Customers are my favorite collaborators
As a writer, I never miss a chance to have face-to-face (or video screen-to-video screen) contact with the audiences I’m creating for. Nothing compares to the experience of directly engaging, hearing feedback, and listening to understand what their lives outside a screen are really like. At Microsoft, I made sure my role as a content designer frequently involved direct engagement with customers—as a key stakeholder in Education, that meant talking to educators and students. It was seriously awesome.
Conferences and demos
BETT London, January 2019 and January 2020
An annual global education conference in London, BETT sees over 16,000 attendees from education spaces all over the world. I attended in 2019 and 2020 to represent Education content at Microsoft, where we were also a major sponsor of the event.
My key roles:
Write booth signage
Create printed materials that directed customers to product support content
Work the booth: Answer questions, give product demos, direct attendees to conference resources, capture leads, and record feedback
Take feedback and learning from customers and use it to in engineering backlog
ISTE Chicago (2018) and ISTE Philadelphia (2019)
ISTE is another major annual conference in the EDU-verse, but based in the US. ISTE is a key opportunity to learn about how education systems differ across the country and the needs of teachers from different regions. At ISTE I had similar responsibilities to those I had at BETT, like working the booth for direct customer interaction and creating print materials (check out the posters I created), but I also got to design an interactive customer experience.
I designed an end-to-end interactive demo to showcase the possibilities in Office 365 Education for attendees
Wrote the demo script for two presenters, setting up a real-life classroom scenario that wove together 5 different Microsoft products
Wrote all booth signage and designed persona “name tags” so that demo participants could be further immersed in the experience
Set up devices and populated the demo accounts with authentic classroom content