This was a really fulfilling project to complete, we really captured a variety of student perspectives on using Outlook, and our final design reflected this in being extremely catered towards student usage of the emailing platform which was the goal we set out to do. We gained so many insightful opinions from the heuristic and usability evaluations that improved our final high-fidelity design, both in its functionality as well as aesthetics.

One really interesting happenstance was our early identification of visual availability being incredibly important, yet when implementing our category inbox switching, what we thought during the initial design to be clear was actually not that visible to users. It can be so easy to overestimate the prominence of features, when as a designer you spend so much time on thinking about, improving, and implementing a visual feature. However, to a user who only spends half a second glancing over the interface, these features really need to stand apart from the noise of a busy interface, which in actuality is difficult to achieve because there are so many necessary elements.