Building Collaborative Workspaces
A live object people recognize on sight, wherever it lands.
Microsoft Loop introduced live components that could move across Microsoft 365. The hard part was making one read as the same live thing in every app it landed in, when every app had its own rules.
What I Shaped
- Anchored identity in one control. Put every component's identity, sharing, and connections in a single persistent element, so it read as one object regardless of which app it lived in.
- Designed for portability. Structured the component to stay recognizable and live as it moved between Teams, Outlook, and Word, each with its own design language to reconcile.
- Explored native vs. third-party behavior. Partnered with motion design on how a component loaded and responded to hover when it lived in Loop versus embedded in a third-party app.
Impact
- Unified how every Loop component behaves across Microsoft 365 by designing the Loop control—the persistent interaction model for identity, sharing, and collaboration—patented as Interactive user interface controls for shared dynamic objects (US 12,277,305 (opens in new tab)).
- Shipped Microsoft's first Loop components into Teams, enabling live collaborative tables, lists, agendas, and action items that stayed synchronized wherever they were shared—the Fluid (opens in new tab) work that later became Microsoft Loop and debuted at Ignite 2021 (opens in new tab).
- Defined the component structure other developers now build to: Microsoft's public developer documentation (opens in new tab) specifies the header and border that mark a Loop component as live and portable.
The first components shipped into Teams in 2021. Loop is now its own Microsoft 365 app.
