The challenge
Building a platform that’s not just about buying and selling products but also about fostering real connections by building relationships between tutors and students.
Microsoft Learning is a brand new concept that Microsoft is building to compete in the gig-economy. The goal was to introduce the platform as a tutoring service and later expand to all things gigs.
Duration: 4 months
Role: Product Designer in charge of building out key flows
Overarching themes
-
Most times, students or parents are on this website looking at tutors for the first time. How do we present the tutors so they feel like they really know them and can trust them.
-
Predictive ease is all about making the users tasks easy. How much data do we have and how much do we know the users to provide them with strong and personalized recommendations.
-
Microsoft has an edge over their competition because they already have a vast amount of products they can integrate into this platform such as teams, flipgrid to make the learning experience even better and easier. The challenge was to find ways to integrate those products into the experience at the right times.
-
Tutors already have a hard task of tutoring multiple students. How can we help them organize their workflow and make it easy as possible so they can focus on what they know best, teaching.
A tutor with personality
Creating an immersive profile experience and finding ways to add more personality to the tutor’s profile so the user can really get to know the tutor.
Key features
-
Background photo is a quick way for the tutor to add the things they like to do or where they’re from so it adds more flavor to their personality.
-
Play button on their profile photo where they can add a quick video introduction of themselves so it’s more immersive.
-
Video at the bottom is an introduction to their teaching style or more information about the subject they’re teaching.
-
Ratings are readily available to the users to add more credibility to the tutor so the user can make a knowledgeable decision.
Everything at the tutors fingertips
Tutor’s dashboard was all about supporting the tutors and giving them all the information they need in one place and also to encourage good habits and get them to continue doing them.
Key features
-
We provided how much they’ve earned this month with a nice data viz which is meant to encourage the tutor to keep teaching and earning more.
-
It’s almost like gamification. By showing this data, we’re hoping that the tutors see the numbers and encourage them to keep those up reducing class cancellations and faster response times.
-
Tutors are able to see which keywords users are using to discover them. This will help them curate their profile so they’re easily discovered.
-
Flipgrid is a product owned by Microsoft. By adding this here, tutors are able to communicate with their students quicker and in a more immersive way because it supports video as well.
Rethinking Microsoft Teams
Our goal here was to find ways to recreate the Microsoft teams experience for a tutoring session. How can we leverage a Microsoft product to support our experience?
Key features
-
Tutors are sometimes teaching multiple students so we wanted to create a space where the system automatically tells you who you’re teaching and how many hours of lessons you’ve completed together.
-
Without having to memorize the tutor has access to all the future sessions that are scheduled with this student so it feel like they’re being cared for.
-
With onenote, tutors are able to quickly take notes during a session without having to jump over to a different app on their computer keeping the conversation in one place.
Learning Marketplace Live
This is a supporting product for learning marketplace built for live events happening in the now. This is an expansion to the gig-economy to see how this overall concept could evolve overtime.
Key features
-
Site navigation is on the side and categorized so a user is able to find exactly what they’re looking for.
-
Really easy way for users to quickly discover new classes and participate.
-
This area is used to highlight some events happening now and making it really easy for the user to take part if they choose to.