search.subscribe.share in outlook 2007 : Search

Paul Thurrott review of Office B2TR

michaelaffronti — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 23:40:00 GMT

Another great review by Paul Thurrott over on the Windows SuperSite: http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/office2007_beta2_tr.asp.

He's got some great information on Outlook and talks specifically about the new Instant Search functionality.

U.S. Government using MSN Search technology

michaelaffronti — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 21:49:00 GMT

The U.S. government has recently expanded its search capabilities across many of its public-facing internet sites using technology from MSN that was previously Microsoft-only, allowing for a more "citizen-focused" information portal.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1915378,00.asp

Instant Search - Part 4: The New Search Lexicon

michaelaffronti — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 06:52:00 GMT

Search before Outlook 12

Search in Outlook 2003 had many issues that prevented users from taking full advantage of it as a primary means of interacting with their mail data.

The Find UI was not visible by default, and most users did not know how to turn it on. Those that turned it off were unable to turn it back on. It also had significant UI complexity, i.e. too many knobs and levers that blended in with each other and obfuscated their purpose. The Advanced Find UI was very complicated and difficult to use for most users.

Most importantly, search in Outlook 2003 was slow. The lack of speed was crippling to most users and compounded the problems with the UI. It was very difficult to search across different store types, and that worked against Outlook’s goal of being able to access so many different types of data stores.

The New Search Lexicon

Search was never considered a primary means of finding information in Outlook. We have taught our users to use folders and flagging systems to help keep mail organized and make it easier to find when needed.

Now that Search returns sub-second results, we can confidently state that Search is the predominant way we want our users to find their information. Users can now move away from folder-based filing systems if they'd like and use Search to always find the items they need, no matter what folder or store they are in. If you prefer to maintain a folder-based filing system (like I do), then our scoping model means you just click a folder and instantly search just its contents, with the ability to up-scope to All Mail Items with just one click.

Deprecation

The new Outlook 12 Search replaces the UI from Outlook 2003’s Find system with the new Search Pane. Along with the Query Builder and view filtering, this new UI represents an entirely new way for users to interact with their Outlook items. Scoped, item-level filtering means that using Search to pare down your view to see less items and find the one you want is a vast improvement over search in 2003.

Instant Search Object Model Extensibility

michaelaffronti — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 03:32:00 GMT

My fellow PM Ryan Gregg has a great blog about our new Outlook Object Model and all of the cool features you can tap into using our extensiblity architecture. One of those cool features is Search, and he has written an excellent post thats a primer on using Search's full content engine through the Object Model:

http://blogs.msdn.com/rgregg/archive/2005/12/12/502904.aspx

Instant Search - Part 2: The Find Timeline & Scoping

michaelaffronti — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 03:30:00 GMT

Our research and usability studies helped us determine where the bottlenecks where in the current search process for our users, and helped us focus our new design on a few key tenets.

The first and most important is that of availability, where Outlook 12’s Search functionality is always available in all modules with a deterministic location and style. The look and feel of the new UI is the key characteristic of our second tenet, simplicity. We did not want the new speed and effectiveness of our search engine to be undermined by a complex UI, so the new Search interface is simple and easy to use with just a single box to type searches into, but allows for the use of advanced functionality through a special drop-down that exposes more features.

The speed and power of the new Outlook 12 Search functionality are two of the most noticeable improvements, as we are now able to return sub-second results to the user over their entire mail store. That means we are able to intelligently index and catalog all of your Outlook mail, calendar, contact, and other data types quickly at startup and keep track of new items while Outlook is running, while making a minimum impact on system performance and never interrupting your work.

The Find Timeline

To better understand how Outlook 12 improves the overall search experience for our users, it is helpful to see our strategy for addressing each step in the Find timeline, reducing the amount of time spent in each step to drive down the total elapsed time. The Find Timeline is our model for the different stages a user goes through when performing a search in Outlook, from the initial thought in their head to seeing the results in the application.

The following diagram shows the steps in the Find Timeline for Outlook 12, as well as a comparison to those in Outlook 2003:

Underlying Interaction Model

Given the existing usage patterns stated above and the known problems that customers are having today with Find, the key to our new design for Outlook 12 Search is one of scoping.

The ‘scope’ of your search is defined as being the range of data that you are searching; think of it as understanding that Michael Affronti’s name will appear in the ‘A’ section of the phonebook and beginning your search there. You have ‘scoped’ your search to the ‘A’ section of the phonebook in an attempt to lower the number of entries you have to look through and reduce the amount of results any potential search would have.

Filtering Interaction Model

Find in Outlook 12 is actually a local filter (based on the current scope selection in the Navigation Pane) intended to return a focused result set, rather than a globally scoped search operation that would generally return a larger result set.

Scoping

One of the obvious problems that Outlook 2003 users encounter is not getting the exact search results they are after (because they are looking within their own information, they know they’ve seen or filed it in the past). A key factor is not realizing where they are searching despite several hints found in the user interface. They often don’t associate typing in a search with being in any particular place within Outlook, which would be fine if everything and everyplace anywhere in Outlook was always searched at lighting fast speed, but that is not the case, nor is it desirable given our field research.

The solution provided to this problem in most Outlook and Web search software is put a scoping mechanism (generally a dropdown menu) next to the Find textbox to let the user control where to search before they issue the query. This does help some people, but puts additional cognitive load on the user to figure out where they want to search before entering the search themselves.

In Outlook 12, a simple, straightforward and deterministic method and conceptual model was devised to encourage users to start searching locally first in the current folder (since in field studies, it became clear that people do in fact know where they’ve put things within Outlook and know generally what folder or module to use to retrieve them).

If the user was not in the correct folder to find the desired items, Outlook 12 offers new ways to simply upscope and broaden their search within the current module. Or conversely, they can switch modules to the Folder List and upscope to look across all Outlook items.

The first method utilizes a link at the bottom of the set of search results that up-scopes to a special All Items folder to broaden the search scope. The location of this is important, as it appears right at the bottom of where the user will be looking at the results. It is both in a helpful location and worded simply enough to be useful.

The second method is to use the up-scoping link located in the Scoping Menu drop-down off of the Search Box. In my next post I will put up some detailed pictures of our new Search UI and give you an opportunity to see this new Scoping Menu, as well as give you a first-hand look at the how and why we built the elements as they are.

The third method is to use the Navigation Pane to up-scope the search. Every Outlook user learns to use the Navigation Pane immediately to change folders and navigate around the application. It is the most common and straightforward location to place a scoping mechanism, as users must use that screen real estate to do the most common tasks in Outlook. The special All Items folder found within each module serves as a convenient click target or keyboard shortcut to invoke a broad search. The ease with which someone can switch from a local folder search to a global search is exactly one mouse click or one keyboard shortcut combination.

For those users that would like to always search in the scope of all the items in that module, they can easily enable this in the Search Options dialog. This will allow you to have the Search Box always peform queries over all of your items in the current module.

This approach of searching first in your current location within Outlook is contrary to what several other third-party and even internal Outlook Search solutions do – they try to search across all parts of Outlook, returning every different type of data that matches. That experience has been reported by users as being suboptimal because too many results come back, and they do not deeply embed the search experience and seamlessly leverage the Outlook user interface for this purpose as only this solution can.

Instant Search - Part 1: Information Overload

michaelaffronti — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 04:30:00 GMT

Over the next several posts I'm going to focus on explaining some of the methedology, user research, and design models that drove our implementation of Instant Search in Outlook 12. I'm going to start by briefly discussing the concept of information overload and some of the basic user scenarios we thought about, and in the next post I'll focus on our concept of the Find Timeline and how that drove our underlying infrastructure.

Information Overload

Outlook has become the one-stop-shop for its users as their central point of information management. A typical user has a work email account, a personal email account, appointments, and contacts in Outlook, and with Outlook 12 they’ll have RSS aggregation and SharePoint data to contend with as well. There are five different kinds of email accounts alone that Outlook can connect to.

Our average user is dealing with information overload on a massive scale and is often at a loss for keeping up with their incoming mail. It is not uncommon for a corporate user to have an enormous amount of items in one folder, as evidenced by this user who has over 10,000 items in their inbox:

When dealing with this much information, one of the best ways to find the specific piece that you’re looking for is by using a search engine. Searching on the web has replaced traditional browsing as the first step many people take when trying to find something Internet, and searching in applications is traveling the same path.

Outlook 2003 had the concept of finding specific items in your mailbox using a search engine built-in to the application. It was not widely used due to lack of speed, reliability, and extensibility when compared to third-party solutions and even other Microsoft products. Outlook 12 will deliver the simple and efficient means to quickly find any item within Outlook on demand, provide the ability to filter down long lists interactively and accurately display matches.

The new Outlook 12 Search UI design is seamlessly integrated, and leverages familiar elements within Outlook to deliver a search experience that feels as if the application was designed around it. To create a great search experience for our users right out of the box, the Outlook team conducted research and focus groups to better understand what types of information users searched for inside our application. Specifically, we attempted to determine the most common search criteria and scenarios for each of the modules (mail, calendar, contacts, etc.) inside Outlook. Creating this list of common scenarios enabled us to create a better search experience for users by designing effective default searches and a UI that allowed them to quickly re-create these common queries in each module. This keeps the results set smaller for these queries and allows the user to quickly and easily find the right item they were looking for in each module.