Make it stand out.
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Keep it real with Artificial Intel
Tapped to help the in-house Cognitive Services team,. Update the design of the customer-facing webpages. Also we broke our SEO on this and don’t know how to put it back together. Can you have a look at that?
The Microsoft Cognitive Services are a suite of machine learning tools, available to help developers build intelligent applications by easily adding cognitive features such as emotion detection, speech recognition, and language understanding.
RESEARCH
I began evaluating Microsoft’s API services by immersing myself in the content. I read the marketing pitches and tutorials, signed up for Azure AI services and those of their competitors, competitive analysis, test-drove developer tools, and built a handful of bots and language models to gain deep industry insights on best practices, trends and offerings.
I helped create a comprehensive competitive analysis and defined personas to ask key questions from varying perspectives. Then, I leveraged the personas to draw up user profiles and journey maps to best find and explain pain points. This enabled me to reframe them as opportunities for solutions. Information Architecture & user flows.
LET’S HAVE a LOOK at the S.E.O–M—G.
Architecture had become a patchwork of confusing, conflicting, even moving or disappearing menu items & CTA’s.
Failing SEO ranking for Microsoft AI services routinely dropped behind competitor’s results, often pushed to subsequent pages.
Style Update UI referenced outdated, inconsistent style guides & pattern libraries. Many icons & illustrations were not visually consistent in style, and often poorly communicated concept.
Messages rambled with an overuse of trendy jargon & confusing terminology, making it difficult for the user to find help and make informed decisions.
A Navigation Maze We navigated landing pages, subpages, documentation and demos, taking a meticulous audit of the information architecture, user flow, UI patterns, & messaging. In short, we found the pages a tangled mess. One thing was clear though—there were several obvious elements that led to a muddled user experience. Let’s start with these:
Simplified & reworded navigation elements to be intuitive, eliminated contradictions, & resolved dark patterns.
Wrote engaging story in a conversational voice and clear terminology
Characterized AI service features as inspired business solutions and Microsoft’s unique benefits with case studies.
Found opportunities to supplement messages with helpful internal and external cross-linking to relevant content, useful information, documentation and reference material.
Integrated pacing elements such as pull quotes to retain a human element.I helped thoughtfully organize and edit content, with empathy for the needs of a diverse demographic of users (i.e. expert developers, directors, product managers, and dreamers), and created an inspiring and helpful user experience, while inherently repairing the SEO.
Simplified & reworded navigation elements to be intuitive, eliminated contradictions, & resolved dark patterns.
Wrote engaging story in a conversational voice and clear terminology
Characterized AI service features as inspired business solutions and Microsoft’s unique benefits with case studies.
Found opportunities to supplement messages with helpful internal and external cross-linking to relevant content, useful information, documentation and reference material.
Integrated pacing elements such as pull quotes to retain a human element.
Wireframes & Prototypes
We created an interactive prototype of key pages using Sketch App and InVision, and demonstrated the user journey to stakeholders.
Suite Icons
Taking the initiative to propose a refinement of the entire API icon system.
Each API service is branded with a unique icon, and appears throughout Microsoft AI tools, websites and apps. I found the original icons to be visually inconsistent as a family, and more importantly, many did not categorically communicate.
I took the initiative and proposed a refinement of the entire Cognitive Services API icon family. Every icon was crafted to be consistent in weight—and in many instances, replaced with an upgrade.
These icons appeared prominently across Microsoft Azure, and thus required the blessing from the Azure stakeholders.
New, original illustrations were needed to convey the many cutting-edge features of Microsoft’s machine-learning APIs.
They must fit visually within the Microsoft Azure brand guides of using geometric simplicity, color palette. I aimed to be original, communicate clearly, playful and witty—yet not cartoonish.