Microsoft Answers Sort & Filter
Product design, User experience
Project Overview
Another aspect of the Microsoft Answers community forum our team worked on is defining how users should sort and filter posts to find content relevant to their task. We collaborated with the Microsoft team to frame our thinking within the needs of two core user groups: people who are looking for help and people who have expertise and want to help others. We encouraged the team to leverage one of Microsoft's web frameworks, making sure we explored ideas that would be easy for their engineers to build while aligning to their cross-company website components and patterns. Our solution increased the discovery of filters by always having them in view and reduced the number of sort choices to the core options needed.
Best practice guidance
When discussing how to refine the experience, we first reviewed some baseline interaction best practices. For this project, we discussed how discoverability and usage of elements is reduced when you hide them behind something. We also reiterated that the more choices a user has, the harder it becomes to choose. Users should only be able to sort or filter by properties they can see in the view.
User and use case focus
To explore options for sorting functionality, we walked the Microsoft product team through an interactive exercise to define which sort directions best support users in core tasks. The old interface allowed users to choose which direction they wanted, adding unneeded complexity. Focusing on what users are trying to do enabled us to reduce the number of choices and simplify the sorting control.
Exploration and iteration
We looked at approaches for how to revise layout and functionality of filters, starting from smaller modifications and grouping changes. We explored letting users choose a filter based on their objectives, and then did a total remapping of the persistent filter column in their web framework pattern. Persistent placement on the left has the added bonus of creating shorter, more readable line-lengths for the post preview tiles.
More work
