Challenge Summary
Welcome to Microsoft - Next-Generation PowerPoint Concepts Design Challenge.
MS PowerPoint is a well-known application used to creatively create decks (slides presentations). We envision a new version of MS PowerPoint where users can work collaboratively on projects, using the power of the crowd (freelancers) to help people create the best decks out there.
We need your help to come up with high fidelity concept designs that showcase the features this application should integrate in order to create a frictionless path to success, from discovery to delivery experience. Meaning that there is a lot of room for doing research, exploration, and suggestions.
1. Welcome Screen.
2. Discovery Flow.
4. Collaboration Flow.
- Please provide a MarvelApp Presentation (see details below).
- Make sure all pages have correct flow! Use correct file numbering. (00, 01, 02, 03)
1. Welcome Screen.
2. Discovery Flow.
3. Engagement Flow.
4. Collaboration Flow.
- Please provide a MarvelApp Presentation (see details below).
- Make sure all pages have correct flow! Use correct file numbering. (00, 01, 02, 03).
The goal of this challenge is to design high fidelity concepts of the new MS PowerPoint web application which integrates a discovery and collaboration experience based on an available market of world workers (freelancers) who help with creating the best decks out there. In other words, making this existing application a crowd-based collaborative design tool.
You are provided with user stories and requirements to come up with your proposal.
User Story
Mary is working on a Venture Capitalist pitch deck for her new ice cream business and needs this done in 2 weeks. Thankfully she is very connected. She reaches out to a large network of friends. Someone for content and research, someone for style and unique design, someone for grammar editing, someone to help with story-telling and finalizing the pitch and even a photographer to take images and add to the deck. Since she does not know how to project manage the deck herself she reaches out to her friend Bob to do the whole project manager, coordination. Everyone works together to make the deck happen while Mary focuses on making great ice-cream flavors. The result is a success.
Typical users are not like Mary unfortunately and are not as connected as her. What if Mary didn't have this network? What if she was just a business owner and didn't even know who to contact and where to begin?
Concept Design Goals
The goal of this project is to design a discovery, workflow, collaboration experience within the powerpoint app of how an army of freelancers around the world can be easily leveraged through the tool to make Mary’s presentation a success. In other words, helping Mary to create a successful powerpoint pitch with the help of the PowerPoint and all of its great brand new collaborative features to help find freelancers, collaborate with them and project manage the project. The goal of this project is to design this workflow (what should it be?).
It’s challenging to think of innovation for this scenario when there’s no tool like this for a reference. When you see how iTunes, Spotify or Uber was created, you see how they took information and experiences to a completely new level by applying basic design principles as discovery, affordance, and feedback; magnified by the glorious benefits of modern technology to create what users didn’t know they needed. Which is one of the most typical cases and that’s why data from research is a key tool for coming up with features that will actually help users but they don’t know yet.
Design Considerations
- We need you to think outside the box for this project, this concept is something new for users, so how would you make the features easy to use, easy to discover?
- We need to clearly see the necessary amount of screens and interactions to take Mary from point A (discover her options) to point B (playing her presentation pitch) in a frictionless way.
- Apply design principles that help with removing questions users might have during this experience. How would you make it self-explanatory?
- Think deeply what would the version of a collaboration PowerPoint would look like. Are there existing features that need to be removed? What’s the most simple way to integrate the power of the world of remote workers into the application?
- How do you apply the design process to the creation of a PowerPoint deck? How would you integrate the research, content elaboration, visual design, and validation?
- We expect you to deliver between 15-18 unique screens, plus any necessary variations to help to showcase the sparkles of the interactions.
- Bonus: can you produce a video that showcases Mary’s journey for the flow? That would be a significant asset for us to present the idea.
About MS PowerPoint
The latest version of the online application can be resumed in a basic way as a presentation creation tool which allows the following (just FYI - this doesn’t have to be represented in your user flow):
- Create presentation decks (from blank documents or templates).
- A deck can contain text, media files, micro-animations.
- There can be a transition between slides (fade-in, zoom-out, etc).
- Users can share projects and collaborate. See documentation.
- You can access a free version of the online application here. You need to own a Microsoft account, that’s the only requirement.
Screens Requirements
Overall
- Propose a navigation system that makes sense and considers all the required features below.
- The following items are our initial rough proposal as a set of screens. You are encouraged to rethink and come up with what you think it’s best for this project. Suggest how to organize this content and group them into screens that make sense. Note that maybe there’s no need to separate engagement and collaboration flows. Help us!
1. Welcome Screen
- What should the new PowerPoint first screen look like?
- Think about the process of engaging users to this new collaborative tool or features.
- The current version looks like this. We would like to remind you that we do not care about the fact the design style doesn’t match MS branding perfectly. We care about interaction and the ideas you can propose.
2. Discovery Flow
There’s a world of gig workers out there, our user needs to embrace them in the smoothest possible way. There could be several approaches to make this successful, overall, they all should at least fulfill the following considerations.
Processes:
Available areas or categories a deck design process needs to embrace:
- Content research
- Copywriting (pitch, storytelling experts).
- Stock icons and illustrations, stock photography/video.
- Graphic design (style, branding, typography system, infographics, etc).
- Animation (effects, transitions, micro-animations).
Freelancers:
- User should be able to navigate through an available set of freelancers ready to jump into projects.
- There should be mechanisms for suggesting or filtering freelancers that best match the project requirements, with the goal of saving time.
- Freelancers should be somehow related to the specific design processes that happen within the elaboration of the deck, such as designer, copywriter, project manager, etc.
- How do freelancers become available, curated? Could they offer their help through tips or do work for free initially? If let's say Mary has a budget could she try 3 different freelancers at once for images and tip them? Can she invite same freelancers she liked before back? Or leverage freelancers her friends used before.
- There needs to be some sort of validation mechanism (reviews? rating? references?).
Considerations
- Difference pieces of the deck, slides will need different work, different freelancers. For example on slide 1 mary may want a perfect image of a grandpa with granddaughter enjoying ice cream. For this only slide 1 will need to be shared.
- Slide 2 she may want to outsource to someone to research the history of ice cream and its effect on bringing families together.
- She may want to outsource the whole deck to someone to polish the flow and create a perfect template.
- She may want to hire a VC storytelling expert to help her with her whole flow, the order of slides and what's needed. All of these capabilities, collaborations, taskifying will need to exist inside the powerpoint online tool.
3. Engagement Flow
Once the system has guided the user through the available suggestions/options, she needs to engage the community, to deliver requirements and set up the rules or agreements prior to start working/collaborating.
Requirements:
- User should enter somehow the needs for the project. Mary may not know exactly what she wants and how to get to a perfect VC pitch and she needs someone to guide her through it using tooling inside powerpoint online.
- Amount estimated slides, goals, content mood (corporate, professional, peppy, etc), description, others - what could it be?
- Timeline and price should be defined and agreed.
Selection:
- User should be able to define her collaboration team once all items are clear and set up.
- User should have a way to communicate with her team back and forth.
- How will the freelancer accept the offer?
- How will Mary request/accept the opportunity?
4. Collaboration Flow
- We would like you to come up with the collaboration, task manager workflow that will address these problems. We face this every day in real world when we dedicate work to others. Workers may not finish it. Mary may not show up to work. A lot of this management happens in person, email, other tools. The goal is for all this to happen inside the app. What would be needed for Mary to outsource, find key workers? She may outsource a slide, a picture, whole slide deck or content. How can they collaborate with Mary and get her input? How will task scheduling work?
- User should be able to communicate with her available hired elements (either one or several).
- User should be able to review progress (through notifications maybe? approve, reject, comments, etc).
- There should be some sort of timeline of events that allows the user keeping track of things and progress.
- Design for error considerations:
-- How do you envision delays to be managed? Let’s say photographer John delivered his assets 3 days late. It impacts costs, timeline and probably stresses Mary out. What should happen?
-- What if a freelancer goes out of the picture for whatever reason (blackout, stolen equipment, tsunami, etc). How to respond? Would there be penalties involved? Would it affect a possible rating system?
5. Delivery Flow
This is out of scope for this design exercise. However, you might find it useful as context, a global view of the whole picture. Do not design these screens.
- The final PPT file should be easily accessible and the main deliverable asset the user will look forward to seeing.
- There should be a summary of the work made somewhere, which includes the final file (s), total cost, etc.
- There could be several payment models. Per task, tips, milestones. Maybe we can start with per task and based on the work? Freelancers will need to specify how much they can charge per job.
Branding Guidelines
- Fonts and colors open to suggestions as long as they are inline with the design goals.
- There’s no need to match the application look to any of the existing versions of MS PowerPoint. We DO NOT care about the look; instead, it’s the interaction design we need to focus on.
Screen Specifications
Desktop: 1440px width. Height as much as needed.
MarvelApp Presentation
- Request a MarvelApp prototype from me using this link: https://tc-marvel-app.herokuapp.com/challenge/30088255
- Do not use the forums to request for MarvelApp.
- Provide clickable spots (hotzones) to link your screens and showcase the flow of the solution.
- Provide the MarvelApp shareable link in your notes during submission upload.
Stock Artwork (Illustrations, Icons, Photography)
- Stock artwork is allowed for this challenge.
- Make sure to declare all your assets properly or you might fail screening.
- You don’t want to fail screening? Read this.
Target User
Basic business to large enterprises. We are figuring out our user specific features but we hope this will be a service that customer will want to pay for. Something easy and fun to use.
Judging Criteria
- The novelty in the ideas you can suggest.
- How well you plan the user experience and capture your ideas visually.
- How well you implement the challenge requirements.
- Cleanliness of your graphics and design.
- Creativity and ease-of-use is key to success as it must be engaging to users.
Submission & Source Files
Preview Image
Please create your preview image as one (1) 1024x1024px JPG or PNG file in RGB color mode at 72dpi and place a screenshot of your submission within it.
Submission File
Submit JPG/PNG for your submission files.
Source Files
All original source files of the submitted design. Files should be created in Adobe Photoshop, XD or Sketch. Layers should be named and well organized.
Final Fixes
As part of the final fixes phase you may be asked to modify your graphics (sizes or colors) or modify overall colors. We may ask you to update your design or graphics based on checkpoint feedback.
MS PowerPoint is a well-known application used to creatively create decks (slides presentations). We envision a new version of MS PowerPoint where users can work collaboratively on projects, using the power of the crowd (freelancers) to help people create the best decks out there.
We need your help to come up with high fidelity concept designs that showcase the features this application should integrate in order to create a frictionless path to success, from discovery to delivery experience. Meaning that there is a lot of room for doing research, exploration, and suggestions.
Round 1
Submit your design for a checkpoint feedback.1. Welcome Screen.
2. Discovery Flow.
4. Collaboration Flow.
- Please provide a MarvelApp Presentation (see details below).
- Make sure all pages have correct flow! Use correct file numbering. (00, 01, 02, 03)
Round 2
Submit your final design plus checkpoint feedback.1. Welcome Screen.
2. Discovery Flow.
3. Engagement Flow.
4. Collaboration Flow.
- Please provide a MarvelApp Presentation (see details below).
- Make sure all pages have correct flow! Use correct file numbering. (00, 01, 02, 03).
The goal of this challenge is to design high fidelity concepts of the new MS PowerPoint web application which integrates a discovery and collaboration experience based on an available market of world workers (freelancers) who help with creating the best decks out there. In other words, making this existing application a crowd-based collaborative design tool.
You are provided with user stories and requirements to come up with your proposal.
User Story
Mary is working on a Venture Capitalist pitch deck for her new ice cream business and needs this done in 2 weeks. Thankfully she is very connected. She reaches out to a large network of friends. Someone for content and research, someone for style and unique design, someone for grammar editing, someone to help with story-telling and finalizing the pitch and even a photographer to take images and add to the deck. Since she does not know how to project manage the deck herself she reaches out to her friend Bob to do the whole project manager, coordination. Everyone works together to make the deck happen while Mary focuses on making great ice-cream flavors. The result is a success.
Typical users are not like Mary unfortunately and are not as connected as her. What if Mary didn't have this network? What if she was just a business owner and didn't even know who to contact and where to begin?
Concept Design Goals
The goal of this project is to design a discovery, workflow, collaboration experience within the powerpoint app of how an army of freelancers around the world can be easily leveraged through the tool to make Mary’s presentation a success. In other words, helping Mary to create a successful powerpoint pitch with the help of the PowerPoint and all of its great brand new collaborative features to help find freelancers, collaborate with them and project manage the project. The goal of this project is to design this workflow (what should it be?).
It’s challenging to think of innovation for this scenario when there’s no tool like this for a reference. When you see how iTunes, Spotify or Uber was created, you see how they took information and experiences to a completely new level by applying basic design principles as discovery, affordance, and feedback; magnified by the glorious benefits of modern technology to create what users didn’t know they needed. Which is one of the most typical cases and that’s why data from research is a key tool for coming up with features that will actually help users but they don’t know yet.
Design Considerations
- We need you to think outside the box for this project, this concept is something new for users, so how would you make the features easy to use, easy to discover?
- We need to clearly see the necessary amount of screens and interactions to take Mary from point A (discover her options) to point B (playing her presentation pitch) in a frictionless way.
- Apply design principles that help with removing questions users might have during this experience. How would you make it self-explanatory?
- Think deeply what would the version of a collaboration PowerPoint would look like. Are there existing features that need to be removed? What’s the most simple way to integrate the power of the world of remote workers into the application?
- How do you apply the design process to the creation of a PowerPoint deck? How would you integrate the research, content elaboration, visual design, and validation?
- We expect you to deliver between 15-18 unique screens, plus any necessary variations to help to showcase the sparkles of the interactions.
- Bonus: can you produce a video that showcases Mary’s journey for the flow? That would be a significant asset for us to present the idea.
About MS PowerPoint
The latest version of the online application can be resumed in a basic way as a presentation creation tool which allows the following (just FYI - this doesn’t have to be represented in your user flow):
- Create presentation decks (from blank documents or templates).
- A deck can contain text, media files, micro-animations.
- There can be a transition between slides (fade-in, zoom-out, etc).
- Users can share projects and collaborate. See documentation.
- You can access a free version of the online application here. You need to own a Microsoft account, that’s the only requirement.
Screens Requirements
Overall
- Propose a navigation system that makes sense and considers all the required features below.
- The following items are our initial rough proposal as a set of screens. You are encouraged to rethink and come up with what you think it’s best for this project. Suggest how to organize this content and group them into screens that make sense. Note that maybe there’s no need to separate engagement and collaboration flows. Help us!
1. Welcome Screen
- What should the new PowerPoint first screen look like?
- Think about the process of engaging users to this new collaborative tool or features.
- The current version looks like this. We would like to remind you that we do not care about the fact the design style doesn’t match MS branding perfectly. We care about interaction and the ideas you can propose.
2. Discovery Flow
There’s a world of gig workers out there, our user needs to embrace them in the smoothest possible way. There could be several approaches to make this successful, overall, they all should at least fulfill the following considerations.
Processes:
Available areas or categories a deck design process needs to embrace:
- Content research
- Copywriting (pitch, storytelling experts).
- Stock icons and illustrations, stock photography/video.
- Graphic design (style, branding, typography system, infographics, etc).
- Animation (effects, transitions, micro-animations).
Freelancers:
- User should be able to navigate through an available set of freelancers ready to jump into projects.
- There should be mechanisms for suggesting or filtering freelancers that best match the project requirements, with the goal of saving time.
- Freelancers should be somehow related to the specific design processes that happen within the elaboration of the deck, such as designer, copywriter, project manager, etc.
- How do freelancers become available, curated? Could they offer their help through tips or do work for free initially? If let's say Mary has a budget could she try 3 different freelancers at once for images and tip them? Can she invite same freelancers she liked before back? Or leverage freelancers her friends used before.
- There needs to be some sort of validation mechanism (reviews? rating? references?).
Considerations
- Difference pieces of the deck, slides will need different work, different freelancers. For example on slide 1 mary may want a perfect image of a grandpa with granddaughter enjoying ice cream. For this only slide 1 will need to be shared.
- Slide 2 she may want to outsource to someone to research the history of ice cream and its effect on bringing families together.
- She may want to outsource the whole deck to someone to polish the flow and create a perfect template.
- She may want to hire a VC storytelling expert to help her with her whole flow, the order of slides and what's needed. All of these capabilities, collaborations, taskifying will need to exist inside the powerpoint online tool.
3. Engagement Flow
Once the system has guided the user through the available suggestions/options, she needs to engage the community, to deliver requirements and set up the rules or agreements prior to start working/collaborating.
Requirements:
- User should enter somehow the needs for the project. Mary may not know exactly what she wants and how to get to a perfect VC pitch and she needs someone to guide her through it using tooling inside powerpoint online.
- Amount estimated slides, goals, content mood (corporate, professional, peppy, etc), description, others - what could it be?
- Timeline and price should be defined and agreed.
Selection:
- User should be able to define her collaboration team once all items are clear and set up.
- User should have a way to communicate with her team back and forth.
- How will the freelancer accept the offer?
- How will Mary request/accept the opportunity?
4. Collaboration Flow
- We would like you to come up with the collaboration, task manager workflow that will address these problems. We face this every day in real world when we dedicate work to others. Workers may not finish it. Mary may not show up to work. A lot of this management happens in person, email, other tools. The goal is for all this to happen inside the app. What would be needed for Mary to outsource, find key workers? She may outsource a slide, a picture, whole slide deck or content. How can they collaborate with Mary and get her input? How will task scheduling work?
- User should be able to communicate with her available hired elements (either one or several).
- User should be able to review progress (through notifications maybe? approve, reject, comments, etc).
- There should be some sort of timeline of events that allows the user keeping track of things and progress.
- Design for error considerations:
-- How do you envision delays to be managed? Let’s say photographer John delivered his assets 3 days late. It impacts costs, timeline and probably stresses Mary out. What should happen?
-- What if a freelancer goes out of the picture for whatever reason (blackout, stolen equipment, tsunami, etc). How to respond? Would there be penalties involved? Would it affect a possible rating system?
5. Delivery Flow
This is out of scope for this design exercise. However, you might find it useful as context, a global view of the whole picture. Do not design these screens.
- The final PPT file should be easily accessible and the main deliverable asset the user will look forward to seeing.
- There should be a summary of the work made somewhere, which includes the final file (s), total cost, etc.
- There could be several payment models. Per task, tips, milestones. Maybe we can start with per task and based on the work? Freelancers will need to specify how much they can charge per job.
Branding Guidelines
- Fonts and colors open to suggestions as long as they are inline with the design goals.
- There’s no need to match the application look to any of the existing versions of MS PowerPoint. We DO NOT care about the look; instead, it’s the interaction design we need to focus on.
Screen Specifications
Desktop: 1440px width. Height as much as needed.
MarvelApp Presentation
- Request a MarvelApp prototype from me using this link: https://tc-marvel-app.herokuapp.com/challenge/30088255
- Do not use the forums to request for MarvelApp.
- Provide clickable spots (hotzones) to link your screens and showcase the flow of the solution.
- Provide the MarvelApp shareable link in your notes during submission upload.
Stock Artwork (Illustrations, Icons, Photography)
- Stock artwork is allowed for this challenge.
- Make sure to declare all your assets properly or you might fail screening.
- You don’t want to fail screening? Read this.
Target User
Basic business to large enterprises. We are figuring out our user specific features but we hope this will be a service that customer will want to pay for. Something easy and fun to use.
Judging Criteria
- The novelty in the ideas you can suggest.
- How well you plan the user experience and capture your ideas visually.
- How well you implement the challenge requirements.
- Cleanliness of your graphics and design.
- Creativity and ease-of-use is key to success as it must be engaging to users.
Submission & Source Files
Preview Image
Please create your preview image as one (1) 1024x1024px JPG or PNG file in RGB color mode at 72dpi and place a screenshot of your submission within it.
Submission File
Submit JPG/PNG for your submission files.
Source Files
All original source files of the submitted design. Files should be created in Adobe Photoshop, XD or Sketch. Layers should be named and well organized.
Final Fixes
As part of the final fixes phase you may be asked to modify your graphics (sizes or colors) or modify overall colors. We may ask you to update your design or graphics based on checkpoint feedback.
Please read the challenge specification carefully and watch the forums for any questions or feedback concerning this challenge. It is important that you monitor any updates provided by the client or Studio Admins in the forums. Please post any questions you might have for the client in the forums.