MONTHLY SERVICE REPORTS
Company: Microsoft
Project: Monthly Service Reports for Exchange
Role: Senior UX Designer
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The Problem
The Exchange engineers are required to give a report each month of how things went across the Exchange platforms all over the world.
This endeavor was extremely difficult and time consuming. Often it would take 3 weeks to gather the data necessary to create a report, but then actually creating the slides usually fell to the wayside for lack of time and it was difficult to create visualizations that told the story they wanted to tell.
The goal was to find a way to help the engineers, and upper management to make this reporting process more effective, less time consuming and rewarding for everyone.
The How
The Monthly Service Report (MSR) is a key tool used to evaluate and assess workload performance over a period of time.
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As the Product Design Lead:
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Worked across multiple engineering teams to understand complexity, overall front-end strategy, and cultivated a healthier and more productive partnership between engineering and design.
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Designed and executed all user research activities including interviews, validation testing, contextual walkthroughs
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Designed an interaction model after weeks of research and input from partners across Microsoft Office and Exchange
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Led design presentations to engineering and upper management/product owners
​This tool was designed for engineers providing the monthly reports, but also for the VP of Exchange, who consumes these reports.
Before this tool, engineers and PMs spent 3+ weeks each month gathering and trying to assemble their data to present, often being messy, cluttered and difficult to gather any insights from. This process was causing extreme anxiety and frustration. The new design increased productivity and communication between the VP and all of the teams presenting their data:
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The top level buckets would remain constant across the workloads
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the remainder of 2nd tier categories can change to fit each team’s needs
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Customizable tiles and pages allow for easy changes and surfacing of critical data without the need to dive in.
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Provides a preview of what’s to come without diving in
Goals for the MSRs allowed the teams to not only provide their data but also point out problems and possible solutions
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To provide a “score card” for how the service is doing
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To provide deeper information on why the scorecard looks as it does
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To provide additional “deep dive” information
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To gather/provide information on how to make things better
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To evaluate and improve on current metrics
The Solution
This project was a huge success across the board. The engineers finally had a template they could use to help them create their reports in a more timely fashion. The VP of engineering could consume these reports with a much richer, deeper understanding of what went on that month. Even at a glance, they could get a big picture of how the overall health of Exchange was doing even before diving into the content. I really enjoyed working on this project, it was extremely rewarding and fun to help all the engineers who were so frustrated before.
