LPM*
Outlook Add In
This is one of those projects that was a real challenge - not necessarily because of its difficulty, but because of the time constraints.
The process that I'm about to describe took place in one week - we called it a hypersprint. The actual ideation / research / design process took about two days.
*LPM - Legal Project Management Platform
Why would anyone do this?
Why?
After a few years of being live it became obvious that while our app was useful and users felt like it was easy to use, most would still do the bulk of their work in their inbox. Our users still spent a large amount of time checking and organising their emails and because we knew that habits are hard to break we decided we should become a part of that habit.
What?
As a way of making it easier for the users to interact with the LPM platform, we decided to create an Outlook plugin that would enable them to quickly create tasks based on specific emails, add members, forward attachments to their projects and a bunch of other stuff as well (that we're not going to mention).
Let's do it in a week
While the flow in of itself was pretty straight forward and it made sense, there were definitely some challenges.
Firstly this was a plugin/addin and what that meant was that I didn't have that much space to work with - just a 320px wide rectangle to be exact. Keeping stuff above the fold was going to be tricky, so I really needed to remove anything that wasn't essential for the user experience. That meant that everything that was a 'nice to have' but not a'must have' had to go.
Secondly time wasn't really on my side.
This project was part of a hypersprint experiment. Wait...what's that? Well... a sprint - but everything happens in about one week (5 working days). Let me tell you that trying to make sense of Microsoft Fluent Design System in a day is not exactly a cakewalk.
But at the end of the day I made it work, and I actually enjoyed the challenge.
