FAST PROTOTYPING
What's the future for Microsoft Office? In 2007 the Office Labs team I was part of a special group tasked with developing future ideas. We spent our days building functional prototypes that were released internally at Microsoft to measure success and behavior, and to gather usage data. It was fast-paced, delivering fast results, and lots of fun!
AN INTRANET VERSION OF FACEBOOK
When I was at Office Labs, Facebook had just become a worldwide success. We developed our own version of it, for use inside an organization. It had a timeline of messages and activities, organized around teams or projects. And with some additional cool features that Facebook didn't have :-)
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One of my ideas was to show team activity. Each time you someone added something to the timeline, your name would move to the top of the list of people, with a nice and smooth animation.The feature had an unexpected side effect: It made people do more and more, because the 'wanted to stay on top'.
Using Scrum
The way we worked at Office Labs was also visionary: We were the first group to embrace Agile and Scrum, which was so different from the Waterfall process that was the norm then at Microsoft. As a designer I loved it - my ideas were implemented as soon as I was done visualizing them, and I learned a ton from working directly with developers.
Remote team collaboration
Another prototype I worked on was called "Townsquare". It was a tool for an Intranet, meant to help employees with following news and people inside the company. You could follow people by adding them to your list. I tried to make the list a little different, giving it horizontal scrolling, and drag-and-drop behavior. Not practical if you wanted tons of people on your list, but fun to play with.
