Integrating intelligence into Power Pages and across Website (solution) interface
Microsoft Power Pages empowers organizations and governments around the world to rapidly launch services as external websites to collect, automate, and share critical business data securely with their customers, partners, and constituents they serve. The Power Pages mission is to be the #1 trusted platform that accelerates customers digital transformation intensity by offering no-code, low-code and code-first website development and governance tools backed by world-class reliable, secure, compliant, and global hosting service.
With this vision and having received great appreciation from the early adopters of Power Pages, the business quickly identified the paradigm shift across industries in the "Age of AI" and wanted to reimagine the entire website creation and browsing experience to future proof its offerings and continue to be a market leader in the low code, no code space.
How it started
With the strategic vision set by the business, Design saw an opportunity to reimagine core JTBD with Copilot and AI-First experiences. This approach aimed to enhance customer value by adding new capabilities and removing existing friction in adopting, configuring, and using Power Pages.
Building on the success of our previous brainstorming sessions and reflecting on key learnings, such as making the process more intuitive for all participants, I organized a three-day design sprint. This event invited all partners and stakeholders to collaboratively reimagine the entire website creation and browsing experience within a more engaging and fun design thinking framework.
Findings
To drive business OKRs around Growth, Maker NPS and World class services, the top voted Gen AI ideas from the brainstorming session was categorised across the following surface of Power Pages.
Website (solution) Interface
Intelligent Studio
Governance
and
Security
In alignment with Product and our Licensing strategy, we decided to intervene starting with our website (solution) interface and then integrate Gen AI capabilities into the website creation process.
Pause, Understand and Proceed
With clear findings in place, I wanted to take a moment to understand how users interact with AI features in the workplace. Collaborating with researchers, we shared the findings with the design team and partners to identify user journey patterns and pain points before diving into solutioning.
These insights were crucial for making informed decisions while reimagining core JTBD and driving world-class solutions, Maker NPS, and Product MAU.
Design for Website Interface
Site Copilot: Power Pages MAU is determined by the number of end users browsing websites built on the platform. To quickly boost overall Pages MAU, I facilitated collaboration with Research to understand user needs and aspirations around AI chatbots. With this understanding and empowering the design team to work closely with engineers, we explored the back-end capabilities of Power Virtual Agents (now Microsoft Copilot Studio). This enabled the activation of a site copilot with a single click or by default on new websites created on Power Pages, driving faster feature adoption among our customers.
As a feature or "enhanced real estate" on websites created with Power Pages, Site Copilot can future proof and drive lasting value by streamlining smart capabilities. It allows users to ask questions in natural language and receive summarized responses with relevant links, file uploads, or even drive agentic scenarios by leveraging Microsoft's evolving Copilot capabilities.
In the early stages of AI model adoption, Design encountered a major challenge. While Engineering found it easy to implement the technology for task-focused interactions in the Copilot pane, Product initially viewed this as the optimal strategy. However, my natural inquisitiveness to keep up with technology, and my discussions with the Responsible AI team revealed a different viewpoint as we navigated the Age of AI. I advocated for cantering AI interactions around Humans, supported by limited examples from other products.
My early collaboration with research further validated this, indicating that users preferred a conversational AI experience over task interactions, aligning better with their existing mental models of using chatbots. Users felt more empowered when in control and favoured using AI to streamline their tasks. This shift from a seemingly straightforward approach ultimately steered the product and business in a positive direction, proving to be the best decision for adapting to the evolving AI landscape.
Intelligent Site Search: Leveraging our telemetry data, we noticed that the existing search functionality in Power Pages had low adoption compared to the overall MAU. By delving deeper and speaking with a few customers, who were largely unhappy, we discovered that our website search component was built on a legacy system, merely replicating the default word search functionality available in browsers.
Reflecting on this and considering another top-voted idea from our brainstorming, backed with research insights, we reached a consensus with Product and Engineering to enhance the overall search experience by integrating Gen AI capabilities. This strategic move not only allowed us to focus on value-added features but also helped reimagine the existing user experience funnel drops.
Recognizing the expanding list of features within the setup workspace, Design proactively reviewed the existing information architecture in the nav bar. The goal was to streamline and logically group features to align with the overall vision.
Intelligent Lists: By harnessing the power of Gen AI search and its underlying technology, we thoughtfully enhanced the user experience. This empowers our end users to visualize data on their websites in a way that is intuitive and user-friendly.
Business Impact
With the shipment of Site Copilot, Intelligent Search and intelligent List features, the business witnessed a upward trend across the metrics as of Aug 2024.
45.15%
out of 100% feedback received were of Promotors
16.8 K
maker copilot MAU of total 53.4K maker MAU
71.24%
YoY growth with overall Power Pages MAU
315 M
Power Pages MAU
Connecting the dots
Noticing the above metrics and the shortfall in the expected Maker Copilot and Power Pages Monthly Active Users (MAU), Design developed a north star vision by leveraging the capabilities of GPT-4 and AI Agents. The goal is to reimagine today's website creation process with AI first approach, and connect the existing AI features, to unlock greater possibilities and enhance user delight.
With a buy-in from the leadership, the below vision is WIP and due for announcement in BUILD 2025 (Microsoft's annual developer conference)