Company: Microsoft / Bing
Role: Creative direction, concept development, social experience design
Dates: February 2012 – April 2014

Situation

Microsoft had an exclusive partnership with Facebook and was looking for ways to “take search social” and provide new and useful features for the Bing search platform.

Task

To understand the value of social data for the user when searching and to apply this in innovative ways to our search use cases.

Action

Together with my team, I defined a vision for Bing+Social which envisioned a “baked in” perspective to social data (as opposed to merely being bolted on to the product).

Results

My vision and framework for using both social content and interpreted social sentiment influenced the pipeline of ideas and features by providing clear direction for new features while focusing experiences more on validated user needs.

We discovered that the relationship to the person supplying the information changed with the type of the search.