People search in Microsoft 365
Microsoft gives you lots of ways to find a colleague and see the files and conversations you share with them. But our data showed that 38% of people looking at someone’s profile were landing on an empty page.
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The problem
There wasn’t enough data in people-centric search. People came looking for a colleague, and for the files and messages they’d shared, and too many of them ended up on an empty profile.
The opportunity
The aim was to increase re-findability of content to over 38%. We also saw a chance to drive adoption of the new people-centric search, and to show the most relevant verticals depending on what someone was trying to do.
The names in these screens are Contoso demo data.
Results
People-centric search shipped in Office.com and SharePoint in the summer of 2022. Once customers were using it, about half the time there were no files to show.
So we added an Overview page that brings together the person’s contact details, org chart and files. In a 50/50 test in production, empty pages went from 50% of sessions to 1%. We shipped the Overview in October 2023.