Role
Design Lead – Responsible for all things related to design as the sole UX/UI designer.
Client
Mitsubishi Estate
Team
Scrum Team (3 PO, 1 Scrum Master, 3 Developers, 1 Designer, 2 SME) 4 Infrastructure Support, 1 Project SV
As hybrid work became the norm, SharePoint-based company portal became too passive. Employees had to remember to visit it, so critical announcements often went unseen. The DX team decided to bring updates into Microsoft Teams—the tool employees already use all day—to improve shared awareness and efficiency.
Our brief was to design and release a Teams-native experience that surfaces the right information at the right moment, without adding noise. Success would be measured by daily adoption, visible time-savings, and the ability to scale beyond the head office to group companies.
HYPOTHESIS
Starting with desk research, surveys, and one-on-one interviews across departments, we identified three main frustrations: employees spent too long hunting for news scattered across channels, messages lacked clear priority, and mobile access on the go was awkward.
PERSONA
Prioritizing accessibility over pixel-perfect personas, we created them directly in Azure DevOps as a Wiki page. Keeping them in the team's daily tool enabled quick access for everyone, and helped foster a culture of focusing on human goals instead of feature-focused backlogs when making design decisions.
USER STORY MAPPING
I brought the whole team into the journey/user story process by incorporating it into our weekly Scrum schedule. Pairing closely with engineers in one-week sprints, Figma prototypes were reviewed live with stakeholders and refined overnight. Each Friday, we ran remote sprint reviews where real users tested how the app fit—or didn’t—into their flow, generating actionable backlog items. Afterwards, we used user story mapping to prioritize the backlog items for Monday planning. Our client felt that this cadence accelerated delivery by roughly 5x compared with their previous waterfall projects.
Prioritize relevant info by reducing noise
Display essential content first so employees can quickly grasp what matters and stay focused on their work. This supports users like Persona 2.1 and 2.2 who value efficient access and dislike digging through irrelevant updates.
Make important info instantly recognizable
Make key updates obvious—no digging required—through clear visual indicators and structure. This benefits users who don’t frequently check internal sites, like Persona 1, 3, and 4.
Enable easy sharing and peer visibility
Allow users to casually share, react, and keep useful content within their teams. This empowers Personas 3, 4, and 5 to spread content organically and strengthen internal communications.
MiTene plugs directly into Microsoft Teams on desktop and mobile as a custom app. It pushes relevant company and department-level announcements twice a day and offers a curated catalog of frequently used SharePoint links—putting what you need at your fingertips instead of buried in folders.
AFTER THE CONCEPT PHASE
We mapped out future directions for the app, from quick wins to an ideal future state. These scenarios kept the dialogue with our clients active and helped them clearly envision what the app could possibly grow into.
IMPACT
Seeing strong results from our test group, Mitsubishi Estate continued to partner with Avanade in extending the app to subsidiary companies, positioning Teams as the universal information hub for the whole company.
TAKEAWAYS
Although agile development is still new in many Japanese teams—especially in consulting—this team practiced it rigorously, leading to an extremely fast-paced, user-focused process that impressed our client. It was a great opportunity to reflect on how designers can play a central role for product owners and developers to make better decisions and deliver impact to our end users and businesses. Figuring out what works best for each team is always a challenge, but this was one of those projects where design thinking made a great impact on the team as a whole.
