Modern, Beautiful Visio
Project Lead, 2010-2012, Team of 4
Visio 2013
Visio is a diagramming and drawing application that is part of the Microsoft Office suite of products.
Visio facilitates the creation of a huge variety of diagram types, including flowcharts, organizational charts, network diagrams, timelines, office plans, mind maps and UML. Its use cases range from sketching and brainstorming to presentation-ready diagrams to precision engineering diagrams.
Visio was primarily used for high-end tasks, like complex engineering diagrams. We wanted to broaden its usage by making it more appealing to normal information workers performing routine illustrative and visualization tasks.
I was the lead for a design and production team of 4, as well as the manager for a shape art vendor and two shape development contractors.
Goals
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Change app personality from a precision diagramming tool to a less intimidating, more free-form tool
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Dramatically improve the aesthetics of the diagrams produced in Visio
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Restructure the command space to improve new user understanding
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Build the collaboration features modern users expect in a business tool
Gorgeous Diagrams
Visio's shapes were stylistically outdated and very difficult to format. This resulted in poor-looking diagrams.
Updated shape library
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Gave shapes an updated, modern style
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Designed and applied framework for shapes to accept automated, theme-based formatting
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Managed vendors for design and development
First rate styling UI and themes
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Dramatically extended formatting and theming capabilities to be in-line with Office
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Created 30 in-box themes\style sets, to allow easy and attractive formatting by end users
