Inside Windows 11
Announcing Windows 11 to the world
Opportunity
In 2021 Microsoft was ready to announce Windows 11 to the world and show off its new features. It needed a new site that was responsive and built to grow over 16 weeks of bi-weekly content additions.
I worked with a single developer to build out the site and its components, ensuring consistency across the weeks of release and envisioning delightful animations for each module.
Working backwards
The rough schedule for the 16 weeks of content was defined (for the most part), but the content wasn’t ready yet.
I started the project by designing for Week 16 and figuring out how all the blocks of content would work together visually. Since the page was destined to grow quite large, I wanted a good rhythm of movement between all the content so that the page felt interesting and dynamic as users scrolled down the page.
Once Week 16 was designed, walking backward and focusing on content week by week was much easier.
Building for breakpoints
The site needed to work for all devices, so breakpoints were defined for everything from small phones to giant desktop monitors.
Some differences were made to the layouts of mobile and tablet designs so that image headers could shine, and page lengths didn’t get too out of control.
Making things fun
In order to make each week’s release feel distinct and interesting, I worked with the developer to implement CSS and Lottie animations for each module’s header.
Results
The site released to great success. The Windows team gave glowing reviews and the site continued to grow and generate a lot of traffic throughout 2021 / 2022.
During the initial 3 month campaign period:
5.3M+ Pageviews (WIP site) ▲7.5X pre-announce monthly pageviews
1.9M+ Pageviews (Inside Windows 11)
10M+ Video impressions
1.2M+ Video views
In 2022 I was brought back to add five new updates aligning with new Windows features.