Office 2016 Smart Lookup

What is Smart Lookup?

Smart Lookup is a new feature in Office 2016 that is shipped in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, etc. It pulls data from Bing like Bing Snapshot, Wikipedia, Bing Image Search, Bing web search, Oxford English Dictionary and the web.
Smart Lookup understands what you are writing in your document and when asked, will show you factual information about your words, directly in the Insights box on the right hand side of your screen.

What problem did we want to solve?

How Microsoft Office help user find helpful information much faster while they write or read contents?

User tend to start research process by opening browser first to find right information as they needed. But what if Office integrate and simplify this information research process by leveraging power of bing? We are not trying to beat web browser, but we are trying to help user find right information quickly, so it can become a aid of web browser for their research. With Smart Lookup, there’s no need to jump over to your web browser every time you need a quick word definition.

Design goal

How design can help user quickly scan different type of information?

First goal we needed to achieve through design is clean typography hierarchy and division of different type of information.

Design iteration

I explored the following design thinking to keep design principle in tact.

• How user can easily scan content and find what they want easily?
• How we can leverage images from Bing to display rich content in organized way?

We did 5 rounds of design review with peer designers and PMs. I revised design to achieve design goal of Smart Lookup. Here are iterations I did on design.

Design decision

Card framework

We build card framework to keep consistency in different type of information. So, user can instantly know what information is where regardless.

Dictionary integration

The Insights panel has two basic options: “Explore” and “Define.” The former contains basic search results, while the latter provides a word definition if Bing has one on file. However, with Bing technology, we have fairly compelling algorithm to recognize user’s intention. Once this algorithm recognize user is looking for definition, Smart Lookup display snippet of definition at the first page for quick access. So user does not have to click ‘define’ tab in this user scenario. This enables user achieve their goal without moving to different page.

Pixel perfect refinement