Uncovering critical usability issues in WorkPoint Express 365 email management.

I organized a brainstorm session with some team members and stakeholders to come up with questions. The main reason was to ask questions from different perspectives, because a designer and a developer will always have different types of questions for a user.

Asking these questions gave us a clearer picture of our users: how they describe their work, how they use Microsoft 365 day to day, and where friction shows up in email heavy roles. That shared understanding helped us shape a primary persona we could design and test against.

Primary persona

Erick Wright

IT Manager and Business consultant at Microsoft

Age	35
Location	Liverpool, England
Marital status	Married

Background

Erick works as an IT manager and business consultant at Microsoft from 2020. He previously worked as a document controller at Orange for 5 years.

Erick mostly plans, follows up, documents, and maintains the status of any project he is involved in, ensuring there is a high level of transparency. Outside of work, he is a dad to two kids.

Goals

Erick’s goal is to stay open to learning and integrate that into how he views the world. He wants to progress in his career.

Technology usage

Erick has a positive attitude towards technology. He likes to keep himself updated with the latest news in the IT world, and he likes to use every system available to him.

Personal traits

Erick is more system oriented than goal oriented. He is always open-minded and ready to learn and accept new things. He likes to stay organized because his job requires a lot of organization and having everything ready and prepared. He is also a team player, open to collaborating with anyone and always ready to help.

Frustrations

• Microsoft feels confusing
• Usability issues with Microsoft Teams
• It takes time to learn and make automations work
• He needs to remember things for 20 people and remind them what they should get done
• Lack of time

Situations

When managing a big team, Erick gets a lot of emails from team members about project updates, upcoming meetings, and any news related to the project he is in charge of. Sometimes he gets too many emails and forgets to respond to some. When that happens, he does not cater to every team member’s needs, which can make them feel like they are not part of the team.

Skills

• Organization
• Leadership
• Outlook
• Excel
• Microsoft Teams
• IT management
• Business

Finding external users who already used WorkPoint Express 365 proved difficult.

I suggested we recruit internal employees who matched the target profile: people who manage a high volume of emails and had not seen the new prototype. Whether they had used older versions was less important. The product would also meet first time users, so testing that first time experience was actually an advantage.

The final pieces were coming together and I was slowly getting ready to conduct the studies.

But before I did, I had to make sure how the sessions would go. So I had a pilot session with two team members, who gave valuable feedback about some parts of the prototypes that could be fixed, which made the upcoming sessions easier, and some corrections on the test in general.

It was time to be a recruiter.

I’ve engaged with 12 participants. I had participants who use WorkPoint Express every day, participants who use it once or twice during the week, and participants who used it before, but stopped using it.

The sessions lasted from 40 to 60 minutes. The meetings were recorded, so I don’t miss any useful insight.

How to actually know if someone successfully completed a task? I followed this rule:

The participant was not being blocked doing the process, which required support of the moderator to continue