Microsoft Azure is a place where one can explore, learn, acquire, manage, and operate Azure services. With thousands of capabilities, the Azure web portal attracts a broad range of user profiles. The scale of the offerings brings a unique challenge: how do we introduce an expanding experience to a broad set of customers with different backgrounds and needs?

During 2019, we've revisited our home experiences with diverse customer profiles in mind. I partnered with product leadership, research, data, content, and marketing to redefine Azure home - eventually helping beginners to get started and discover offerings, assisting power users just enough so they feel in complete control of their productivity.

We simplified Home by reducing clickable targets by + 25% when used for the first time. Although it affords less choice, we maintained the conceptual layout, reduced the learning curve, and received unanimously positive feedback about the visual appeal and simplicity of the updated experience.






We developed an adaptable design that is based on customer usage, without any explicit action from the customer. At the top of the page, we present a collection of recently used services. It's initially populated with Azure’s most popular services. It will adjust once the customer starts using a service. Although seemingly simple, this adaption reduces search and navigation times, improves time-on-task scores, and speeds up the customers' most common workflows.





We’ve introduced “hover cards” throughout our experience that present contextual information relevant to each service. The cards help improves the efficiency of customer journeys and the discoverability of key information. They also help customers of all levels of expertise. While new customers can benefit from Microsoft Learn content and free offerings, advanced customers have a faster path that creates instances or access their recently used instances of that service.