Skype for Business

Microsoft · Concept & vision · Senior Designer

A set of vignettes built around real work scenarios — a meeting room, a control tower, a clinical broadcast, a phone in transit — each anchoring Skype to a specific surface, concrete enough for stakeholders to react to.

Skype for Business meeting room vignette — a 55-inch wall display showing call participants, shared notes, and meeting timeline

Skype lived in a single rectangle. The work didn’t.

Background

Microsoft asked for a vision of Skype for Business beyond the chat window — how it would show up on the surfaces work actually happens on.

Skype for Business existed inside a single rectangle: the desktop client. But the work it was supposed to support didn’t. Conversations spilled into meeting rooms, phones, broadcasts, and back again.

My role

A set of vignettes built around real work scenarios — a meeting room, a control tower, a clinical broadcast, a phone in transit — each anchoring Skype to a specific surface.

The product had to be everywhere the work was.

Skype for Business existed inside a single rectangle: the desktop client. But the work it was supposed to support didn’t. Conversations spilled into meeting rooms, phones, broadcasts, and back again. The product had to be everywhere the work was.

Microsoft needed a way to show stakeholders what that future could feel like: concrete enough to react to, not another deck of abstract diagrams.

Vignette 1.5A — a 55-inch meeting room display with a Hello, Joe Foster greeting, shared OneNote field observations, video call participant, and a meeting timeline along the bottom — vignette 1: meeting room, 55″ wall display

Each vignette anchored Skype to a specific work scenario.

Each vignette anchored Skype to a specific work scenario and a specific surface. A field-ops meeting on a wall display. A logistics manager pulling a status check on a phone. A clinical broadcast with live captions, watched on a tablet in a different language than it was spoken.

Live clinical trials broadcast on tablet with Spanish caption translation overlay — live broadcast: spanish caption track

Same live clinical trials broadcast on tablet with traditional Chinese caption translation — live broadcast: traditional chinese caption track

Recorded clinical trials broadcast on laptop, scrubbing through a session with Dr. Carol on August 23 — same broadcast, recorded: scrubbed back later from a laptop

Vignette 2.2 — control tower scenario on an HTC One phone showing an inbound message from Rich Allen with a triangulated photo attachment — vignette 2: control tower, phone in transit

Wide World Importers vessels status data terminal — vessel, date, BI class, shipment number, depart, container, voyage — data terminal: quiet state, status at a glance

Same data terminal with conversations module surfaced and a phone overlay asking who has been talked to about shipping early — data terminal: live state, the conversation walks in

Phone scenario — incoming appointment call with Dr. Solomon, scheduled for 4:30pm, lock-screen interface with accept and decline — phone: appointments arrive as calls, not notifications

One vocabulary, every surface work shows up on.

The visual system held all of it together: one vocabulary across surfaces. The same blue header, the same timeline metaphor, the same way of showing who’s on the call. So the future felt like a product, not a sketch.

Outcome

Five surfaces designed in concert, held together by one shared visual vocabulary — concrete enough for stakeholders to react to, so the future felt like a product, not a sketch.

surfaces designed in concert: wall display, laptop, tablet, phone, terminal.

vignettes anchored to real work scenarios, not abstract diagrams.

visual vocabulary shared across surfaces, making the future feel like a product.

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Let’s make something work.

Boston & remote · Open to full-time & contract

will.a.bruno@gmail.com