Microsoft Unlocked
Creating a hyper-immersive storytelling platform
The Challenge
Microsoft has incredible stories to tell about humans and technology. In 2020, an audit revealed they were telling these stories across 13+ disparate sites with little consistency, and they decided to move to a single platform to unify their efforts to increase impact. The idea for Microsoft Unlocked was born—a new platform shedding light on unique connections that impact the world. Aimed to inspire, engage, and excite their audience on a new level, Unlocked has elevated Microsoft’s storytelling, and shifted the perception from what they sell to who they are and what their products enable.
My Role
I led (and continue to lead!) the strategy team at Instrument over the course of 2+ years to design the platform, launch it, and create immersive stories for Unlocked. My responsibilities looked like:
Leadership: Overseeing a team of UX and content strategists, and partnering closely with writers, creative directors, visual designers, content production teams, and clients
Facilitation: Planning and leading project kickoff, workshops, and reviews
Collaboration: Driving the project forward by bringing people together to make decisions across the internal team, another agency and clients
UX: Driving explorations for various aspects of the experience, including navigation, content categorization and tagging, metadata, and component system definition
Collaboration early and often
I believe the best ideas come from working together. Throughout this project, I set the team up to share their observations and ideas openly, working in Figjam daily and making. I foster an environment of curiosity and encouragement to help people do their best work.
Story development
In addition to creating the platform itself, our team continues to develop hero stories. One such story was The hidden power of feelings, a story about the importance of social emotional learning and a tool Microsoft created to bring it to classrooms.
Results
Research conducted by the Microsoft team showed that that the stories created by our team, specifically The hidden power of feelings, saw the highest engagement rate of any story on the site.
Additional qualitative interviews revealed that their target audiences experienced increased positive sentiment as it relates to Microsoft’s brand and the impact they are having on humanity.
