Microsoft Project
Redesigned for Modern Work
A Brief History of Microsoft Project
Microsoft Project is one of the oldest and most popular Enterprise Project Management applications– first released for MS-DOS in 1984. With each new release the product has grown in power and complexity. While users respect project for its power and performance it lacks the sophistication and ease-of-use of modern productivity applications. The UX is clunky and much of the value is dependent on using a waterfall project methodology.
Our Initiative
I arrived at Microsoft just as an effort to modernize Project was gaining momentum. I joined a small team of three designers charged with bringing Project into the modern workplace with a brand new web-first experience. The product we ultimately launched brought the best of Microsoft Project together with modern work methodologies and a seamless user-experience.
What would Project look like if it were designed for the first time today? How might we create a product that feels simple and intuitive to new users without compromising on the feature-richness that has come to define Microsoft Project?
What might a unified project management offering from Microsoft look like? How would this cater to existing customers of Dynamics 365, MS Project, and Azure DevOps?
Who are the primary users across sales, services, and manufacturing projects? What are their individual responsibilities and what tools and processes– software or otherwise– do they use to accomplish their jobs?
How might we gracefully transition our existing project management offerings from across Microsoft into this solution? How can we take into the account the existing users, functionality, and frameworks behind our current offerings?
Market Research
Involving users in the design process was important to our team from the very start. We relied on insights and usage data from existing Microsoft products like Planner and Microsoft Project and on new findings from emerging project management methodologies and industry trends.
User Needs
Involving users in the design process was important to our team from the very start. We relied on insights and usage data from existing Microsoft products like Planner and Microsoft Project and on new findings from emerging project management methodologies and industry trends.
Sense of Home
“There is no centralized place to see work from across the company”
Flexible Methodology
“We need tools that cater to waterfall, agile, and hybrid projects”
High Level Visibility
“We need to show leadership the status of our work across various projects"
UX Architecture
It was important to us that the user flow was intuitive. Users start at Project Home and each project contains three primary task views– Grid, Gantt, and Board. Each of these views formats the same underlying task data. Task Details appear as a side pane and can be invoked from any project view– or from Roadmap's where that task has been added.
Shared Controls
Because our new offering would be composed of three distinct experiences I designed the core components for navigation and commanding to be consistent throughout. It was important that the experience feel coherent across each of the project views and in our portfolio offerings.
Project Home
Our research found that existing Project users often worked across projects concurrently. The existing product lacked a strong navigational model and did not have a clear home. The product had no single place users could return to at any time to begin a new task or get re-oriented. We designed Project Home to be the go-to space to browse and create projects.
Project Grid
Our research found that despite an abundance of specialized project management applications the humble spreadsheet reigned supreme as the the most popular project management tool. Project user's relied on the ability to perform bulk operations in a familiar spreadsheet grid. With this in mind we designed our task grid to incorporate core spreadsheet interactions like drag-fill, typeover, drag-and-drop, and point-and-click selection of cell targets or ranges. We also chose to forgo the popular commanding model of interaction and made direct manipulation a key design principle.
Gantt Chart
We extended this direct manipulation model to the Gantt Chart. The Gantt Chart represents tasks visually on a timeline and emphasizes task relationships. Each bar represents a task and each line shows the dependency to another task. Tasks are listed on the vertical axis and the time intervals on the horizontal axis.
Agile Boards
We added a board view as part of our larger objective to incorporate elements of agile. The board view allows for a highly visual representation of your tasks in various grouping options, such as progress, by buckets or assignees.
Designing for the Ecosystem
As our work on Modern Project evolved we began an effort to tell a more cohesive story about tasks across the Office suite of products. With the help of some internal motion designers, we put together this sizzle reel to help tell that story.