Outlook Web Access is the online companion to Microsoft Office Outlook, powered by Microsoft Exchange 2007. The application provides e-mail, calendar, contacts, and tasks for information workers. My work was focused on the Outlook Web Access Premium client, designed for use with Internet Explorer versions 6 and above.

As a UI Design Program Manager, I wrote the functional specifications that defined the user experience and also created the visuals for screen elements with input from feature teams for each area. I worked closely with other OWA program managers, developers and test engineers to design usage scenarios, review and finalize feature designs and ensure correct implementation and functionality for each of the product features. This process included collaboration with the user research and marketing departments, writers, and other program managers from the Office Outlook team. My work also included visual specification for in-context errors, informational alerts, notifications and overall product design and consistency. Some features I owned were: Mail, Calendar, Options, Conversation View, Categories, Flags, Folders, Automatic Name Resolution, Log on, Change Password, Out of Office Assistant, New Mail Notification, Search, and more.

This was a four year effort encompassing a complete overhaul of the user interface including adding increased functionality to the product. The user interface was completely redesigned with a focus on increasing productivity for the information worker. To accomplish this, we reduced the number of clicks required to get tasks done by removing dialogs and incorporating actions and responses in place. We removed all pop-up notifications and incorporated them into the main window, providing access on demand. We enhanced drag and drop functionality, improved and expanded the right-click context menus, integrated errors contextually with more helpful error strings, and included explanatory text and Help for new features where necessary. The product redesign also includes a fresh look and feel, streamlined for the online user experience.

Note: The OWA dev team was the first to use several technologies together to create a web application that functioned just like a desktop app, coining the term AJAX. The software engineers on my team were some of the best, most enthusiastic, driven, innovative people I’ve ever worked with.

Here's an example of some of the new OWA features, originally presented as a post for the Microsoft Exchange team blog.