Outlook Room Finder

Room Finder is a feature that is deeply integrated into Outlook’s meeting flow. Our customers rely on it to book specific rooms during specific times. The team had been aware that “room booking was hard” for our customers. It had been our second-highest source of enterprise customer dissatisfaction. The customer’s temperature for improving this functionality in Outlook became hot. In conjunction, the Places service team was working with larger enterprise customers to migrate from third-party room management and booking solutions to using Microsoft 365 exclusively. Some of these customers would be making a significant investment to move their conference rooms back to Exchange Online (Outlook) and to use Microsoft-recommended hardware and devices in those rooms.

The project's goal was to improve the current experience vastly: respond to user updates to the meeting date, time, and attendee list, more filters, and confident room suggestions. In parallel, we wanted to increase engineering agility by shipping a singular experience to multiple platforms. Outlook’s Room Finder would be the first time we built a web-powered experience hosted by native clients.

Team: Donna Seo (Design Lead), Daniel Choi (Designer), Brandon Haist (Researcher), Jennifer Lu (Product Manager), Victoria Rodriguez (Product Manager)

Problem

When given carte blanche to talk about any problem areas in Outlook, room booking was by far the most common topic. Customers described Room Finder as outdated, causing many to begin using third-party solutions to book meeting rooms. The Room Finder was outdated in all fairness because it was an artifact from an older version of Outlook. For example, it did not consider adjustments to the date and time from the meeting form and the number of people added to the recipient lines.

Experience Gaps

Customers wanted to be able to scope by city, building, a floor within a building. Most users expected type-down support rather than a drop-down menu. In addition, customers wanted to be able to filter by capacity, room equipment, and accessibility.

Primary User Jobs

Find a meeting room that meets specific criteria (capacity, floor, features, accessibility).
Find an available meeting room in one particular building.
Book in unfamiliar locations (city or building).

Solution

Provide customers scopes, filters, and intelligent suggestions. Additionally, before a user even adjusted anything, suggested rooms would preemptively consider the number of people in the recipient lines and where they were located.

When the new Room Finder shipped, our customers were delighted to see the updates and new functionality — resulting in many companies letting go of their third-party tool and moving to Outlook’s native Room Finder.

Room Finder also enabled Workspace Booking for when our users return back to work post-pandemic. Since launch, 50+ companies have onboarded to use Outlook Workspace Booking through Room Finder in less than three months. Workspace Booking feature is being used by over 60 countries with Microsoft offices. On average, 20k bookings occur a month as global employees start to return to the office.

Room Finder is now a cross-platform feature available in Outlook Windows, Web, and Mobile.