Sharepoint

Project Journey: A seemingly simple project quickly turned into a major endeavor. It began as a straightforward audit of the SharePoint website building interface. Due to significant turnover and a lack of change tracking, there wasn’t an accurate Figma build to verify inconsistencies between the Figma files and the engineering implementation.

The Project: The task was to capture interactions of all the different “web parts,” review the code, and take screenshots of what was happening. Each web part has a dropdown menu with many toggles that activate or deactivate other menus and radio buttons. This led to an exponential increase in variables and options. For example, the News feed had 6 different layouts, each with multiple variations, making it challenging to create a comprehensive Figma component.

My Role: I documented existing issues, identified the most significant problems and quick wins, and created a Figma prototype for SharePoint to highlight the discrepancies between design and implementation. Collaborating closely with my boss, I helped develop a v1 toolkit of Figma components and guidelines (she focused on wording and tokens) for the design team. Despite the challenges, including team changes and leadership transitions, I remained dedicated to ensuring the project’s success and adapting to the evolving team dynamics.

My next task was to make a Figma protoype of the existing Sharepoint site.

After reviewing all the different web parts, we had to make some tough decisions. We discovered more errors than we could easily fix, both in design and engineering. A new Fluent design system was being developed, and we were due for an upgrade to make the site-building experience easier. Everything needed to change, but there wasn’t enough time to do it all. Therefore, we devised a three-stage plan to get things back on track.

The next step was to create a UI Toolkit. This helped us build new features accurately and quickly. We also focused on achieving quick wins through outcome-based development.

I will save trying to share the entire project, but over a year long project. The updates for vNext started shortly after this project and then V3