Rethinking Communication
Next Gen experiences for Skype to fuel expression and communication
OVERVIEW
Skype was starting to loose ground to new competitiors like Snapchat, Messenger, Whatsapp. As the Skype team was re-designing the app they collaborated with Bing and Cortana Design Teams in Microsoft to bring AI focused experiences into Skype. My role was to lead the design and strategy from the Bing team to rethink communication experiences powered by AI.
ROLE
Product Design Lead, Microsoft ・2017
Product Design ・ Concept Design・ Executive reviews ・ Sprint facilitation
Mission
Bring back the core value prop of Skype by focusing on combining the best of communication and AI Products.
Essentially three different orgs were to come together - Skype + Bing + Cortana to figure out how to empower communication experiences with AI. The team thought of 3 ways to approach the problem, we went with model B and explored concepts using that direction. This gave us a good framework as how to think about the next gen Skype.
The Sprint Process
Design Sprints have become widely adopted globally by companies as a tool for innovation and problem-solving. We followed the design sprint method to come with solutions within a week and pitch them to the leadership. Out of the many concepts created, only selected are covered in this case study.
Understanding Generation Z — The Next Generation of Super Creatives
I did a deep dive to understand our target users — who are they, what is their lifestyle & outlook, how the world is shifting towards Gen Z and the upcoming professions.
Themes for the concepts
Essentially three different orgs were to come together - Skype + Bing + Cortana to figure out how to empower communication experiences with AI. The team thought of 3 ways to approach the problem. We went with model B and explored concepts around those. This gave us a good framework as how to think about the next gen Skype. I extracted major themes from the brainstorming session on which we can focus our ideation and concepts.
01 — Enable people to express themselves
02 — Enable people to unite together over activities
03 — Make video chat the hero of the app
04 — Enable people to communicate effortlessly
05 — Video chat without language barriers
06 — Enable people to find and share while chatting
Enable people to express themselves
To have a great video chat between two people or groups of people it was essential to equip them with tools that they can have fun with. Snapchat filters were a rage and we took inspiration from it and explored different types of lenses users could use to have a great time. We came up with four major types of lenses - beautify, augmented filters, voice swap/modulation and games while video chat.
Enable people to unite together over activities
I looked at how can video chat be made more exciting, can skype be the medium which enables people to connect and do activities together with their friends, partner, or families. Activities like watching videos together, or play games while video chatting, or even share your screen.
Enable people to communicate effortlessly — Live Subtitles while you Video Chat
Users sometimes are in environments where they can’t video chat openly - like an office or in a noisy subway and sometimes we also don’t have access to earplugs. I explored how video chat still work in such situations.
Enable people to find and share quickly
A large part of chatting is sharing — a new recipe you cooked, a new song you listened, restaurants to meet, which movies to watch together. Sharing while chatting was tedious and involved lot of steps. To simplify this problem I explored the below solutions.
Outcome & Impact
After the design sprint, I presented the concepts to design and Skype leadership. There was extreme enthusiasm for the concepts and they wanted to take it forward. Lot of features like proactive cortana suggestions, 3rd party addins were implemented in Skype. In a short time frame of two weeks, this was a really exciting space to explore.