way to experienced power users.
Project Goals
Reduce the high rate of unpublished content and newsletters especially in new users. Create a destination for authors to use weekly if not daily.
My role
I was the only Product / UX Designer on the project and collaborated with a Product Manager, Researcher, and two Developers on the project
Its an app
It’s an app for newsletters. A newsletter could be regular reports, status updates, thought memos, leadership notes, personal stories, opinion pieces related to work etc.
Easily create your newsletter as a rich free flowing web page (powered by SharePoint pages)
Rich and dynamic content – text, images, videos, links, sections, columns, color formatting. Save as draft or share your draft with another person for content contribution. Choose from templates out of the box or create your own
Share with your audience in Outlook, Yammer and Teams
Same content shared everywhere.
All analytics accrues to the same item.
Content can be updated after sharing as well
Get back to drafts and other recent posts, plus analytics and intelligence
Value proposition
• Easy creation of rich dynamic content in a lightweight experience
• Newsletters powered by SharePoint pages are responsive, Accessible and can load fast.
• Users can “Like’ a newsletter and comment on newsletters.
• Content will quickly render fully inside Outlook. Users can Like and comment on pages from within outlook.
• Content can be updated even after publishing (unlike email)
• Analytics accrue to same item even if newsletter is forwarded or posted in other channels(unlike email)
• M365 date residency, compliance and governance
User persona
• Early phase developing wireframe concepts and thinking about page layout and component hierarchy
Home page sketches to wireframe
User jobs
I began to ideate potential solutions/designs that align with our design spec and take into account features that would allow users to successfully find what they're looking from the most basic standpoint. I drive a FigJam exercise with the feature crew (Design, PM, Dev, Research) breaking down user jobs and key actions.
Structure and hierarchy
After breaking down user jobs and stack ranking features against the problem set, loose sketches began, leading to low-fi wireframes to initial med-fi comps
Authoring home experience
Customers wanted a home experience that could be one place for everything. To take it one step further the home experience grows with the author. As the author publishes content engagement is tracked along with analytic highlights and a deep dive into your page list
-Day 30 with robust views, recent and templates, full analytics
with alternative page layouts
-Day 0 with clear instruction on getting started and quick CTAs to
start authoring
Final output
Success
A true app home destination that is full of features including: create, collaborate, edit your content, save your unpublished content for later, manage subscribers and benefit the power of analytics.
Impact
A key customer metric is the amount of unpublished content. Early data shows the unpublished rate of 50% was reduced to 25%