Forms Templates

I worked with the Forms team from 2022-early 2023. My first project was revising 5,000 templates. I worked with my team in China to align myself with their work, and reached out when I encountered challenges.

One of my strengths is revision. With this project, I used this skill to make sure that the Forms templates were up to Microsoft standards. The Writing Style Guide guided me with rules for punctuation, capitalization, etc.

After I familiarized myself with the templates and guidelines, I was able to identify what areas required more discussion and research. I met with stakeholders and the localization team to come up with solutions that I developed and implemented. This included:

Privacy issues in financial or medical forms that previously asked for account numbers and Social Security numbers
Inclusiveness when addressing gender or sexual orientation, etc.
Empathy towards the user when asking insensitive questions in medical forms

Forms timer feature

Forms also has a quiz feature marketed towards the education setting where teachers can import their current quizzes and have them converted.

When the strings were presented to me, the timer started to count down when it hit the last minute. I raised concerns about accessibility. I suggested to the UX designer that we warn the user about the countdown because it can cause test anxiety. A few weeks later, they contacted me to rewrite the strings to help ease the user.

For Forms, I also wrote callouts to guide users, edit invitations and labels, and review AI-focused features.

Voice and tone principles

During my time with the Forms team, I took note of the voice and tone principles that we wanted to convey in our content. My manager asked me to develop the guidelines in a content guide for the team. I polled my team about what words best described our product and used that to write the principles.

The New Microsoft Planner

I moved from the Forms team over to work on Microsoft's productivity apps. This included To Do, Planner, and Project. At this time, the teams were started on the new Planner app in Teams. This app brought their products together in one unified producitivity planner. As the team's content designer, I collaborated with teams in Redmond, WA and India with the naming process of the product, naming button labels, call-to-actions, and tooltips. I was responsible to make sure that the words on the screen were consistent during the process. Since this is a producutivity app, our goal was making the product as user friendly as possible to keep users focused.

The product was announced in November 2023 and will launch in 2024. Here is a blog post that provides a walkthrough of the product.

Project Premium templates

With my experience with Forms templates, I was chosen to work on premium templates for the Project team. I reviewed the current five templates to learn more about the formatting, structure, and product features. I researched seven additional template that focused primarily on business subjects. I then created an outline from my research and how it fit within the Project's capabilities. I worked with my project manager to make sure that each template not only covered the subject, but also used Project’s capabilities. This includes buckets, lists, goals, and the timeline.