Creating the modern email experience
My first job after college landed me on the nascent Outlook team at Microsoft. I had an opportunity over the six years I was there to help figure out how so many core scenarios should work: email, calendar and scheduling, spam filtering in its infancy, contact and task management, cross-platform, programability, internet protocols, data synchronization, and much more. In many ways, it was the ideal job for me to learn so much about the fundamental building blocks of productivity software in a short amount of time.
By 2001, I had been offered the job to lead Outlook’s user experience team, the team responsible for designing how all of Outlook’s features should work from a user interface perspective. Outlook was in the midst of transitioning from an enterprise product to one being used widely by consumers, and at the same time email was becoming the central way that people communicated. It was a wildly exciting time!
My team redesigned the Outlook user interface and, in doing so, created a number of the paradigms that ended up defining the modern email experience. We created features like the conversation view (eventually copied by Gmail, which launched a few years later), the Reading Pane, Search Folders, two-line mail view and contextual dividers, the Navigation Pane, multiple calendar views, quick flags, and much more.
Though Outlook has changed enormously in the 15+ years since I left, the bones of what we figured out and built are still recognizable—not just in Outlook, but in virtually every email product in use today as the “default” way things work.
A closer look
More information
As the Outlook UI design happened at least a decade before it was commonplace to write more publicly about product design decisions, there’s not a lot written about it online.
One fun tidbit… a controversial keyboard shortcut truly loved by some and loathed by others, CTRL+ENTER to send an email message, is totally my fault. Here’s the story of how it came to be.
I also created the Outlook reminder sound which played 15 minutes before every meeting for more than a decade. Here’s the story of how it got created (and how my name mistakenly ended up in the sound file included in Outlook!)
And finally, here’s is a short blog post I wrote about the importance of labels in understanding user interfaces, using my experience designing Outlook as an example.