Case Study
NetDocuments
Word Add-in
Secure co-authoring and document management, right inside Microsoft Word.
Secure co-authoring and document management, right inside Microsoft Word.
Legal professionals spend the majority of their day drafting and editing in Microsoft Word. Historically, NetDocuments users had to constantly move between the ND web platform and Word to open files, save changes, manage versions, and add required metadata, a workflow that fragmented focus and slowed work.
I led end-to-end UX design of a net-new Word Add-in that brings NetDocuments directly into the Word ribbon. Users can now open matters, save documents, co-author in real time, and stay compliant, without ever leaving Word.
Users were forced to jump between Word and the NetDocuments web platform to open files, save updates, manage versions, and add metadata. This constant task-switching broke concentration and made real-time collaboration nearly impossible in a profession where accuracy and speed are critical.
The legacy checkout model meant only one person could edit a document at a time, creating firm-wide bottlenecks on active matters. Worse, documents saved locally outside of ND created real compliance exposure that legal teams couldn't afford to ignore.
I lose my train of thought every time I have to go back to the browser to save or check a version. I just want to stay in Word and do my work.
As lead product designer, I owned end-to-end UX for the first native NetDocuments surface inside Microsoft 365, from the earliest research through the shipped product. I drove discovery, ran the synthesis workshops that aligned the team on a single design challenge, and partnered closely with a second designer, product management, and the Word / M365 engineering teams to keep the design honest against real platform constraints.
This was as much facilitation and prioritization as it was pixels. Two calls shaped the entire product:
The project opened with a broad mixed-method research effort: a general interest survey (n=87), a detailed preferences survey (n=130), end-user interviews (n=7), and admin and partner interviews (n=10+). An in-product feedback modal recruited active users mid-workflow, reaching people during real sessions, not in a lab setting.
The research surfaced a clear tension: attorneys wanted co-authoring, but were deeply concerned about losing control of their documents in the process.
The final product brings NetDocuments natively into the Microsoft Word ribbon. Attorneys can open documents from any client matter, save back to the right location with required metadata, co-author with session-level control, and access version history, all without leaving Word.
