Michael David Watson
Work/Microsoft

  • Android Native Patterns
  • Mobile-first Strategy
  • Material Design
  • Cross-platform UX
  • Design Systems
  • Information Architecture
Role
Product Designer
Team
Microsoft OneDrive, Redmond
Timeline
Jun 2014 – Jun 2015
Platform
Android
01 / 07

Web and Android convergence wireframes. One concept model for files, shares, and accounts, expressed natively on each platform.

When Satya Nadella reset Microsoft around mobile-first, cloud-first, OneDrive became a flagship surface for identity, documents, and storage on every device customers used. On Android, the product still carried Windows IA, iconography, and interaction grammar. It read as foreign and behaved that way.

The brief was not a visual refresh. The app needed an end-to-end redesign against Android’s own conventions, ahead of Material, at a fidelity that could earn a place on a Samsung home screen. I led Android UX across two platform generations: a surgical KitKat alignment release, then the full Material rebuild.

We opened with audits of the existing app, competitive research across the storage category, and whiteboard sessions with web, Android, and Windows to agree on a shared concept model before any screen was settled.

  1. 01

    Platform-native posture

    Stop porting Windows. Re-ground file, folder, account, share, and search in Android conventions and the emerging Material spec. A reskin that kept Windows IA would have shipped faster and left navigation broken on Android.

  2. 02

    Unified concept model

    Web, Android, and Windows each had their own IA. Alignment required one mental model for how users perceive files, shares, and accounts before platform-specific work could begin.

  3. 03

    Two coordinated releases

    Ship a KitKat alignment to prove the thesis with real code, then rebuild for Lollipop once Material landed. Waiting for a single big release would have left KitKat users on a broken app for another year.

  4. 04

    Phone and tablet

    One IA and interaction language across handset and tablet, not two parallel products. Every decision was checked against both form factors before it was final.

The work started with an audit of the existing app and competitive research across Google Drive, Dropbox, and Box. That surfaced where Windows-derived IA broke most visibly on Android. Findings were pressure-tested in whiteboard and group design-thinking sessions with the broader product team.

The output was a single diagram, internally called the unified theory of stuff. Files, the people users share with, and the accounts they sign into were mapped as one connected system rather than three separate concerns.

That diagram became the shared vocabulary for downstream decisions: what lived in the drawer, how multi-account behaved, how sharing collapsed across personal and business contexts. Once the model was settled, Android debates shifted from aesthetics to platform fidelity.

Files, shares, and accounts as one connected system, agreed across web, Android, and Windows before screens were designed.

Two coordinated releases. The first proved the bet with shipped code on the existing platform. The second rebuilt the app against Material while Google was still finalizing the spec.

Android L phone alpha

A surgical pass against the existing app. We re-grounded the action bar and overflow, replaced Windows iconography with Android conventions of the day, and re-anchored the nav drawer so OneDrive read as an Android citizen on a stock Nexus. The sequence follows the Squarespace alpha flow: home, search, overflow states, then drawer.

01 / 10
01 / 05

Android L tablet alpha

Phone and tablet shared one IA grammar from the earliest alpha. Multi-select, drawer states, and grid layout had to match across form factors before the Material rebuild, so tablet was never treated as a stretched phone.

Material phone concepts

The Lollipop release rebuilt the app against Material while Google was still finalizing guidance. The objective was not to apply Material to OneDrive. It was to design OneDrive as if it had always been Material, and to ship at a fidelity that could earn a place on a Samsung home screen.

01 / 10
01 / 10

Material tablet concepts

The tablet scaled the same IA into multi-pane layouts. Selection, sharing, and search behaved identically to phone; the work was responsive grammar, not a second product.

Final designs and redlines

Production-ready specs for header, settings, help, and Chromecast surfaces. Redlines locked spacing and typography so engineering could ship the Lollipop release without re-opening IA debates.

01 / 12

Galaxy S6

Preloaded as a Samsung first-party partner app

2

Platform generations shipped: KitKat and Lollipop

1

IA and interaction language across phone and tablet

OneDrive on Google Play →Samsung × Microsoft on the Galaxy S6 ↗

For Android users, the win was a full application grounded in Android conventions, not a Windows port compressed onto a phone. One mental model for files, shares, and accounts, with navigation and interaction aligned to the platform even while Material was still new on the OS and Google’s own apps were only partway into the language.

For Microsoft, that meant stepping outside a Windows-first comfort zone to compete with native-first mobile apps while the design language was still being defined. The unified model shipped in production, the Galaxy S6 preload followed, and OneDrive held its own on Android alongside products built for the platform from day one, not as a late reskin.

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