Microsoft’s Ignite Convention is an important opportunity to connect with potential end users and provide needed education on products like Azure. While the complex cloud system solved a variety of the I.T. industry’s needs, it lacked a relatable way to communicate its benefits.

My Role — Project Lead
Conceptual development, product strategy, wireframe documentation, visual design, stakeholder presentations, resource management

Our Challenge
Was to explain Azure’s expanding array of connected services — over 100 to be exact. Our metric for success? Whether our users returned to our solution, progressed through the interaction funnel, and shared the experience.

Azure Feels You
Fortunately we had an excellent connection to the user’s mental state and perspective. The sales team within Azure was our Client. Through them we could gather extensive research into user definition such as job descriptions, enterprise organizations, and process workflows. This was extremely useful because I.T. is a very technical space. We uncovered non-apparent behaviors like the use of multiple tools for “cloud backup and geo redundancy services.” indicating lack of understanding within closely related capabilities.

Discovery clarified our problem. Difficulties which provided barriers to adoption for our users were resistance due to changing ‘pre-established process patterns,’ and the nature of Azure’s currently ‘scattered documentation.’

What adopters needed was a central hub giving them the resources to understand how to do their jobs better. All user research pointed to this being as simple as creating a site which broke down our two main user segments and their main job responsibilities. For example: I am an I.T. developer at 21st Century Fox, Inc. I need to deploy and test applications utilizing existing API. 

In order to prevent creating another overwhelming tool, we aligned our user stories to our interaction model — a choose your own ending theme. Pick your job, select what you do, and learn your own way through video, step-by-step, or trial.

Information architecture was an easy outline because our interaction model gave us structure, although we tree-tested it just in case. In fact, we centered the rest of our design decisions around the model. Allowing us to work quickly through sketches and wireframes. Using them to quickly iterate and align stakeholders. Things like “token based sign-ins” were cut because they did not match a user need and sucked up unnecessary developer resources. 

All final mocks adapted the Microsoft UI and illustration design systems. We included custom art from all other convention products. Allowing us to create visual association and bring cohesion between our separate experiences.

The developer and I aligned over assets and determined which interactions to track for gauging success before coding the final product.

Results
Just like the Microsoft Dashboard product, the delivery of this too completed my contract at Indigo Slate. Due to this I do not have the data detailing business impact for Microsoft or user satisfaction of our I.T. brethren. However, this product was the direct reason our overall budget was increased by over 200%. In every small way Microsoft’s confidence in our solution makes it feel a whole lot like a success to me.

The Team
PM: Jim
Copywriter: Nicholas
Dev: Matt