Microsoft | Skills Profile & Editor
Overview
Skills is Microsoft’s new enterprise product aim to help organization leaders make strategic workforce decisions—spanning recruitment, internal mobility, and upskilling—using talent skills insights. It also delivers personalized skills experiences to employees across the Microsoft 365 platform.
In January 2024, I joined the Skills team to lead the design of core employee features, Skills profile and Skills Editor, from concept to launch.
My role
The team
Timeline
goal
Outcome
Impcats
What's the problem?
Skills platforms help org leaders and HRs gain talent skills insights to make strategic workforce decisions — such as recruitment, internal mobility and upskilling — while enabling employees to keep track of their skills. However, customers often struggle with low employee engagement on existing skills platforms, resulting in insufficient and inaccurate skills data, limiting the ability to generate meaningful insights that drive business success.
This was the biggest pain point with existing skills platforms on the market. When I joined the Skills team, we identified our competitive advantage in leveraging AI and broad Microsoft touch points to drive employee engagement in creating and maintaining their Skills profile. With our AI inferencing backend in place, my role was to bring this vision to life for end users.
Discovery - Breakdown of the problem
I started with customer calls and competitive analysis to understand the key reasons employees don’t engage with existing skills platforms in the market:
Employees don’t see the value in creating and managing a skills profile, as it is not connected to their growth, performance, or daily work.
Current platforms are typically standalone apps, disconnected from the tools employees use daily, leading to poor discoverability.
Current solutions require extensive manual input, making the experience tedious and discouraging user engagement.
Current solutions lack a good user experience, making engagement feel like a burden rather than a benefit.
"Creating my skills profile feels like another admin task …I don't see why I would do it when I have a job."
- quote from an employee user
Opportunities
We identified the opportunities to drive employees engagement:
Reducing manual input with AI inference based on job title, user activity across M365.
Integrate skills management into the tools employees use everyday to increase discoverability
Make experience more engaging and rewarding
Long term: Motivate users to create skills profile by providing high-value scenarios (learning, career growth, networking opportunities)
Through product planning sessions, our team defined the strategy and roadmap, identifying key goals for each product phase.
Case studies of the 2 releases
Beta Release
A stand-alone Skills homepage to drive users add skills they have, with additional ability to select skills they want to learn and manage skills more granularly.
General availability (GA) Release
Skills editor in M365 Profile card
Pivoted the Skills homepage into a simplified editor integrated within the M365 Profile surface, enhancing discoverability and expanding reach to a broader user base.
Beta Release Final Design
High-level goals for Beta Release
Create a beta version Skills employees homepage with the following goals:
How might we communicate the value of Skills to incentivize users given the constraints:
No resource to support an onboarding flow
Limited high-value offerings in Beta release
How might we drive users to create skills profile with the help of AI suggestions?
How might we develop a scalable foundation and design pattern that supports future scenarios on Skills homepage and keep coherence across different surfaces?
To catch up with a Microsoft-wide marketing moment, we need to launch the Beta Release in 5 months, leaving only 1.5 months to finalize the design from scratch.
Challenge 01
Navigate ambiguity on a tight timeline
At the outset, we aimed to include a wide range of features in the release—profile creation, skills proficiency, and skills learning—while designing for future scalability into skills insights, career growth, and network scenarios.
I began with low-fidelity explorations of the Skills homepage to visualize these directions. However, without a clear and aligned product positioning, making informed design decisions was challenging.
Despite a tight release timeline, we faced significant ambiguity:
Unclear product vision
Lack of alignment on feature priorities and scope
Uncertainty around key feature feasibility due to dependencies on partner teams
Unclear user discovery point due to an undefined product platform
Approach
Driving clarity & alignment through cross-functional design workshops
To create clarity for our team, I facilitated a cross-functional workshop with leadership, product managers, engineers, researchers, and content designers. This workshop helped establish a common ground, align our goals and priorities, and set clear design directions.
Product Vision
For employees, Skills is a horizontal service across Microsoft touch points, providing employees bite-size skill experience in the flow of work.
Product Platform
We were still uncertain about where Skills would reside, with potential platforms including the Viva Home app, Viva Learning app, M365 Profile Card, and M365 apps page.
Design Direction
Given the time constraints to launch and the uncertainty around the product platform, we designed the Beta experience as a standalone web page while ensuring scalability for future integration as a horizontal service.
Feature Priority for skills profile
P0: understand the value of Skills
P0: select skills to create profiles
P1: select skills user want to learn
P2: select skills proficiency
Design Direction
A clearer key Jobs-to-be-done with a prioritization over value education & current skill selection.
Design workshop
Key Jobs-to-be-done
Layout iteration
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Design decision
We went with 1-column layout on the landing page to prioritize suggested skills confirmation task, provide a more guided flow without an onboarding and introduce P1 & P2 features progressively in the second page.
The design followed the Viva and Fluent design language, incorporating color, gradients, icon styles, illustration, and card components for consistency.
Beta release
Final layout design
Skills home page
Skills management page
Challenge 02
How might we simplify the skills concepts and encourage user to confirm, dismiss and add skills?
From a backend and leadership data perspective, there are four distinct skill types, each serving as a valuable data point for generating workforce insights.
Skill framework
V0 design
Individual confirmation UX resulted in a low number of skills being confirmed or dismissed
In the POC design, we simply enabled users to confirm or dismiss skills individually.
However, internal testing with private preview users revealed that, on average, users confirmed only 6 skills, with very few dismissing any.
To improve AI-driven personalization, we aim to increase the number of confirmed skills while also encouraging users to dismiss irrelevant ones, helping refine our AI inferencing for a more tailored experience.
V1 iteration
Confirm/dismiss a batch of skills with follow-up flow
I explored a flow that allow users to select skills they have, and click button to confirm or dismiss a batch at ones. In addition, I added the required features — skill proficiency, skill visibility and learning interest in a follow-up flow.
✅ What worked: The batch confirm interaction encouraged users to confirm more skills.
❌ What didn't work: However, the flow proved too complex for users to complete—especially without a guided onboarding experience or a high-value scenario as an incentive.
V1 Iteration
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Further iterations for batch confirm & dismiss
Final design
Batch confirm and individual dismiss
"Compared to other ones I've used… I think this is so much better because it's very simple and intuitive… I never had to look for longer than 10 seconds."
Participant from user testing
Outcome
A simple, intuitive experience that increased the average number of confirmed skills by 167%.
The pivot for ga release
Building on strong customer feedback from the Beta Release, we made a compelling case to partner with the M365 Profile team and integrate Skills editing into the profile card—a highly visible surface across the M365 ecosystem. This integration enhances discoverability and creates a more seamless, connected experience.
Additionally, our leadership team proposed making users' suggested skills visible on their profiles to others, further encouraging them to verify and edit their skills and driving insights value for org leader users.
High-level goals for GA Release
🛠 Transform Skills homepage into M365 Profile Card editor
How might we reuse the design component to speed up development while ensuring a great user experience in a much smaller surface?
🤸♀️ Driving user engagement and maximize data value for leaders
As org leaders are the buyer of Skills, how might we further drive employees engagement so that leaders gain workforce insights?
💜 Building User Trust in AI
User testing feedback revealed that users want more transparency on how AI utilizes their data to generate skill suggestions.
How might we develop a scalable foundation and design pattern that supports future scenarios on Skills homepage and keep coherence across different surfaces?
Define
Defined product direction through research-backed design iteration & storytelling
I explored a range of low-fidelity concepts based on the pivot requirement. After reviews, our team was divided between two key approaches for setting up a skills profile and its core functionality:
AI-Generated Public Skills Profile: AI automatically generates a public skills profile, allowing users to select top skills, add new ones, or remove any. This approach minimizes manual effort while enabling users to prioritize their most relevant skills.
AI-Suggested Skills for Verification: AI presents suggested skills for users to review and verify, distinguishing between verified and unverified skills on the public profile. This approach ensures accuracy and credibility while giving users more control over their profile.
Both approaches have trade-offs, balancing between org leaders' data value, employees manual effort and their control & trust.
2 approaches for skills profile
research
To help define product direction, I negotiated time to conduct user research. In collaboration with a UX Researcher, we gained evaluated the benefits and risk of the 2 skills profile curation approach, and assessed users reactions and concerns to unverified, AI-generated skills profile.
Methods
Moderated interviews with using clickable Figma prototype
Participants
9 enterprise M365 information workers
Time
Research Findings
Verification is seen as a crucial first step for trust and accuracy, with a strong desire for post-verification customization.
Users appreciate AI efficiency but expect full control over decisions. Verification is seen as a crucial first step for trust and accuracy, with a strong desire for post-verification customization.
Design principles
Establishing design principles to guide us forward
Based on user insights and business priorities above, I established design principles to document our decision making, creating a clear framework for future decision-making and ensuring consistency and alignment within the team. These principles helped:
Streamline Decision-Making – By setting clear guidelines, the team could quickly evaluate design choices, reducing ambiguity and enabling faster iteration.
Enhance Cross-Team Alignment – The principles served as a shared foundation for designers, PMs, and engineers, ensuring that everyone worked toward the same vision.
Improve UX Cohesion – By maintaining consistency across features, we created a more intuitive and seamless experience for employees interacting with the AI-driven skills platform.
Design principles
GA Release Design
Handed-off in Feb 2025
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Design highlight
Simplify skills into two types—verified and unverified—with clear visual distinction.
Design highlight
Prioritize the key job-to-be-done. Establish a clear visual and action hierarchy.
Design highlight
Enable users to verify a batch at 1-click
Outcome
Most participants in the 2 rounds of user testings perceived the verifying UX to be intuitive, clear and simple.
Design highlight
Provide additional context on demand to build trust without overwhelming users
Design highlight
Build trust with AI through transparency by showing users how their data is used and providing ways to learn more about AI.
Highlights
User research revealed that transparency are key to building trust in AI.
To address this, we provide essential context upfront without overwhelming users, using progressive disclosure to surface deeper insights only when needed. This ensures transparency for those who seek more information about AI usage, data privacy, and visibility.
Outcome
Post-release user testing showed strong positive reception, with most participants appreciating the ability to view skill sources at a glance. Many noted that this feature resolved their concerns about AI, reinforcing their trust in the system.
Human in control
Ensure users can control how their data is used
One step further
Reorder skills
Research revealed that while users are willing to sacrifice the "Select Top Skills" feature in favor of "Verify Skills," they still want a way to customize and prioritize certain skills. To address this, I proposed a reordering feature as a fast-follow solution to meet user needs.
With reordering feature, org leaders can also get more valuable insights.
Final design prototype
Moving forward
Personalized skills experience in the flow of work
A dynamic, hover-activated skills card integrated across M365, enabling users to discover, learn, and verify skills seamlessly within their workflow.
Vision
Vision design for the future of skills-based experience, creating real value and foster deep engagement
Creating an intuitive and clear skills-editing experience is just the first step. To truly drive employee engagement, we need to deliver value-added experiences—such as skills-based learning, internal job recommendation, skills-share learning community and mentor matching and so on.
During the Microsoft Hackathon in September 2024, I partnered with another designer and our engineering team to build a career roadmap experience in just three days. Leveraging Skills Intelligence, our goal was to help employees identify key development areas, track progress, and connect with relevant growth opportunities—empowering them to navigate through their career paths.
Outcome
Delivered a user-centric experience that drives engagement, builds trust, and provides valuable workforce insights while expanding the product to high-impact surfaces, reaching over 345 million users.
Received strong user testing feedback. Our usability and fairness-focused testing showed that all participants found the experience intuitive, simple, engaging and easy to understand. Most participants mentioned they found this experience to be valuable and would use it. Notably, 7 out of 8 users found the skills source toggle helpful, increasing their confidence in AI.
Shaped a more user-centric, trustworthy, and intuitive product by advocating for end-user needs and concerns.
Foster cross-functional collaboration by introducing processes such as co-design workshops, establishing a design review cadence, and creating a shared framework for evaluating design.
Helped Skills move beyond Viva to M365 platform, increasing user base from thousands to 345M+.
"Compared to other ones I've used… I think this is much better because it's pretty self-explanatory and intuitive.. I never had to look for longer than 10 seconds."
Participant from user testing
Learning
Clarity over Simplicity
One of my biggest learnings from the past year is that clarity—not simplicity—should be the ultimate design goal. Clarity enables users to truly understand and navigate a product, while simplicity can sometimes create the illusion of ease without real comprehension.
When we realized our design was too complex for users to understand and take action on, we attempted to remove elements—only to find that stripping away too much led to even greater confusion. Users lost trust due to the lack of context and transparency.
Then I learnt that a design that looks simple isn’t necessarily clear or intuitive. Too often, we strive for visual simplicity but overlook the essential context that helps users achieve their goals effortlessly. True clarity ensures that users can grasp and navigate an experience with confidence.
Leverage data and visualize your analysis to communicate & align on design effectively
When advocating for a user-centered approach, these tools help ground discussions in evidence rather than opinion, making it easier to align stakeholders. If you need to push back on a decision with your PM, use data-backed insights and visual storytelling to illustrate potential pain points, inefficiencies, or misalignments with user needs. A well-crafted visualization not only strengthens your argument but also fosters productive dialogue, ensuring that design choices are driven by clarity, usability, and business impact.
As designers, we often develop an intuitive sense of what works and what doesn’t—and that instinct is worth trusting. If something feels confusing, forced, or misaligned, chances are your users will feel the same way. Leveraging these communication tools has been instrumental in building my confidence when advocating for better design decisions.
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