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Design Microsoft Outlook.

This question is more likely System Design.
Asked at Microsoft
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 Clarifications: 
  1. ​Ok so Microsoft outlook is mainly an email which helps users manage their emails along with other functions like calendaring, task management etc. So can I assume the question is that I need to design a email client app that helps users manage their emails? Yes 
  2. Any constraint as to whether it should be a desktop/mobile application etc? No. Ok since there are no constraints
Product description:
An email client application, is an application which helps users send, receive and manage their emails. Along with managing emails it might provide added functionalities of enabling chatting, calendaring, task management.
It can be free or paid.
Goal: Is there any specific goal, which I shd keep in mind while designing this application? Goal is to create a email client application and drive adoption of the application.
Lets focus on the user segments who might use this application:
  1. Students : for collaborating with their school and college mates for school/college work/assignments and interacting with the school/college as well as for receiving updates from the school/college.
  2. Professionals: For interacting with colleagues / organization and receiving updates from organization.
  3. Personal users: For communicating via email with any establishment/friends.
Out of these, I would like to focus on personal users, as this is the biggest segment since almost all literate individuals  > 13-14 yrs of age use a personal email client for managing their email communication which is apart from the one given by organizations/colleges.
Pain pts from personal user:-
  1. How to draft an good quality email. Impact - high, reach - high
  2. How to keep my received emails in a organized manner Impact - high, reach - high
  3. How to manage space within my inbox, considering for personal use, users use a free version of the mail client which comes with space constraints. Impact - high, reach - med
  4. How to get to know that I have received an email Impact - high, reach - high
  5. How to quickly reply to emails Impact - med, reach - med
  6. How to quickly search and organize content in my mail box Imapct - med, reach - med
Key attributes of the email client:-
  1. Success rate: as user is trying to communicate imp information to the other party it is imp that his mail is delivered successfully.
  2. Bandwidth usage: as low as possible since people with high or low bandwidth would like to access their emails and thus it should work with minimum bandwidth
  3. Data consistency: it is imp to mantain which sequence of actions which the user performed on an email.. otherwise inconsistency can happen. Also it is imp to store correct copy of the emails and show those to all the receipents.
  4. Fault tolerance/redundancy: mailbox has many imp information/data of the user and thus the mail client should be able to retrieve the data which the user requires at any point of time.
With these attributes in mind, below would be my technical design for the working of the email client:-
  1. A web app that can work via desktop as well as mobile device to give accessibility to all users.
  2. Application should have option to optimize as per the available bandwidth (features like not show rich text features and content)
  3. Should mantain multiple databases in different geographical locations to support data redendency.
  4. Should have a robust error reporting mechanism so that if an email delivery fails it is quickly informed to the user.
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Things you did well

  • Clarifying question: asking clarifying questions is always good to narrow down the scope of the question
  • Product description/goal/user segment: you did a good job describing the product, setting a goal and choosing a specific user segment
Areas of improvement
  • The transition from customer pain points to key attributes of an email client is a bit abrupt and unatural. In the beginning you approach this question as a product design question and then later suddenly transition to system design. The flow is a bit off. If you wanted to focus on system design, the customer pain points should've been something like speed/security/storage etc. Maybe it should've been a clarifying question to ask the interviewer if it is a system design or a product desing.
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