Sometimes good design isn’t about standing out but fitting in. Participoll, a premium add-on for Microsoft PowerPoint created by our long-time development partners Ultimateweb, found out exactly that recently when they deployed their new version for Office 365.
Participoll allows users to run live audience polling directly inside PowerPoint. It’s a powerful tool used by huge multinationals from Philips & 3M to KPMG & L’Oréal. As Participoll has evolved it has integrated more and more with PowerPoint’s charts feature but it’s UI hasn’t quite caught up – until now.
Having worked with the team at Participoll from day dot on their website & the product’s logo (a personal favourite of Tom‘s), we were approached to help move their UI on to keep up with Office 365’s new style. our brief was simple, take the plugin’s 12 icons and style them to match Office 365’s default toolbars. The theory is that, as Participoll now integrates more than ever with PowerPoint, so too should it’s UI – to help give user’s confidence that Participoll is meant to be in the toolbar.
Taking a look at the, often inconsistent, way in which Microsoft styles its icons, we set about re-drafting Participoll’s icons to match. We identified Microsoft’s default UI typeface, their limited UI colour palette, how they size elements relative to one another and what icons denote what. We recreated elements from Microsoft’s icon set in fresh, crisp vector formats and combined elements from several icon families to match the required aesthetic. The end result is a set of toolbar icons that feel a part of the furniture but are familiar and intuitive to regular Office 365 users.