A Fortune 500 healthcare company's internal AI assistant had no mobile or tablet support, limiting adoption to desktop-only users. I co-led the 10-week engagement to bring it natively into Microsoft Teams — resolving an open architecture decision through structured comparison and designing a complete interaction system within Microsoft's platform constraints, from proof of concept through production-ready handoff.
Highlights
role
Proof of Concept, Strategy, Architecture, Interaction Design, UI design, Engineering Handoff
team
2 UX Designers, 1 Software Developer, 1 Scrum Master
duration
10 weeks
Client name anonymized per NDA. "Contoso" is used throughout as a placeholder, following Microsoft's standard convention for sample/demo company names.
The context
Contoso had developed an internal AI assistant to help employees retrieve information from enterprise knowledge sources. Although the assistant was available through a standalone web application, employees needed to leave their primary collaboration environment to use it.
The business wanted to integrate the assistant into Microsoft Teams, where employees already spent much of their working day. The initiative had an ambitious target: increase adoption tenfold without rebuilding the existing AI backend.
Our team had ten weeks to evaluate the integration approach and deliver a Teams-compatible experience.
The first significant decision was architectural.
Choosing the right integration approach
I evaluated two approaches for integrating MIA into Microsoft Teams: embedding a custom React application or using native Teams components and Adaptive Cards. The decision depended on functional requirements, engineering effort, platform constraints, and long-term maintainability.
Used the platform's constraints to the product's advantage
I reviewed the feature scope and retained organization switching, source citations, and response feedback. These capabilities allowed employees to access information in the correct organizational context, inspect supporting sources, and communicate response quality.
Delivered designs the developer could build from directly
Instead of handing off annotated wireframes for the developer to interpret, every screen was designed inside the same tool the developer used to build — Microsoft's Adaptive Card Designer Each card was exported as a JSON code file and covered every real scenario a user would encounter.
Results
User Impact
First-time mobile and tablet access - closed a gap that made the product unreachable for most users
Core experience preserved despite features cut
Zero behavioral change required - lives where employees already work
Business Impact
Unblocked a stalled project with one structured decision
Eliminated an entire frontend to build, host, and maintain
Zero infrastructure rework - delivered on existing systems
Production-ready code delivered - no design-to-dev interpretation cycle
Built to scale inside Microsoft's ecosystem without additional frontend debt
What I Learned
Designing within Microsoft's ecosystem reinforced that platform constraints can be strategic advantages. By embracing native components rather than replicating the web experience, we reduced implementation complexity, shortened delivery time, and produced a solution that fit naturally into employees' existing workflows.