It is no secret that amount of email we receive increase every day. For those emails that we care about, most of us take some action on them (read, reply, file, etc.) and put them away. But some of those emails we need to refer back from time to time. A convenient and fast way of digging emails up is searching for them. You enter a keyword or the person that sent it and Exchange returns you the results for that query. But when the part you are looking for is buried within a long conversation it becomes a hassle to find the specific section you are looking for.
OWA has been highlighting the search term hits to easily identify where the search term is within a long conversation. We have recently made 3 improvements to OWA’s hit highlighting feature:
- Auto-expand conversation items that have hits in them
- Auto-scroll to the first search hit
- Hit navigation within a conversation
Auto-expand conversation item with hits
When you search for a term and select a conversation from the result list, OWA will open all the items that have search hits within that conversation and collapse all those that don’t contain the term letting users can concentrate on those items related to their query.
For example the following screenshot shows a conversation with 15 items (3 unread) as it is displayed in Inbox (before search):
When user searches for the keyword “73”, OWA auto-scrolls to first occurrence (explained below), expands all the items that contain “73” and collapses all the items parts that don’t contain the search term. If you want to see the content of items that don’t contain the term, you can still expand them by clicking on that item. You don’t have to open each item part just to see if the word you are searching is there or not. Distraction-free search results FTW!
Auto-scroll to the first search hit
Whenever you search for a term and select a conversation from the result list, OWA will move the scroll position of the reading pane so that the first item part with that search term is in view.
The same conversation displayed in results after we have done a search for “low car” is below. What you will notice here is that the reading pane (right-most panel in the OWA window) is auto-scrolled to reveal the first occurrence of the term “low car”. This way you don’t have scroll up/down a long conversation just to see where the highlights are.
Hit navigation within a conversation
Last one of the improvements is the one we are most proud of and we think will help users save quite a bit of time when searching. We have taken a useful cue from the “find in document/page” feature of word-processors and browsers to implement hit navigation inside a conversation. What this enables is, for the user to jump between search hits quickly using a control built into the reading pane. You can see the control at the right-bottom of the reading pane during search.
Here are the components of the hit navigation control:
- Search term (highlighted with orange background) to match the currently highlighted instance of the term in the reading pane
- Buttons with arrow icons in the control enable user to move to previous (up)/next (down)
- Numbers showing the total number of visible hits for the search term and the relative position of the currently highlighted one
User can move between the search hits by clicking previous and next buttons. Reading pane will move the position to the next or previous search hit depending on the button clicked. The following screenshot shows what OWA UI might look like user searches for “knob” and then use the new hit navigation UI to go to the 5th instance of the term “knob” within that conversation (by clicking next 4 times). As you can see the currently highlighted term is distinguished from the all the other highlights using a different background color (yellow vs. orange). Navigation buttons work in a circular way which means that when you are at 10th hit clicking on next will take you back to the firs item.
We have been rolling out these features to Office365 users and our Enterprise customers can get them by applying Exchange 2013 CU2.