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About Encounter

We are team of 4 students at the University of Washington Information School, building this as our senior capstone project.

Our sponsors, Microsoft Learn, want us to look at their platform from a technical and non-technical students perspective. By filling this content-gap, we will be able to connect students to these Microsoft resources and provide them with the skills to become adept users, thereby turning them into lifelong customers.

Simran Kota

Jack Lucas Chang

Brendan Jacobsen

Godgiven Grogan

Our Goals

Navigation

We simplified the navigation to only have the most relevant content for a student. Instead of multiple navigational layers, there are now three main pages: the catalog, saved courses, and references.

Audience targeting

We specifically tailored our content to appeal to the student demographic by providing them with topics that are in demand and will help them develop skills to get their next internship or job.

Roles

We developed five main personas for student users: the data science student, the software engineering student, the aspiring product manager, the non-techincal student who needs to learn basic computing skills to work with data, and the non-techincal student who has some computing background.

Personalized Courses

Based on the role and skill level a student chooses, they receive personalized course recommendations that help them gather the skills they will need to apply to positions in that field.

Personalized on-boarding

We personalized the onboarding process to let the user select exactly what they hope to get out of the platform, which in turn helps us ensure they are presented with the most relevant content for their goals.

Dynamic Content

Students appreciate a variety of content mediums to appeal to various learning styles, which is why we edited courses to incorporate text, images, videos, and code windows. A student is able to use whichever tool works best for their unique learning needs.

Simplified Content Model

The original content model was very confusing from a student’s perspective with multiple layers of course content and hundreds of filters, most with topics students have never heard of. We simplified this to make content more discoverable with a Topic, Language, and Difficulty filter, and simplified the course structure by simply having modules with units and attached recommendations to continue.

Better Student Outcomes

The new platform, renamed to Microsoft Encounter, has been proven to be more relevant and user friendly to the target audience. A user is much more easily able to find their desired content and start engaging with the content.