Microsoft Teams

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.

ROLE

Product Design Intern

PROJECT TYPE

New Feature

PLATFORM

Desktop, Mobile

DURATION

May - June 2022

TEAM

PM, Design Mentor

OUTCOME

Presented to wider PM and design leadership

My Role & Process

During my internship in the summer of 2022, I joined the Teams for SMBs design team working on immediate UX needs with PMs and future vision initiatives. Outside of my core responsibilities, this project was self driven and exploratory.

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.

User Research

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.

I learned that 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.

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.

Narrowing Concepts

With a ton of design ideas in hand, I wanted to get an initial gauge from the resources I had:

PMs and Engineers: I spoke with PMs to understand how they envisioned share contacts fitting into the platform given the many other projects they manage, as well as Engineers to understand technical constraints.
Research reports for other products - I used Microsoft's archive of user research studies for Teams and adjacent products to logically abstract findings onto this project; helping me backup my design decisions.

Based on these findings, I scrapped, modified, and validated ideas:

/Commands and @mention - leveraging 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.
Global search bar variations - consulting with PM and Engineering, we found that benefits of sharing by search bar don’t justify the technical effort, especially given stronger alternatives.
Multi-select vs single-select - internal feedback showed that sending multiple contacts tended to be rare, so the final design uses single select for efficiency.

Final Designs

via @mention

When 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 extension

A 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’ drop

If 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 card

The 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.

Transparent copy

Improved 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 settings

The 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

Learnings

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.