Microsoft Outlook

I’ve spent my tech career obsessing over how people interact with software, specifically looking for ways to make daily communication and productivity tools feel less like a chore and more intuitive. I’ve been lucky enough to help shape the user experience for two massive communication apps: Microsoft Outlook and Gmail. During my time at Microsoft, I built significant features for Microsoft Outlook:

The To-Do Bar: Bouncing between your inbox, calendar, and task list was a major distraction. I built a persistent sidebar that pulls your upcoming meetings and flagged tasks adjacent to your email, keeping your daily priorities visible without breaking your workflow.

Color Categories: Not everyone likes filing things into strict, rigid folders. Inspired by physical sticky notes, I built a flexible, color-coded tagging system so users could visually organize emails, calendar events, and notes their own way.

Search Folders: I used to constantly run the exact same searches every day (like "all unread mail" or "attachments from my boss"). I turned frequent searches into live, auto-updating folders so your most important info is always aggregated and waiting for you.

Overlaid Calendars: Comparing schedules side-by-side to find a meeting time was a huge pain. I designed a way to visually layer calendars on top of each other.

Tasks on the Calendar: A standard to-do list ignores the reality that tasks actually take time to complete. I integrated tasks directly into the daily calendar view, letting users drag and drop their to-dos into specific time slots so they could actually block out the time needed to get things done.

At the end of the day, my goal has always been simple: zero in on the daily digital grind, have a little empathy for the user, and build things that actually save people time.