Copy of Contextual Help

Contextual Help - Windows 10

What is it about?
Search engine, in general, has been evolving a lot and Bing from its start has developed enormous techniques to serve the user intent. What we intended was to make Bing more relevant by providing context.

The Challenge

User today uses all sorts of platform and devices. While searching on web a lot of this information is not taken into consideration. The biggest challenge was to identify these entry points and opportunities where we can grab context and pass it Bing.

The impact

Tech Help answers team focussed on helping users on their help related intent and also bringing more relevance with Users context on Bing through device and OS and thus help them with any Software or hardware help queries.

User behavior on a search engine

We tried to looked on the existing behavior of how user's are presently using search engine

When a user searches on a search engine, he is presented with algos (Blue links) which comprises of

Primary title in context with searched query
Source URL
Secondary metadata

The user navigates to the different websites mostly relying on

Metadata information
Source authenticity

When user do not find a reliable source, they reformulate the query and search again.

Overall there are possibilities of the user being fully satisfied, partially satisfied or not satisfied with the algos or answer that search engine provides.

So are we missing something?

Inorder to understand this we looked into a lot of user queries and logs. One very important thing that was found was for the same query and same answer some users are satisfied and some are not. We found out that there is a missing user context.

What device the user is using?
What was the user trying to perform?
What software version the user has?

Bing ranking and relevance

User Context is missing

Web information

Where would we get this user context from?

Let us look at the user again, there are two pieces of information that we can always start with

where is the user
what is the task the user is trying to perform

All of this information is available in the user's device

User pain points

formulating the right query to search

- not know what to search.

- not knowing how to search.

Going back and forth and not realizing where to find help

Key Scenarios

Scenario 1: When user searches for an issue, conversational paradigm, can help user to get to the exact issue

Scenario 2: When user is trying to perform a task in OS settings

Related task on Windows Settings

Aid to task completion

Dynamic top queried questions on Bing.com, help the users to reach out to the task intent associated with the relevant settings page without they looking for an answer on a search engine