Microsoft Professional Degree

Microsoft Learning

Introduction

My role:
Senior Designer

My team:
UX Architect, UX Designer, Front end Developer, Project Manager, Engineers

​Stakeholder:
Program Manager, Organization Leadership Team

Year:
2016

Situation

Microsoft Learning aimed to launch a new program to help learners build technical skills for emerging roles such as Data Scientist. To achieve this, the initiative partnered with leading MOOC platforms like edX. A key challenge was designing a seamless user experience across third-party platforms, while ensuring the learning journey remained unified and manageable within Microsoft's ecosystem.

Task

Goal
Design a vision for a new Microsoft professional learning platform in collaboration with edX

Task

• Design the web site for onboarding new users 
• User dashboard for the enrolled student
• UX flows for courses that reside on edX platform

Action

Design Process
​Craft a sample user persona and scenario to guide our design thinking

Outline all the entry points and map out the user journey

• Since user can enroll for the program from edX or MPD website, it's quite challenging to make the flow seamless.
• The approach was to prioritize course consumption (in edX) and ensured there are links to visit user dashboard in MPD.
• Trying to keep one user account across platform was a challenging area as well since Microsoft account (MSA) wasn't implemented in edX. We provided account linking as a workaround between edX and MSA .

Result

Home page and Course Landing Page

• Collaborate with stakeholders to design the program home page, prioritizing values and featured programs
• Design a sample program detail page complete with easy-to-follow learning path

User dashboard 

• Personalized to user activity that allows quick resume of previous session
• Easy to track user progress in the enrolled program and course
• Social engagement with other instructor and students
• Celebrate user completion of the program and sharing with potential employers

edX user flows

• Support multiple entry points to the program from edX or MPD site, and inter-linking between both platform
• Easy enrollment to the program from edX
• Ensured all entry points are seamless and allow for discoverability for MPD dashboard

Visual assets

• ​I love visual design and had fun coming up with all kinds of badges used around the program

Conclusion

I delivered the original vision of Microsoft Professional Degree and expanded it to a pilot program for release. It was launched in 2016, renamed to Microsoft Professional Program and eventually shifted to a different approach than originally envisioned.

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