Microsoft · Power Apps mobile
Power Apps mobile, rebuilt
Finding an app, sharing an app, and a guided tour that earns the first ten minutes of a new user's patience.
Overview
Power Apps mobile is where field workers, admins, and frontline employees actually use the apps their organization builds. Two problems kept surfacing: people couldn't find the right app among everything they had access to, and once they found something useful, sharing it with a teammate was harder than it should be.
I rebuilt app discovery and sharing, and designed a guided tour to get new users oriented in their first ten minutes instead of abandoning the app cold.
Different users arrived with different intentions — some knew exactly what they needed, others wanted to return to something they'd recently used, others needed to discover an application available to them for the first time. The homepage had to balance all three without turning into a long, undifferentiated directory competing for limited mobile screen space.
Design decisions
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1
Restructured app discovery around recency and relevance instead of an alphabetical list, so the app someone needs right now surfaces first.
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2
Cut sharing down to a single, obvious action from anywhere in the app — no separate admin flow required for a simple teammate share.
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3
Built a short guided tour for first-time users, focused on the two things that mattered most in research: finding an app, and sharing one.
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4
Organized the experience around three behaviors — Return, Find, and Discover — instead of treating every application as equally important, which created a clearer hierarchy than a flat, alphabetical list.
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5
Treated the empty-favorites state as a chance to stay useful, not a dead end — surfacing recently accessed apps so the homepage stayed relevant before someone had favorited anything.
Prioritization ran on usability impact against engineering effort — featured apps, better empty states, app sharing, and faster app-opening performance were all weighed against each other, which moved the conversation from "what could we design" to "which improvements would create the most meaningful experience for customers."
Key screens
Home — recent, favorite, and recommended apps surfaced first.
Featured — a dedicated discovery tab for apps beyond what's already been used.
Search — recent and favorite apps stay visible before a query is even typed.
The guided tour, introducing what changed to returning users.
The two metrics that mattered most
Discovery and sharing were the behaviors research flagged as broken — and the two the redesign moved most.
Finding and sharing an app now takes seconds, not a support thread.