Sara Li

July - August 2022

Microsoft Teams

Make sharing contacts as easy as handing out business cards

During the summer of 2022, I interned for Microsoft Teams working on various immediate UX needs, and future driven initiatives. One of the projects I led was to create methods that would make sharing contacts on the Teams platform a seamless experience.

Large corporations use Teams for interdepartmental collaboration, SMBs use Teams to communicate with clients & partners, and educational institutions use it for student/faculty communication. For organizations that have a large employee base or are constantly working with new people - sharing contacts becomes an integral part of their workflow.

PROBLEM

Contact sharing is an inefficient, manual effort

Currently, there is no dedicated way for a user to share a contact with another user on Teams. As a workaround, users have to manually click, copy, and occasionally take a screenshot before pasting the information. For those with more pressing tasks, sharing contacts should be a more streamlined process.

RESEARCHResearch via an internal survey due to reduced formal research funding

Why an internal research survey?Due to reduced funding for formal user research, I spoke with internal users from the Global Intern group within Microsoft. I assumed that they were tech-savvy, familiar with various contact-sharing methods in other apps and would have an opinion on what they disliked and liked.

What did I learn?People care about privacy! Users would not mind their social media profile being shared if it was only their platform alias being given since no personal contact information like email or phone number is revealed.

How does this impact us?Microsoft Teams requires having a contact's email or phone number to initiate a conversation. This complicates the process by introducing an additional layer needed to maintain user privacy.

Opportunity

How might we make sharing contacts as easy as handing out business cards while safeguarding privacy preferences on Microsoft Teams?

Ideation

Casting a wide net to cater to both power users and novice users

Platforms vary in contact-sharing intuitiveness. Some offered clear methods for sharing contacts like a dedicated 'Share Contact' button, while others use subtle, in-flow cues, enhancing convenience for power users.

Filtering

Narrowing concepts leveraging past research & internal stakeholders

/Commands and @mentionsLeveraging an internal report on user initiated invocation methods for a different product, I found that @ is used more to reference people and places and / for coding and documents to insert new items.

Discarding global search bar variationsAfter consulting with PM and Engineering, we concluded that the benefits of search bar variations don’t justify the technical effort, especially given stronger alternatives.

Multi-select vs single-selectInternal feedback showed that sending multiple contacts tended to be rare, so the final design uses single select for efficiency.

Solution

Introducing in-context contact sharing methods, catered to both novice and power users

via @mentionWhen the user types @ in chat compose, two options pop up: @mention someone or share someone's contact. From user feedback It was also important to clarify that the other person won't be notified since that was a concern of using the @ function I found in the research report

via chat extensionA contact sharing message extension keeps users in the context to the chat and its quick to access, but it also caters to users with lower technology confidence since options like the @ function may be less familiar

via drag n’ dropIf we're talking about maximizing efficiency, then there's nothing quicker than simply dragging and dropping a contact into the chat you're in.

via profile cardThe last solution was having a copy contact option right in someone's profile card since people tend to navigate here to get someone's information or learn more about them.

Safeguarding privacy preferences via transparent copy and granular control settings

Transparent copyImproved the privacy preferences by clarifying what happens when you accept a chat.I updated the copy to indicate that others could then view your contact information and included an optional link to change privacy settings.

Granular control settingsThe second change enhances privacy by adding more granularity in user settings. Previously, there were only two options: either to show or hide from everyone I added the option to only show the contacts the user accepts

Outcome

Reflection

Speaking with internal stakeholders (PMs, designers & engineers) to gather information is just as important as speaking with our users. I gained a ton of valuable insights during these conversations and it provided another way for me to validate my design decisions.