In 2016, I joined the Outlook Growth team tasked to grow our user base by focusing on our untapped markets and user segments. I was hired to help design and develop a daily planner, focused first on college students in North America and later on general consumers.
Our time management offerings at the time felt very heavy and corporate, and they didn’t really appeal to consumers. So we wanted to design a beautiful, delightful and straightforward time management solution that appealed to the typical consumer, with North American students being our first scoped target audience.
Product Design
Product Strategy
Prototyping
2016 - 2017
Disjointed ecosystems, heavy apps with a steep learning curve
Customers wanted a simple destination to plan - capture notes, tasks, events, and organize and personalize their productivity systems
Customer Focused, grounded in User research
We narrowed down our initial target audience to students as this allowed us to focus and refine the experience. We performed several research sessions, including remote and in-person focus groups, workshops, and several research trips to Universities across the county to interview students and learn about their time management processes and workflows
Summary of themes we heard from the research
Highlighted above are some of the needs of Agenda’s primary and secondary target audiences (Aspiring and Active organizers, respectively), and how it currently stacks up.
Deviating a bit from Microsoft’s established corporate branding, we went for a very light and playful look and feel to appeal to our younger demographic
Calendar and tasks all in one place
Agenda brings together your Calendar and tasks into a single app and makes it easy to get a more holistic view of your time.
Bounce tasks and events back and forth
Life happens, plans change. Easily unschedule previously committed events by moving them to the task list