🆕Classic vs. Modern View
UI styles for the People Module
Overview
The People Directory offers two UI styles—Classic and Modern—to support different ways of discovering and exploring people across the organization.
The Classic view emphasizes browsing, structured navigation, and multiple display formats, while the Modern view introduces a search-first, Google-style experience with smart filters and optional AI assistance.
Classic Directory View
The Classic view is the default People Directory experience and is designed for browsing and structured exploration of employee profiles. Users can search for individuals by name or browse through the full list of users in the system.
The Classic view supports multiple display options that can be selected based on user preference. In Tile View, users are displayed in a grid format with profile pictures for quick visual recognition. List View presents a comprehensive, scrollable list of all users and their key details. Org Chart View visualizes the organizational hierarchy, allowing users to understand reporting relationships and navigate through managers and their teams.
When users open the People module in the Classic view, all users are rendered alphabetically, and pagination is used to move through large directories.
Filters can be applied to narrow results. For example, including filtering by manager. When filtering by manager, users can optionally include all reports, allowing both direct and indirect reports across multiple hierarchy levels to be shown.
Profile cards in the Classic view display a configurable number of profile fields. Admins can choose which fields appear on each card and can display up to 15 profile fields per person, enabling richer profile visibility directly within the directory.
Modern Directory view
The Modern view introduces a search-first experience optimized for speed, scale, and relevance. Instead of landing on a full list of users, employees are presented with a centered, modern-style search bar when they open the People module.
Users can search by name, job title, or other profile fields and view results in a clean grid layout. This approach avoids loading thousands of profiles upfront and is especially effective for large organizations with complex people data.
Quick filters in the Modern view
The Modern view includes built-in quick filters positioned below the search bar to help users quickly surface people most relevant to them. Selecting a quick filter immediately triggers a search, and only one quick filter can be active at a time.
Available quick filters include recent collaborators, people reporting to the user, people in the user’s department, people the user follows, and people in the user’s location. The availability of certain filters depends on whether related features such as Departments or Locations are enabled in the domain. When a quick filter is applied, it replaces any previously selected custom filters.
In addition to quick filters, the Modern view supports advanced filtering through custom filters configured by admins. Up to five custom filters can be enabled, using predefined profile fields such as job title, department, location, skill, or language, as well as supported custom profile fields.
Multiple custom filters can be applied at the same time, and multiple values can be selected within a single filter. Results are narrowed progressively so that people must match all active filters, while matching any selected value within each individual filter. This allows precise filtering without requiring complex searches.
Search behavior and AI-assisted discovery
The Modern People Directory supports searching across multiple profile fields, including names, job titles, and other configured attributes. Searches return results quickly, even in very large directories.
When enabled by an admin, the Modern view integrates with the Colleague Finder AI Assistant. Users can switch to AI Assistant Mode directly from the search bar and ask natural-language questions to discover people based on intent, such as role, expertise, or location. The assistant returns relevant results and supports follow-up questions within the same interaction.
Choosing between Classic and Modern
The Classic view is ideal for users who prefer browsing, visual hierarchy, and structured navigation through tiles, lists, or org charts. The Modern view is designed for fast discovery through intelligent search, filtering, and AI-powered assistance, making it especially effective for large and distributed organizations.
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