Let us tell you a little about who we are and what we do as a lab.
Our goal is to understand our users' needs and enable them to be more productive in a wide range of scenarios on a wide range of devices.
Office Labs is a group of designers, researchers, developers and creative thinkers who operate like a startup within the Office team.
Learn more about our focus on
PRODUCTIVITY
We strive to imagine and create the seeds for new products and services that can enhance the lives of millions.
We work in a collaborative fast-paced workspace with whiteboards, stickies and design concepts lining the walls. We rely on each other's diverse skills and backgrounds to generate and explore ideas, and ultimately evaluate their potential impact. The team works hard but always has fun along the way.
One of the main trends that drives our focus is the observation that although data and technological capacity is growing at an exponential rate, our ability as humans to consume it has not kept pace. Our software needs to evolve to help focus our attention on the right things at the right times and empower us to use all that information to achieve our goals.
TECHNOLOGICAL CAPACITY
HUMAN CAPABILITY
Time
To us, productivity is broader than email and word processing. We are always looking for new ways to expand the range of products and services that make peoples' lives better.
Learn why our
DESIGN PHILOSOPHY
is all about you
We think technology should start working on our behalf to make the complex stuff simple, and the time-consuming stuff fast.
Although we have the ability to rely on years of user experience knowledge from the Office family of products, we also pride ourselves on learning from new people, playing with new ideas (or combining old ones in new ways), and experimenting with entirely new interaction models and interface paradigms.
Check out our
FUTURE VISION
It's important to spend a lot of time trying to learn from people.
At the heart of the Office Labs creative process is our deep belief in people-centered design thinking and execution. Each new idea and project is an opportunity to learn and push the boundaries of software and services as we know them today.
New projects begin with cross disciplinary teams ramping up quickly by learning and analyzing trends. We create prototypes that challenge assumptions and help inspire discussion about what is possible and how it can be achieved.
So we create videos that visualize how technology could play a part in our lives in the future.
We like to spark discussion about future scenarios by trying to portray the evolution of key trends in the form of a vision video. Our team has been producing these publicly-facing videos for years, and they play a key role in our internal processes for identifying and designing experiments. We also use these videos for external communications and partner engagements.
Learn more about our
EXPERIMENTS
One of the best ways to get people thinking about the future is to show them what it could look like.
WATCH OUR LATEST VISION VIDEO
Creating prototypes and experiments is a great way to get people talking. It helps make the unreal or unfeasible feel closer to reality.
Sometimes the projects we work on are a little risky and not everything turns out to be über brilliant. But, innovation is a messy process, and it's important to learn quickly and keep taking bold steps.
Our experiments aren't always publically available, but we're constantly building, taking feedback, and iterating in close partnership with the rest of the Office team.
Interested in
JOINING US?
If we sit around and talk about the future we're not helping to make it real any sooner. So, we create prototypes to learn and influence the direction of future products and services.
We're not all talk! We like to build stuff too.
Office Labs is looking for the best and brightest minds to help us advance the state of the art. We look for inspired people who bring an active curiosity and a flexible, can-do attitude to the team.
Our small, collaborative team blurs the lines between work and fun. We're interested in designers, developers, researchers, program managers, and testers, so if you think you've got what it takes, we encourage you to apply.
We are always looking for people with passion, creativity, and the skills to tackle tough problems.
BROWSE OPEN POSITIONS
