When Azure AI Foundry (then called Azure AI Studio) launched in November 2023 at Microsoft Ignite, it was a complex product with very little in the way of onboarding and user education. I was tasked with softening this landing by creating a first-run experience in the chat playground, the feature that allows users to experiment with and build on large language models (LLMs).

I worked with a designer and UX researcher to determine which elements of the chat playground most needed explanation, then with the playground team to understand exactly what each of those elements actually do. I then wrote the teaching bubble content and we tested it with users. After a few tweaks based on test results, the teaching bubble tour launched at Microsoft Build in May 2024.

The latest telemetry on the tour indicates that 13% of users (new and existing combined) complete the entire seven-step tour without closing out. Our next phase will be to discover which step is our biggest drop-off point and experiment with eliminating or reworking that to increase retention.

Scroll through the images to see where each teaching bubble is placed on the screen, then a close-up of the content.

The “learn more” phrase is part of the design pattern for all of our links to documentation, not my choice here. I’d probably go for something like “See how to write a strong system message.”

The notion of “grounding” is important here because later users can evaluate the “groundedness” of their application, that is, how well its responses reflect the grounding data you’ve connected.

One issue we’re working through is that we use “deploy” in more than one way. In the screen above, note that there’s a button just atop and to the left of this teaching bubble with the CTA “Deploy as web app.” Users must have a deployment in order to work on their app, and then they deploy the app to make it available for use. These terms are legacy from the old Azure Machine Learning and haven’t yet been changed internally, so all I could do here was educate. This teaching bubble focuses on the deployment the user needs to get started, and the last one in the series covers the “Deploy as web app” button.

Here’s a bug: this teaching bubble should be pointing to the Evaluate button in the command bar, but instead it’s lost. I’ve filed this bug but it wasn’t fixed before I took these screenshots.

Here’s the final step in the tour, the teaching bubble that covers the “Deploy as web app” button discussed above. I believe that keeping the two “deployment”-related buttons separate helps avoid confusion. This is something we could test if we had unlimited research resources.

Back to all projects