Outlook.com + Outlook Web App

Beginning in 2014, I led an initiative to merge the user experiences of the consumer-facing Outlook.com and commercial-facing Outlook Web App (OWA), coinciding with merging the codebases to reduce redundancies and improve efficiencies.

While indexing heavily on the sensitivities of the consumer audience and their potential for abandonment, my team and I undertook an extensive experience and feature audit of both products to compare and contrast with one another—highlighting key areas to celebrate and carry forward as well as opportunities to improve. While collaborating extensively with User Research, we iterated through countless variations of the merged experience—from navigation and commanding, to brand and visual identity, and everywhere in between.

What culminated from the 18 month journey was the migration of close to 1 billion mailboxes and a company-wide example of how to successfully migrate existing users at scale to a new product with very little attrition and exceeding growth targets.

Here are some examples of this journey to a single web-based Outlook experience for all user segments.