Powerpoint Redesign 2018

I challenged the design team at Thinktiv to redesign several frequently used products with notoriously bad design, or poor user experience. PowerPoint is a constant necessity for business and clients. Its continually utilized between our clients, strategists, executive teams, marketing, product, and DESIGN.

2 factors contributed to this choice:

1) The universal need for this application.
2) The historical design debt that PPT has taken on over the years resulting in awful user-experience.

I took themes, components, hierarchy, layouts. and standards from Sketch, Keynote, and Adobe products to reassess a simplified and more flexible PowerPoint.

Flexibility - Like Sketch, this version of PPT would utilize plug-ins to a simple, centralized framework. Similar to Adobe products, you could customize workspaces that catered to your needs, whether you are a visual designer or financial director.

Organization - Objects and elements will live in simple organized layers underneath pages, similar to Sketch. Simple buttons would allow you to push elements up and down in the layers or group as needed.

Elements - Elements could be simply added or edited on the fly. The most common items would live on the tool bar while a flout menu would ornate more specific insertions.

Styles - All type styles can be defined to the right as basic character styles and changed or assigned.on the fly.

Responsive Layouts - Responsive design shouldn’t be limited to the web apps. The new PPT would incorporate responsive building parameters when you want to

Sharing - Similar to Google cloud products, PPT should have clean sharing abilities with permissions and version control. Export options would allow for various formats, not just PDF and JPEGS, but clean HTML and clickable prototypes. Providing viewers with a clean URL to host presentations on - such as Invision does.

Views - Toggling between normal slides and master slides should happen with one click, similar to InDesign. PPT needs simple grid options in it’s themes in order to rein in design and layout decisions made by amateur users.

Reach out to me @ ccolwell@thinktiv.com if you're interested in doing this type of work!