Experience Design for SERP of Bing specifically tailored for gamers, which apart from answering also lets them explore, discover, share and connect with other gamers & gaming content.

DESCRIPTION & SCOPE

This project was done as a graduation project with Microsoft IDC, Hyderabad. It was a part of end semester curriculum during my Master’s degree program at National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad.

The duration of this project was six months. As for my individual role in the project, my responsibility was to obtain a design brief, research, define the needs and goals of users, identify pain-points, create personas, brainstorm & ideate, design (interactions, wireframes, and visuals), and test a complete UX workflow.

BRIEF

Bing search experience for avid gamers and general users making gaming-related searches. Bing aims to deliver the best search experience in the gaming domain. The project objective is to focus on Bing’s answers for digital gaming.

• As part of the project the designer is expected to understand user search behaviour and interaction patterns.

• Explore options for a deeper engagement with the Bing (e.g. rate, review, purchase and share)

• Define new patterns and framework which are unique to Bing, that scales across to other domains and verticals

OBJECTIVE & METHODOLOGY

To enrich the user experience of ‘Bing search’ and make it more meaningful in the domains of digital gaming. With this in mind, I planned to explore newer ways to search on Bing and add more value to the search results.

The brief of this project was to design a search experience for a very specific group of users, digital gamers. During the duration of the project, secondary and primary research was conducted about the digital gaming domain. Multiple feedback sessions were conducted with the whole design team at Studio +91. Crafting wireframing, interactions and visual designs were also a part of the journey. Finally, after following the complete design process a unique experience was created for the users.

LEARNINGS

During this opportunity to work on a Microsoft Bing Search UX project, for my internship, I had some great learnings. I was working and collaborating with a very dedicated and hardworking team, which consisted of the management team, Studio+91’s design team, my mentor, and myself.

For an internship of 6 months, I learned much more than its duration and I continue to do so. As this was my first real design project after design school, I learned about the entire development process in a corporate environment as huge as Microsoft. It was an experience made rich by the constant mentoring from the in-house designers, monthly reviews with the entire Microsoft design team, and biggest of all, getting to be an active contributor in the entire UX innovation process, right from the ideation phase up to the communication of the exact UI and UX requirements.

As I was required to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement with MS-IDC, the details of this project can not be made available publicly, however, it can be shared for a portfolio review or interview.