The Customer

Our Client is Microsoft, an American multinational technology corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington. It develops, manufactures, licenses supports and sells computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and services. Its best-known software products are:

• The Microsoft Windows operating system.
• The Microsoft Office suite.
• The Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers.

As of December 2022, Microsoft has a market cap of $1.898 Trillion. This makes Microsoft the world’s third most valuable company by market cap.

Challenges

It’s no secret that Microsoft faced a significant transformation under its new leadership in 2016. This transformation was embracing the evolution of software technology from perpetual licensing to a more consumption and SaaS-based solution.

At that point, many new products appeared in the educational area, and Microsoft concluded that it was necessary to focus on introducing innovative ways to improve the learning experience using Microsoft Teams.

Digicode and Microsoft created a long-term partnership to support these transformation activities that benefited the client with the right mix of digital technology expertise, business knowledge sharing, and the ability to innovate with momentum.

Digicode became the only external innovation vendor for the Microsoft Israel R&D centre.

Solution

Digicode’s role was to bring a brand-new e-learning experience to MS Teams/Office 365 and cover the school audience based on it. For this purpose, it was decided to develop a new social quiz that allows users to challenge each other and combine their knowledge for a chance to win fabulous prizes and infinite glory for Android and iOS. Digicode worked alongside Microsoft engineers’ product development cycles.

The Digicode team started working on the project by reviewing the documentation and MS Teams functionality. We decided to use technologies like Angular 5, Node.JS, and Azure services to make the quiz game available on iOS and Android devices.

There were three primary goals for the new Microsoft app named Passit:

To get things going, we started by crafting wireframes with a pencil. It soon became apparent that the Microsoft & Digicode team were all on the same wavelength. The customer accepted all the proposed ideas and was pleasantly surprised by the quality of our team’s work. Then we moved on to designing the user journey. We developed the game flow and created all the screens based on the user journey. The more we figured out how users would interact with the app, the more the quiz became like the real thing.

Current game flow

The project was successfully developed and delivered to the customer on time and within budget. The app was compatible with Android and iOS devices and soon became popular among Australian, USA, and Israel schools.

Outcomes

By working alongside Microsoft, Digicode has helped infuse innovation and rekindle the entrepreneurial spirit within Microsoft itself. This engagement is in an area of innovation that Microsoft is leading now in the educational space.

A gamification technology integrated into Teams by Digicode dramatically increased the easiness and level of communication between teachers and their classes, helped to collect and share feedback much more efficiently and answered the increasing demand for educational system modernization.

This was the first innovation project delivered by Digicode, followed by many more.

Digicode’s culture is what not only attracted Microsoft but has expanded the relationship to the next level.