Create a great user experience with SharePoint Search Usage Reports

User experience means different things to different people. The context we are going to talk about in this article is the user experience related to your employees being able to find the information that they are looking for easily. This is one of the key components to a succesful and well adopted Intranet or "Digital Workplace".

A pain point for users with many Intranets is that content is hard to find. Migrate your content to SharePoint, wait for it to get indexed and your job is done right, people can just search for it. This is a common misconception and leads to to old addage "SharePoint sucks".

SharePoint does not suck, just that they way that you have implemented it sucks.

In the consumer world, people search to find what they are looking for. More often than not that experience is pretty good and you find what you need. Why can't you have that experience at work as well? Well you can. You just need to know how and have the data to validate it.

You may have heard the saying that your Intranet should and is a living breathing organism. This is true, your Intranet is never finished. The job is not done after the lauch of this new shiny tool. This is when the work really begins. Those quick links that you have published on the Home Page after Information Architecture workshops might be good for launch but are they really what your employees are accessing frequently? Global Navigation, tick we have what we think is a great structure....but is it?

This is where you as Intranet Owners, Digital Workplace experts / champions...whatever the title need to iterate, garner feedback and adjust as required to really provide a great "User Experience".

Enter the new Microsoft Search Usage Reports

These new reports help you visualize data generated from Microsoft search requests that have been initiated from SharePoint Home and the Office.com search boxes. The insights that you gather from these reports will help enable you to get a better understanding of what your users are searching for and allow you to take actions that will ensure a more useful and amazing user experience for them.

With these reports, accessible from the Search and Itelligence section of the Office 365 Admin Centre, you can see Top queries, queries that have returined no results and also abandonded aueries. Each useful in their own right.

Imagine looking though the top queries and identifying that 10 people from the Human Resources Department are search for a particlular document, topic or content? You can then maybe create a page on the Intranet all about that topic, bring the relevenat content to a single location and then promote that to a Global Navigation node. Maybe then even use audeience targeting to display just for the HR Team.

Or maybe there is a trend across the entire company that relates to the process of applying for leave. Why not then build and information page all about applying for leave, using a quick link on the Home Page (because at launch you did not have one) and linking to that page. Now all the information for employees is easilay accessible and you have now provided a great USER EXPERIENCE.

All because you are taking notice, listening if you will to what users want and looking at the data to help make informed decisions. You can even download these reports and do some even deeper analysis over them.

So with the new Microsoft Search Usage Reports you can continue to iterate and provide a really great user experience for your employees. I would highly recommend that you add this to your task list on a regular basis.