Microsoft

Cortana in the Wire

Summary

Every year Microsoft holds an open Hackathon where employees are promoted to go build an ad hoc team of engineers, designers, researchers,writers and program managers to actively work on a passion project that may not make it above a cut line.

During the 2015 Hackathon, while working on the Cortana design team, I joined a group of designers from different areas of Windows. We had an idea, what if Cortana lived in the messaging substrate as an active participant, able to bring insights into the conversation? We spent about a week and a half iterating and sketching, shooting some video, and framing a story through a few case scenarios.

Role

As the resident Cortana expert I brought UX and UI knowledge of how Cortana behaved as an interface, as well as an understanding of current engineering limitations and projected engineering capabilities. I also storyboarded, shot, and edited all of the video.

Problem

We set out to answer, how can we help solve for the complex lives people currently live, from scheduling and balancing work/life to everyone being on different platorms and in fragmented ecosystems? How can solutions be where people already are, in the communication substrate?

Impact

Our Hackathon was well received within the design studio, and throughout the Microsoft Windows organization. The effort was back logged, and added to a number of strategy efforts. The work also resulted in a U.S. patent (10,666,594 - Proactive intelligent personal assistant). The impact on the organization itself were ties between the Communications team and the Cortana team to work closer together, realizing that some solutions require cross team collaboration and effort.