Led research that evaluated an in-product learning experience within Windows 11's Teams integration. Insights led the product team to pivot their approach in time for launch.
Remote content sharing became an increasingly important user need during COVID. One of the Windows product teams I supported saw this as an opportunity to uplevel the live content sharing experience — they built a streamlined Windows integration that made sharing easier and more accessible.
Having built the feature, the team needed UXR support to evaluate a proposed in-situ learning experience (LE) designed to educate users about how the feature worked. I worked with the PM and design partners to understand the problem space, craft research questions, and design a study protocol from scratch.
The Windows 11 release was only months away — timing was critical.
All components were contained within a remote 1:1 interview format with external Windows 10 users who used a single monitor, recruited through UserTesting.com.
Used a Figma prototype to showcase both the sharing experience and its proposed LE. Collected sentiment and perceived value across both dimensions.
Embedded within the concept test to evaluate discoverability, understandability, and error tolerance of the LE under a high-stakes sharing scenario.
Remote 1:1 sessions with external Windows 10 users. Structured to allow naturalistic interaction with the prototype before directed probing.
Sentiment toward the sharing feature itself was overwhelmingly positive. Users found it valuable, intuitive, and exciting. But the proposed in-situ LE told a very different story.
The LE had low discoverability — users often missed it entirely. When they did notice it, understandability was poor, especially in high-stakes sharing contexts. Most critically, the LE negatively synergized with existing Windows features, reducing user confidence in aspects of the experience unrelated to the new sharing feature.
These findings pointed clearly toward alternative LE formats — ones that educated users proactively rather than in-context, and that didn't interfere with familiar Windows behaviors.
The insights from this study led the product team to scrap the proposed LE entirely and begin exploring alternative education methods based on my recommendations.
With Windows 11's release only months away, catching this early — rather than shipping a LE users would ignore or be confused by — saved meaningful engineering time and avoided a degraded launch experience.