Windows AI

Microsoft is betting big on AI, and I was lucky enough to be a Product Designer and UX Engineer on the Windows Design & Research team for a few years. I've worked on a lot of the new up and coming AI features in Windows, like the recently announced Recall feature.

My work for Copilot was to help flesh out how Copilot "felt", where it showed, and how it "moved". I designed and built numerous prototypes, both low and high fidelity, to test animations, interactions, and how it integrated into the different M365 apps.

There are such a wide range of products, how and where do you show Copilot? How do you keep individuality and be a similar experience across a global suite of applications? How does it resize? These were just a few out of hundreds of questions about designing for AI.

The core of the experience is identity. A user friendly assistant that is shown by using a clear, consistent metaphor to build up an understanding of the AI moments across all Microsoft products. My prototypes were used in a lot of user research, revealing several key insights. The most important insight was that we were no longer tied to just a chat bot interface.

Users really connected with the concept of little assistants everywhere, as opposed to just a chat bot. It's clear from this work that deep integration of AI into regular workflows will be a essential component of all companies UX experiences going forward.

This kind of embedded intelligence means all M365 apps can have a customized Copilot. Some of these apps though, are kind of brands on their own, Like Excel and Word. So you have to be able to blend in the Copilot experience, making it feel more native. Some users always went to search, while others rarely did, instead hunting for buttons. I worked on several different behaviors and interactions until ultimately deciding to provide multiple endpoints into Copilot.

This also shows when using the various Copilot panes and chats by using gradients specific to each M365 app.

By quickly building prototypes based on specific questions, we were able to build a great experience that can scale worldwide, across teams and products. I'm glad I was able to push forward a new and upcoming technology.

I've also done future explorations that you may get to see in some upcoming Windows updates. I wish I could share more of those, but as of now, they're still top secret :)

The ideal UX with AI is still yet to be determined. I believe a bifurcation is going to happen, a highly immersive, personified assistant on one hand, and an entire class of AI technology that will blend into the background, hidden, but powering a lot of everyday tasks.