Viva Home
Microsoft Viva had grown into a suite of powerful apps that most people met one at a time. Viva Home became its front door: a single place in Microsoft 365 and Teams to understand what the suite is, find what you already have, and get to it.
Key Contributions
Took Viva Home from workshops and sketches to a shipped MVP in six months.
Defined the four goals the design was judged against: wayfinding, discovery, education, and delight.
Explored three competing concepts and argued the tradeoff that set the MVP's scope.
Ran the design through exploratory research with information workers and senior leaders.
Handed off desktop, mobile, dark mode, high contrast, motion, and edge cases to engineering.
At a glance
Problem
Viva's apps were encountered separately, so people rarely discovered what else they already had access to.
Outcome
A unified hub in Microsoft 365 and Teams that explains the suite and routes people to the apps they are licensed for.
What I owned
Concept exploration, the MVP design, prototype testing, and the specification engineering built from.
Constraints
An aggressive timeline, and a hard requirement not to cannibalize usage of the individual Viva apps.
The challenge
A suite that people met one app at a time
Viva brings communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights into the flow of work. But people arrived through whichever single app their organization had rolled out, and formed their entire impression of Viva from it. The usage data showed exactly that shape.
12%
Of monthly users touched more than one app
Viva reached 20 million monthly active users globally in 2022, but only about one in eight of them opened a second app in a given month. The suite was being used one app at a time.
We asked more than 15 customers with 1,000+ licenses what stopped their organization adopting more of the suite. 73% pointed to cost, 61% said the use cases were not relevant enough to their needs, and 55% said the apps were too complex, with discoverability the specific difficulty. Two of those three are design problems, and both are about knowledge rather than capability.
Understanding value
People struggled to say what Viva was for. Asked directly, they described the one module they had used, not a suite.
Discoverability
Even licensed apps were hard to find. There was no single place that showed what an organization had and what it was good for.
"I thought Viva was just Insights and Connections. I feel like I have to look for all the things I have access to."
Research participant
Design process
Six months, listening first
The project ran from workshops to engineering handoff in six months. The arc was simple: learn, explore, decide, test, ship. The sections below walk through it in that order.
LearnAbsorbed what partner teams across the org already knew, then ran workshops to define the problem statement and the principles we would hold ourselves to.
ExploreSketched, wireframed, and built three competing concepts, with design workshops and critique keeping stakeholders in the loop rather than surprised. Together with leadership, we chose the direction.
TestBuilt a prototype of the chosen direction and ran moderated and unmoderated studies on it, gathering qualitative feedback on how people read the page and what they expected it to do.
Hand offSpecced the MVP for engineering with the states and edge cases that usually get discovered late, and stayed available through build.
The workshops distilled into four goals, and every concept that follows was judged against them.
Wayfinding
Be the front door to the suite, making it easy to explore licensed apps and feel their value first-hand.
Discovery
Help people find the full range of features available to them, not just the module they arrived through.
Education
Provide resources that let people get the most out of what their organization already pays for.
Delight
Make the experience enjoyable, not merely functional. Motion carried a lot of this weight.
Design explorations
Three ways a front door could work
Rather than refine one idea, I built three that disagreed with each other, so the choice would be about strategy instead of taste. Each went to design, product, and engineering leadership with its own pros and cons, and the next section is the decision we landed on together.
Navigation-led
Left-hand local navigation with the apps categorized inside the hero, content in cards, and suggested and recommended items throughout. Strong for people who already knew what they were looking for.
Action-led
A top hero dashboard with actions in the hero itself and each section categorized by app. The most immediately useful, and the most likely to duplicate the apps it was supposed to introduce.
Education-led
A thumbnail approach, visual forward, choosing education over action. The weakest at getting something done today and the strongest at answering the question people actually had, which was what Viva is.
Decisions and tradeoffs
Why we chose education
With the three concepts on the table, we and leadership aligned on the education-led direction. Three arguments decided it.
Considered
An action-led dashboard where people complete tasks without leaving Home.
Chose
An education and wayfinding launcher that sends people into the apps to act.
Why
Home is the front door. A front door's job is to get you inside, not to keep you standing in it. The actions belong in the apps that own them.
Considered
Measuring Home's success by the engagement it captured itself.
Chose
Protecting the individual apps' usage as a hard constraint on the design.
Why
A hub that pulled monthly actives away from the apps it fronts would have looked successful while making the suite worse. Home wins when the apps do.
Considered
Designing for people who already knew the Viva suite.
Chose
Designing for people who did not, which the research said was most of them.
Why
Assuming familiarity was the mistake the current experience already made. People described Viva as whichever single app they had been given, so Home had to explain before it could navigate.
User testing
What testing with users taught us
With the education direction agreed, we built a prototype of it and put it in front of people: exploratory sessions with 25+ information workers and 8+ senior leaders across sales, tech, marketing, and HR. We asked whether they understood what Home was for, whether the content enabled discovery, and how the motion made them feel. The direction held. What changed was the detail.
First impressions were positive, and the amount of content felt right.
Opinions split on which section was most valuable, which told us the page was serving different roles differently.
Motion mostly landed, with specific elements people wanted dialed back.
People wanted to customize Home for themselves and their organization.
Some content read as repetitive and the copy could be more descriptive, which sent us back to fewer, richer cards rather than equal billing for every app.
Impact
What shipped and what moved
10%
Increase in product engagement
Measured after Viva Home shipped as the entry point to the suite.
A front door that holds
Home became the cross-product entry point for the suite in Microsoft 365 and Teams, rather than another destination competing for attention.
Shipped ready for the edges
Desktop, mobile, dark mode, high contrast, motion, and edge cases were specified before build, not discovered during it.
Looking ahead
What I would have done next
Not long after Viva Home shipped, a reorg moved it to a different part of the company, so this is the direction I would have argued for rather than a roadmap I got to run.
Let people customize Home for themselves and their organization, which testing asked for and the MVP could not fit.
Bring sound into the experience alongside motion, so delight is not carried by animation alone.
Keep researching after launch, since a front door's job changes as the suite behind it changes.
Agree a north star for Home, so each release is a step toward something rather than a set of additions.
Viva Home taught me that a hub is a piece of writing as much as a piece of design. The layout only works if the words on each card tell someone why they should care about a product they did not know they had.
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