Outlook Product Design — Navigation, Reading Pane & Calendar Experience

Project: Comprehensive UX/UI redesign of core Outlook surfaces including Mail navigation, Calendar interactions, and contextual reading pane experiences. Led cross-functional design initiatives that modernized interface patterns while maintaining user familiarity and accessibility standards.

My Role

Lead Product Designer owning end-to-end UX/UI across Mail navigation, Calendar experiences, and contextual reading pane integrations. Responsibilities spanned Mail folder organization, Calendar left navigation (mini month, date picker), and smart content surfaces for travel bookings and contextual information.

Design Leadership: Directed Calendar interaction patterns across Month/Week views, redesigned event creation forms, and developed contextual illustration systems. Led cross-functional collaboration with engineering, PM, research, and accessibility teams to deliver scalable, cohesive experiences.

Opportunity

Navigation Clarity: Outlook’s navigation had grown dense and inconsistent, creating friction in user workflows and reducing feature discoverability across Mail and Calendar surfaces.

Contextual Intelligence: Opportunity to seamlessly integrate third-party content (travel, reservations) directly in reading pane with native, actionable UI patterns.

Calendar Modernization: Critical need for improved interaction feedback, better density handling, and enhanced personalization while preserving familiar workflows for both power users and casual scenarios.

Strategic Scope: Balance modernization with user familiarity across Microsoft’s broad ecosystem, ensuring accessibility and cross-platform consistency.

Process

1. Research & Analysis: Comprehensive UX audit synthesizing user feedback, support insights, and behavioral data to identify key friction points across navigation and interaction patterns.

2. Navigation Redesign: Reimagined Mail folder hierarchy and Calendar left navigation for improved clarity, speed, and discoverability. Focused on reducing cognitive load while maintaining power user efficiency.

3. Contextual Integration: Designed native UI patterns for travel bookings, hotel reservations, and smart content directly in reading pane. Created illustration systems that complemented inbox content without overwhelming core workflows.

4. Calendar Enhancement: Redesigned Month/Week view interactions, simplified event creation forms with intelligent defaults, and improved density handling for various calendar scenarios.

5. Iterative Validation: Rapid prototyping, user testing, design reviews, and close engineering partnership ensuring Fluent design alignment and accessibility compliance.

Results

Enhanced User Experience: Improved Calendar navigation and event visibility, significantly increasing user engagement and task completion rates for common workflows.

Reduced Task Friction: Streamlined date selection, meeting creation, and folder navigation reducing average task completion time and user errors.

Contextual Intelligence: Delivered intuitive reading pane integrations that surface actionable travel and reservation content, improving productivity and user satisfaction.

Design System Impact: Contributed scalable, accessible components to Microsoft’s Fluent design system, enabling consistent experiences across products.

Global Scale: Enhanced unified Outlook experience now serving hundreds of millions of users worldwide, supporting diverse workflows and accessibility needs.