This is the first blog post in a series that highlights lessons we learnt from interviewing customers before and after launching Email Tags recently.
This lesson took us by surprise!
We’ve always focused our products (and related websites) on helping customers file their emails better. But when we spoke to customers, it was clear that there was a shift away from filing emails to searching for emails.
Filing emails was the old way of making them findable. The new way for most users is Outlook Search.
This was true even for Outlook users who had good filing systems in place already.
Nobody wanted to go into folders and look through emails manually. Instead they were using Outlook’s built in Search tools to help locate emails quickly.
Users of Outlook Search however identified the following 3 problems:
- Search sometimes returns too few emails i.e. important emails may not be found if they don’t have the necessary keywords in them.
- Search sometimes returns too many emails… there may be other emails with the same keywords too.
- Unless you have your emails filed in separate folders, it is difficult to see a group of RELATED emails easily
Filing emails in folders could be a solution for some but for most people it no longer is an effective solution. It takes too much effort to maintain a folder based email filing finding system.
We created Email Tags for Outlook as a solution that builds on Outlook Search and provides all the benefits of folders and search.
We launched it and then interviewed users and found out… that you liked it… BUT… YOU HAD FANTASTIC IDEAS TO MAKE OUTLOOK THE IDEAL EMAIL FINDING TOOL!
We’re working on your ideas and will release something next week.
In the meantime you may want to look at the following links:
Fixing Search Problems In Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010
Make Outlook 2007/2010 search all folders instead of just the current folder
Search Additional Outlook data files (PSTs, OSTs) in Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010