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Teams EDU
How might we... Create a "home" experience for class teams that is authentic to education scenarios?
Home Page
Teams EDU
How might we... Create a "home" experience for class teams that is authentic to education scenarios?
Home Page
Teams EDU
How might we... Create a "home" experience for class teams that is authentic to education scenarios?
Home Page
Teams EDU
How might we... Create a "home" experience for class teams that is authentic to education scenarios?
Role
Lead designer for educator and student scenarios on the core feature team. Collaborated across three partner teams and worked with PM’s, engineers, researchers, and writers.
Role
Lead designer for educator and student scenarios on the core feature team. Collaborated across three partner teams and worked with PM’s, engineers, researchers, and writers.
Role
Lead designer for educator and student scenarios on the core feature team. Collaborated across three partner teams and worked with PM’s, engineers, researchers, and writers.
Role
Lead designer for educator and student scenarios on the core feature team. Collaborated across three partner teams and worked with PM’s, engineers, researchers, and writers.
Background
Microsoft Teams is used as a learning platform by millions of educators and students around the world, and our goal is to help them create meaningful online learning experiences. Especially during the COVID pandemic, educators relied on Teams and other digital learning tools to teach students.
Background
Microsoft Teams is used as a learning platform by millions of educators and students around the world, and our goal is to help them create meaningful online learning experiences. Especially during the COVID pandemic, educators relied on Teams and other digital learning tools to teach students.
Background
Microsoft Teams is used as a learning platform by millions of educators and students around the world, and our goal is to help them create meaningful online learning experiences. Especially during the COVID pandemic, educators relied on Teams and other digital learning tools to teach students.
Background
Microsoft Teams is used as a learning platform by millions of educators and students around the world, and our goal is to help them create meaningful online learning experiences. Especially during the COVID pandemic, educators relied on Teams and other digital learning tools to teach students.
Class team anatomy
Problem
Through our customer feedback channels, we saw potential to improve the current class team experience. In its current state, the General channel was not an authentic "home" experience for class teams: ✗ Teachers can’t customize the layout ✗ Posts don’t offer enough flexibility in content ✗ Hard to find important information in a feed
Problem
Through our customer feedback channels, we saw potential to improve the current class team experience. In its current state, the General channel was not an authentic "home" experience for class teams: ✗ Teachers can’t customize the layout ✗ Posts don’t offer enough flexibility in content ✗ Hard to find important information in a feed
Problem
Through our customer feedback channels, we saw potential to improve the current class team experience. In its current state, the General channel was not an authentic "home" experience for class teams: ✗ Teachers can’t customize the layout ✗ Posts don’t offer enough flexibility in content ✗ Hard to find important information in a feed
Problem
Through our customer feedback channels, we saw potential to improve the current class team experience. In its current state, the General channel was not an authentic "home" experience for class teams: ✗ Teachers can’t customize the layout ✗ Posts don’t offer enough flexibility in content ✗ Hard to find important information in a feed
Through our feedback forum
Research
With our user research team, we conducted interviews with 100 teachers, split evenly among elementary, middle school, high school, and education.
Research
With our user research team, we conducted interviews with 100 teachers, split evenly among elementary, middle school, high school, and education.
Research
With our user research team, we conducted interviews with 100 teachers, split evenly among elementary, middle school, high school, and education.
Research
With our user research team, we conducted interviews with 100 teachers, split evenly among elementary, middle school, high school, and education.
Opportunity
We saw an opportunity to build a new "home" dashboard to: ✔ Increase customer engagement in class teams ✔ Help students and educators prioritize and find important information We also saw an opportunity to collaborate cross-org with Microsoft SharePoint, a website-building platform with several existing widgets.
Opportunity
We saw an opportunity to build a new "home" dashboard to: ✔ Increase customer engagement in class teams ✔ Help students and educators prioritize and find important information We also saw an opportunity to collaborate cross-org with Microsoft SharePoint, a website-building platform with several existing widgets.
Opportunity
We saw an opportunity to build a new "home" dashboard to: ✔ Increase customer engagement in class teams ✔ Help students and educators prioritize and find important information We also saw an opportunity to collaborate cross-org with Microsoft SharePoint, a website-building platform with several existing widgets.
Opportunity
We saw an opportunity to build a new "home" dashboard to: ✔ Increase customer engagement in class teams ✔ Help students and educators prioritize and find important information We also saw an opportunity to collaborate cross-org with Microsoft SharePoint, a website-building platform with several existing widgets.
Ideation
To kick off our collaborations, the Teams EDU + SharePoint teams conducted a design jam together, hoping to set the stage for the project direction and goals.
Ideation
To kick off our collaborations, the Teams EDU + SharePoint teams conducted a design jam together, hoping to set the stage for the project direction and goals.
Ideation
To kick off our collaborations, the Teams EDU + SharePoint teams conducted a design jam together, hoping to set the stage for the project direction and goals.
Ideation
To kick off our collaborations, the Teams EDU + SharePoint teams conducted a design jam together, hoping to set the stage for the project direction and goals.
From this design jam, we defined three key principles:
From this design jam, we defined three key principles:
From this design jam, we defined three key principles:
From this design jam, we defined three key principles:
With SharePoint’s expertise in site building and customization, we pushed forward with the idea of a home dashboard powered by SharePoint pages and web parts.
With SharePoint’s expertise in site building and customization, we pushed forward with the idea of a home dashboard powered by SharePoint pages and web parts.
With SharePoint’s expertise in site building and customization, we pushed forward with the idea of a home dashboard powered by SharePoint pages and web parts.
With SharePoint’s expertise in site building and customization, we pushed forward with the idea of a home dashboard powered by SharePoint pages and web parts.
Design Challenge #1
How should a home dashboard be built into class teams? After exploring various models, we eventually decided between two frontrunners.
Design Challenge #1
How should a home dashboard be built into class teams? After exploring various models, we eventually decided between two frontrunners.
Design Challenge #1
How should a home dashboard be built into class teams? After exploring various models, we eventually decided between two frontrunners.
Design Challenge #1
How should a home dashboard be built into class teams? After exploring various models, we eventually decided between two frontrunners.
Ultimately, we decided to go with Model 1, since it was both discoverable and utilized our existing framework that customers understood. We also did not want to confuse customers who already used Posts in the General channel. We agreed that we should revisit the idea of setting the “Home” class app as the default landing experience over the General channel after the initial release.
Ultimately, we decided to go with Model 1, since it was both discoverable and utilized our existing framework that customers understood. We also did not want to confuse customers who already used Posts in the General channel. We agreed that we should revisit the idea of setting the “Home” class app as the default landing experience over the General channel after the initial release.
Design Challenge #1
Ultimately, we decided to go with Model 1, since it was both discoverable and utilized our existing framework that customers understood. We also did not want to confuse customers who already used Posts in the General channel. We agreed that we should revisit the idea of setting the “Home” class app as the default landing experience over the General channel after the initial release.
Ultimately, we decided to go with Model 1, since it was both discoverable and utilized our existing framework that customers understood. We also did not want to confuse customers who already used Posts in the General channel. We agreed that we should revisit the idea of setting the “Home” class app as the default landing experience over the General channel after the initial release.
Design Challenge #2
How do we provide value off the bat? To start, we wanted to leverage SharePoint’s existing web parts to automatically pull information from the class including files, assignments, and calendar events.
Design Challenge #2
How do we provide value off the bat? To start, we wanted to leverage SharePoint’s existing web parts to automatically pull information from the class including files, assignments, and calendar events.
Design Challenge #2
How do we provide value off the bat? To start, we wanted to leverage SharePoint’s existing web parts to automatically pull information from the class including files, assignments, and calendar events.
Design Challenge #2
How do we provide value off the bat? To start, we wanted to leverage SharePoint’s existing web parts to automatically pull information from the class including files, assignments, and calendar events.
From SharePoint’s previous data, we also knew that customer engagement increased when starting from a site template rather than from scratch. Referencing our research study on class dashboards, we proposed a new class home template:
From SharePoint’s previous data, we also knew that customer engagement increased when starting from a site template rather than from scratch. Referencing our research study on class dashboards, we proposed a new class home template:
Design Challenge #2
From SharePoint’s previous data, we also knew that customer engagement increased when starting from a site template rather than from scratch. Referencing our research study on class dashboards, we proposed a new class home template:
From SharePoint’s previous data, we also knew that customer engagement increased when starting from a site template rather than from scratch. Referencing our research study on class dashboards, we proposed a new class home template:
Design Challenge #3
How do we make this feel like one cohesive product? Even if we were using a SharePoint page as the home dashboard for a class team, we wanted to make sure the experience felt native to Teams. To do so, we aligned visual and font styles, fixed site interactions, and created custom empty states and help resources.
Design Challenge #3
How do we make this feel like one cohesive product? Even if we were using a SharePoint page as the home dashboard for a class team, we wanted to make sure the experience felt native to Teams. To do so, we aligned visual and font styles, fixed site interactions, and created custom empty states and help resources.
Design Challenge #3
How do we make this feel like one cohesive product? Even if we were using a SharePoint page as the home dashboard for a class team, we wanted to make sure the experience felt native to Teams. To do so, we aligned visual and font styles, fixed site interactions, and created custom empty states and help resources.
Design Challenge #3
How do we make this feel like one cohesive product? Even if we were using a SharePoint page as the home dashboard for a class team, we wanted to make sure the experience felt native to Teams. To do so, we aligned visual and font styles, fixed site interactions, and created custom empty states and help resources.
Bringing SharePoint components and web parts to the latest Fluent design guidelines
Updating interactions to match native Teams patterns, like opening meetings in Teams client instead of the web browser
Validation
We ran three different sessions of user testing and flash feedback through our design process, testing with Figma prototypes.
Validation
We ran three different sessions of user testing and flash feedback through our design process, testing with Figma prototypes.
Validation
We ran three different sessions of user testing and flash feedback through our design process, testing with Figma prototypes.
Validation
We ran three different sessions of user testing and flash feedback through our design process, testing with Figma prototypes.
From our web part ranking exercise, we were also able to iterate on the placement of web parts in the default template.
From our web part ranking exercise, we were also able to iterate on the placement of web parts in the default template.
Design Challenge #2
From our web part ranking exercise, we were also able to iterate on the placement of web parts in the default template.
From our web part ranking exercise, we were also able to iterate on the placement of web parts in the default template.
Outcome
Microsoft Education announced the Class Home Page feature in the summer of 2022 and is now generally available to schools. Since its release, the feature has been used weekly by millions of teachers and students.
Outcome
Microsoft Education announced the Class Home Page feature in the summer of 2022 and is now generally available to schools. Since its release, the feature has been used weekly by millions of teachers and students.
Outcome
Microsoft Education announced the Class Home Page feature in the summer of 2022 and is now generally available to schools. Since its release, the feature has been used weekly by millions of teachers and students.
Outcome
Microsoft Education announced the Class Home Page feature in the summer of 2022 and is now generally available to schools. Since its release, the feature has been used weekly by millions of teachers and students.
Takeaways
One of our team's goals in 2022 was to build EDU authenticity - to meet teachers and students where they are. We believe that the Class Home Page was a great first step in that direction, and we were incredibly happy that the feature was met with such positive response.
Takeaways
One of our team's goals in 2022 was to build EDU authenticity - to meet teachers and students where they are. We believe that the Class Home Page was a great first step in that direction, and we were incredibly happy that the feature was met with such positive response.
Takeaways
One of our team's goals in 2022 was to build EDU authenticity - to meet teachers and students where they are. We believe that the Class Home Page was a great first step in that direction, and we were incredibly happy that the feature was met with such positive response.
Takeaways
One of our team's goals in 2022 was to build EDU authenticity - to meet teachers and students where they are. We believe that the Class Home Page was a great first step in that direction, and we were incredibly happy that the feature was met with such positive response.
