Microsoft Purview
Microsoft Purview is a unified data governance platform delivering capabilities for data discovery, data quality, data sharing, data use governance, and data privacy to enterprise organizations with hybrid, poly-cloud, and single-cloud data estates.
How we owned
the problem
Discovery
We invested in an intensive discovery process with customers to understand their needs.
Story Flow
Our user journey documentation helped provide clarity on how customers would interact with a range of capabilities.
Platform
Ultimately, to get the level of flexibility needed to serve the wide range of customers, we landed on an extensibility platform model.
Making data
Discoverable
A core value proposition for any data governance product is making an organization’s data easy to discover by many types of users in many contexts.
Balance user expectations and technical constraints
Users come to any search experience with conventions in mind. It’s critical to be mindful on the technical impact of those considerations as well as the user expectations.
Account for business
and technical users
Data catalogs are used by a wide spectrum of users in organization. It was critical that we account for as many perspectives and needs as possible.
Defining
the Problem
We started our work by validating some explorations with customers and learned a few things…
Data Curation is Critical
Search relies on high quality indexes. High quality indexes rely on human curation.
Different Expectations
Depending on their backgrounds customers wanted extensive Boolean support OR “just a single input field”
Social Search
People depend on social constructs like “Popular searches” to aid search.
Discovery Models
There are many ways to find what you’re looking for.
Data Discovery
Purview enables users to discover data in the data map through query-based exploration as well as logical browsing of sources.
Our focus for Gen 1 has been to provide a conventional faceted-base filtering which supports a wide range of use cases.
Embedded Discovery
Purview’s extensibility model allows other Microsoft products to embed a searchable data catalog in their experiences, reducing the need for customers to leave their context to find data to work with.
Project Highlight: Ontology
As a platform, ontology is a critical aspect of designing our experiences. Customers experience a range of capabilities and the terminology they encounter must be consistent in its meaning and clear in its intent.
Purview Data Discovery:
Outcomes & Learnings
Consider it a journey
People use a number of methods to find things depending on their context, what kind of thing they are looking for, and how much they know about it. It’s important to address as many options as possible.
Words Matter
Focus on terminology early. Even internally, misalignment creates confusion.
Meet the customer where they are
Don’t make customers leave their work to find things. Providing embedded capabilities – and making it easy for partner teams to take advantage of them – is critical to satisfying customers.
Prioritize and Sequence
With multiple product teams depending on a central design team, sequencing is more important than priorities – everyone thinks their work is the most important thing.
Platforms are Different
Platforms require designers adopt new ways to create a broad, shared understanding in order to ensure customers have a consistent experience across the products.
