Azure for Students experience

During my internship at Microsoft, I joined the Cloud Experience Studio - Azure Core and was working on:

1. Revamping the navigation and interface of the Azure for Students platform to increase user activities and engagement of student developers around the world.
2. Designing a new feature for the platform - Customized study plan - to support students who are new to cloud computing.

1. What did I focus on solving?

To make the platform easier to scan through, I decided to focus on redesigning the navigation bar and Overview page (homepage), since the first page users see after logging into their account often determines how they navigate the rest of the platform.

Some key pain points of the original designs are:

• Overwhelming amount of content
• Unclear content structure
• Confusing naming convention

2. How did I solve these design problems?

3. What did the outcome look like?

Key improvements in the new Overview page

• Reduced the amount of information on the page to focus on the most important content.
• Replaced the 3x2 grid layout with a row-by-row format for easier skimming and comprehension.
• Redesigned sections as collections of cards instead of exhaustive lists to create a clearer content structure.
• Added more imagery to visualize and highlight primary content.
• Converted hyperlinks into buttons to better emphasize the calls to action (CTAs).

1. Why this feature?

Although Azure for Students has been able to suggest some popular learning content for students on its Overview page, there are no one-size-fits-all recommendations, and many students new to cloud computing still struggle to decide what to learn.

Customized Study Plan is a new feature that could:

• Cater to each individual user’s needs and preferences
• Provide more relevant learning suggestions

2. Why AI? How could it be helpful?

Based on my secondary research, AI has the potential to create personalized experiences for users by:

• Tracking users' learning history to provide resources that help advance their learning paths
• Evaluating users’ performance and engagement on the platform to suggest tools and learning content that keep them motivated
• Collecting feedback from users on their current study plans and enhance them

Integrating Microsoft Copilot AI assistant into the platform will also help embrace the new era of AI driven by Microsoft.

3. What was my design process?

Since I was working on a brand-new feature and it was my first time designing for AI, I went through a fun but challenging process of learning and designing simultaneously.

*Details about the AI implementation in this feature cannot be disclosed due to a Non-disclosure Agreement.