Highlight Reel — A Microsoft Garage Project

During my internship at Microsoft, I worked with UBC researchers, the OneNote team and software engineering interns to create Highlight Reel. Highlight Reel is a mobile companion application that provides an interactive video experience, enabling students to save time and study effectively while on the go. Students using Highlight Reel on mobile can download lecture videos for offline viewing, highlight sections of a video and selectively play highlighted content.

Highlight Reel was piloted with 500 students at the University of British Columbia. This project was the Microsoft Hackathon 2017 Executive Challenge Winner.

Context

Researchers from the University of British Columbia found that video learning was replacing traditional methods of learning at a rapidly increasing rate. However, as textbooks disappear, so do some of the most fundamental ways of annotating text: highlighting and writing notes in the margin.

When it comes to video learning, there is a lack of digital tools that can be used to capture important content. UBC researchers teamed up with software engineers from the OneNote team to create a web application that aims to solve this problem.

The OneNote team was working on a web application that allows students to take notes while watching a video, view a heat map of their most-watched and least-watched sections and highlight important parts.

With the growing prominence of mobile-first students, the OneNote team challenged our team of interns to create a companion application that brings textbook tools to video learning on a mobile platform.

Our challenge for the summer was to create a mobile companion application.

Goals

We wanted to accomplish three main goals with our mobile application:

1. Help students save time by providing a video experience that allows them to study effectively and efficiently.
2. Ensure that our app is a companion app by staying true to Highlight Reel’s overarching goal and aligning its features with the functionalities of the web app.
3. Embrace mobile constraints by designing features that work on mobile and leveraging the contexts in which users prefer mobile over web.

User Groups

We conducted multiple rounds of user interviews with university students to understand who we were designing for. Highlight Reel is for students like Maria. Maria is a full-time university student who works part-time and commutes to school every day. Her goal is to maximize her time while she is on-the-go, especially on the bus.

Highlight Reel appeals to three primary user groups:

1. Commuters with a prohibitively expensive data plan
2. Students who learn best through interacting with learning materials
3. Busy bees who aim to maximize time

I mapped out the three core stages of Highlight Reel’s product experience to identify pain points and opportunities. From this, our team was able to understand which features to prioritize.

This user journey maps out the three core stages of Highlight Reel’s product experience.

Product Overview

We prioritized three features for our minimum viable product: allowing students to download videos for offline viewing, highlight sections of videos and selective play highlighted content.

Onboarding Experience

When students use Highlight Reel for the first time, they are met with an onboarding experience that introduces the three main features to them.

Download Videos

When we conducted interviews with university students, we found that most students were apprehensive about watching videos while on the go because of how much cellular data this would consume. This is why we made offline viewing one of our core features.

Highlight Important Content

Students typically watch assigned videos twice: once before the lecture it is due and once before an exam. By allowing students to capture important content with a highlight, students immediately know what to review when exam season comes.

Made for All Learners

Understanding that students learn and absorb information in different ways, we added an auto-scrolling transcript for students who prefer reading content over watching it. The transcript also works well for those who like to preview video content before watching the entirety of it.

Review Content

When reviewing for an exam, students can access the highlight player and selectively play highlighted content. This way, they can save time by only watching the sections that are important to them.

What I Learned

My time at Microsoft has taught me the value of failing quickly in order to learn quickly — this means being able to identify and test assumptions, openly take feedback, filter through it and use it to inform the next set of iterations. I learned how to design and explore possibilities within constraints, what it means to communicate with developers and why it is important to involve them in design decisions.

Huge thanks to my amazing team for making this experience a dream!