Ask
Lucio
MY ROLE
Product Designer
SCOPE
Design system · Plugin UX
PLATFORM
Microsoft 365
COMPANY
OVERVIEW
Lucio streamlines legal workflows through AI — it takes care of the legal busywork — drafting, summarizing, comparing — so lawyers can focus on strategy.
At Lucio, I designed the AI layer that lawyers actually work inside — not a tool they open separately, but one built into Word and Outlook, the two places their work already happens. I led end-to-end design across two products at Lucio : a Word plugin that brings drafting, playbook-driven review, and research directly into the document, and an Outlook plugin that turns fragmented email threads into answers and billing narratives.
Underneath both sits a single design system, standardized in collaboration with design and engineering across four surfaces — the two plugins, a SaaS product, and a native app.
SETBACKS
Built for an assumed canvas for Word plugin, not a researched one
What happened: The initial build shipped at 520px wide — nearly double Microsoft's documented 329px guidance for Office Add-in task panes, and not validated against it before development began.
Root cause: The width was chosen based on what felt comfortable for the chat interface, not against platform constraints — a research step that got skipped under early build pressure.
Recovery: The entire plugin was rebuilt to 320px in one week — 9px under even Microsoft's own minimum, at the PM's direction, to hold a hard consistency contract with the Outlook plugin's 320px floor so both products could share one interaction language.
Optimized for space before testing for readability
What happened: Body text shipped at 10px, on the assumption that a narrow task pane needed proportionally smaller type to avoid feeling cramped.
Root cause: Space efficiency was treated as the constraint to solve for; readability wasn't tested until after the fact, and it had visibly suffered.
Recovery: Rather than reverting to a generic design system sized for a full-width canvas, a dedicated compact system was built from the ground up — 12px as the readable floor, with every UI element (chips, buttons, inputs) redesigned to fit that constraint rather than the reverse.