Office 365 Executive Vision

Executive vision work moving Microsoft cloud services toward a unified Office 365 admin, discovery, upsell, try, and buy experience.

RoleUX Designer II
Timeline2010
ScopeOffice 365 / Executive Vision / IT Admin

Office 365 Executive Vision case study cover

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Overview

Brief

Create an executive vision that could unify 30+ cloud-based services inside one deployment and admin experience while helping stakeholders see the future service model.

Role: UX Designer II
Constraint: IT admins and business buyers needed clearer discovery, provisioning, upsell, try, buy, and service-management paths across a growing ecosystem of cloud offerings.
Outcome: Delivered an extensible Office 365 admin vision and a working prototype recognized with a Microsoft Gold Star Award.

Project context

my role

UX Designer II

client

Microsoft

team

3 Program Managers
2 Usability Researchers
3 Executives
1 Content Writer

tools used

Planning Research Requirements Gathering Feature Design Lead Design Strategy User Experience Information Architecture Wireframing…

platform

Cross-platform product experience

FEATURED EVIDENCE

Highlights

A quick scan of the moments that best explain the problem, the pivot, and the payoff.

Why it mattered

Story

Hypothesis

A shared admin vision and extensible service model would let Office 365 scale without fragmenting discovery, provisioning, and management experiences.

Insights

The vision had to remain extensible enough for add-on cloud services while making service discovery, purchase, deployment, and management feel coherent.

How it moved

Decision points

Direction Chosen path and rationale

Translate cross-service requirements into executive wireframes and a working SketchFlow/Silverlight prototype that made the future admin model tangible.
Validation Testing and refinement

Daily syncs with product owners, PMs, researchers, and executives kept the vision coherent as requirements evolved.
Engineering Handoff, specs, implementation

Executive wireframes in PowerPoint led directly into a working SketchFlow/Silverlight prototype for stakeholder review.

Resulting shift

What changed

Unified discovery, upsell, try, and buy scenarios in one admin vision
Designed to support up to 30 add-on cloud services
Executive wireframes built directly with stakeholders in PowerPoint
Gold Star Award for contribution to the vision prototype

Tools

Tools used on project

The working set used to research, prototype, align, and ship this case.

Microsoft PowerPoint
Photoshop
Axure RP
Sketch
Silverlight
Expression Blend
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Visio

Reconstruction lab

Launch a Silverlight Demo

Recreated from legacy Silverlight-era work, this hosted demo preserves the admin and cloud-services interaction vision while showing the kind of rich-client product storytelling used for executive review.