Microsoft OneNote

UX Designer Intern
8 week Internship

The new Onenote

Create personalized notes

ABOUT ONENOTE

OneNote is a digital note-taking app...

It gathers users' notes, drawings, screen clippings, and audio commentaries. Notes can be shared with other OneNote users over the Internet or a network.

Deliverables

By the end of 8 weeks internship I had to present

  • Research and ideations
  • Design solutions (OneNote Android)

Design Process

  1. Understanding the project brief
  2. Research Analysis
  3. Ideation and brainstorm
  4. Designing solutions

How might we bring the unique value prop of driving emotional resonance and delight through OneNote? OneNote should not only allows users to capture and recall their notes, but express their thoughts and emotions in the most human and delightful way.

UNDERSTANDing the project

Breaking down the problem

  1. The project brief was quite a long paragraph, so I broke the project brief to understand what the user needs.
  2. The next step was to explore the OneNote app on the device to understand the current experience and what is lacking in the current experience .

UNDERSTANDing the project

Exploring OneNote App

  1. Limited customization options: OneNote offers limited options for customizing such as changing the background color, font style, and font size.
  2. Lack of personalization options for note-taking tools: OneNote offers a wide range of note-taking tools, such as pens, highlighters, and shapes, but users are unable to customize these tools to their liking.
  3. No personalized recommendations or suggestions: OneNote does not offer personalized recommendations or suggestions based on a user's note-taking habits or interests.
Insights are more in regards of project brief

Understanding the Project

User Reviews: Play store and reports

OneNote team had done consumer scenario research which helped me to create user personas and map out their journey

Research analysis

Building user persona and user journey map

With the research from consumer scenario and secondary research I crafted two personas and mapped their journey.

Scenario 1- User taking lecture notes

Compared user journey of digital and physical note taking.

Jenifer- Takes meeting notes on OneNote app

Robert- Takes notes on notebook

Scenario 2- User writing journal

Compared user journey of digital and physical note taking.

Jenifer- Writes journal on OneNote app

Robert- Writes journal on notebook

Research analysis

The physical note taking process…

To understand more about the note taking process, I did an observation analysis on physical note-taking processing.

  1. Understand user behavior
  2. What are the physical attributes
  3. Identify Pain points
Note Taking Format
Note taking tools
Note Organization

Bucket 1

Personalization

How might we help users to express their thoughts and emotions in OneNote by providing features that can help them to personalize their notes

bucket 2

Awareness

bucket 3

Onboarding

Why Personalization

Personalization gives convenience to users. Users feel lack of personal touch in their note-taking process. They feel confused and overwhelmed by so many notes. Personalization can also improve recall by making it easier for users to review notes

Who is affected by the problem

Users who use notes taking app regularly for various purposes like lecture notes, shopping list, journaling, project plan etc.

Where does the problem arise

While creating a new notebook

Formatting the note after capturing

Reviewing the note

What are we are trying to solve?

Difficulty in differentiating notebooks

Limited option of personalizing the notes

Lack of personal touch

Let’s personalize

Note-taking: Streamlining Your Thoughts…

Solution 1/3

Notebook Covers

  1. The purpose of a  cover is to convey the theme or organize the way notes are taken.
  2. The notebook feels more personal to users
  1. The notebook icon size is small difficult to distinguish between notebooks.
  2. No option to choose notebook cover color.
  3. Only list view to view notebooks

Create New Notebook

Create a notebook menu with notebook cover selection choice

  1. User wants to take quick notes, so want quickly create notebook- Give them default cover choice
  2. User wants to take  notes  by customizing cover- Let them explore covers

Edit Notebook

Users can edit their notebook anytime. This feature was missing in current OneNote

  1. User can change notebook name and cover if they want to.

Notebook Layout

Users can change the notebook layout view i.e. grid view or list view. Currently this feature is restricted to home.

  1. User can select list or grid view from home page as well as from notebook page
  2. The selection in the notebook page will be reflected on home as well.

Solution 2/3

Stickers

  1. Stickers helps users communicate their thoughts, easier, quicker, brighter, and express emotions and feelings better than words.
  2. User can create their own stickers using lasso tool.
  1. I designed a new action bar on the top where user can highlight, add stickers and emojis.

Add sticker

User can add sticker from the action bar

  1. User wants to take quick notes, so want quickly create notebook- Give them default cover choice
  2. User wants to take  notes  by customizing cover- Let them explore covers

Create a sticker

User can create their own stickers using lasso tool.

Solution 3/3

Templates

  1. Templates can ease our workload and make us feel less stressed, and, at the same time, they increase efficiency.
  2. Templates saves users time in organizing the content
  1. I designed a template bottom sheet, with various categories of templates based on user scenarios
  2. I wanted to explore more on templates but I had time constraints so went ahead with first ideation.

Add template

Users can add template to their notes

  1. Users can choose template when they create a new page
  2. Users can choose template later from menu

Next Steps

1. The next steps on this project that I could have done is user testing to validate my solutions and improve better.

2. Ideated more on notebook covers, users can add their own covers and how to implement that.

3. Build my understanding more on designing solutions

Feedback from my team

Anshita was able to take feedback and suggestions with growth mindset and channeled them in her design solutions. She has finished her project on time including prototypes and presented to the team, which inspired the team to focus on personalization.

Design Manager, OneNote

She has articulated her insights from user research including solutions she will be working on. She was able to channel the feedback from peers and mentors in to the project with a growth mindset.

Mentor, OneNote

She quickly learned and implemented on the feedback that came her way and showed fast progress to bring it all together.

Senior Designer, OneNote