PipelineDeals Search Redesign
PipelineDeals has been around for 16 years and was in need of a major search redesign. Users have hundreds to thousands of records and it was time consuming for them to find the correct record.
Date: 2020
My Role: Lead Product Design
Design: User Research, Requirement Building, Interaction Design, Information Architecture, Product Design
Stakeholder Objectives
Business Objective
Redesign the current search that is faster, more intuitive, and allows users to spend time closing sales instead of searching.
My Objective
My objective and role in this project was to discover the real problem that our users were facing. While we knew our users did not like the current search we did not know why.
Challenges
The three large challenges that we came across are:
Context and Relevance
User Data
Modernization
Challenge #1
Context & Relevance
What users need for search more than anything else is making sure that the searches that are showing up are relevant to what they are searching for as well has having user interface that gives them context as to what they are seeing.
The relevance was done by a great engineering team on the backend server.
The context is the challenge of me as the designer to make sure that the user knows what they are looking at, why that data is showing up, and what they can do with that data.
Challenge #2
User Data
In software where there are many different types of customers the big challenge with creating a search design is making sure that the data being shown is helpful for all users.
Challenge #3
Modernization
In the midst of this project PipelineDeals is also working on modernizing the look and feel. While this gives flexibility on making the new search with new components is also adds in the complexity of working to maintain the current system at the same time.
This is an ongoing challenge on all new features as I am working with the team on the new design system in 2021 (Case study coming in late 2021)
Design Process
Instead of starting the project with all the requirements already built out the project started out with the team exploring through customer feedback, conducting user interviews, and doing a competitive analysis of other search designs. By taking the time to have all of the information before creating the requirements we had a better understanding of what was needed by our users.
Low-Fi Sketching
Wireframes
User Interviews and Surveys
High-Fi Designs & Specs
MVP Launch
When the MVP launched many users did not like that the search took over their entire screen vs having a smaller search that has been done previously. While users used it for several days they found that they liked to have all of the additional information for search, but they rather get all of the information faster.
This was a discovery in beta, but it was decided to wait until seeing what the larger user base thought. The ‘small search’ was launched two weeks later along with the header redesign. (Case study coming soon)
V2 Launch
The v2 launch introduced the concept of ‘peak search’ and allowed users to make the choice on their own if they wanted to see the more advanced details if they needed more information.
This launch went over very well. After the launch the users loved the advanced search because they could quickly move through the large amount of data and could filter down if needed.
Retrospective
As the product design team is maturing at PipelineDeals the biggest change the needs to be made is the improvement of research and surveys at all points of the project. At the beginning of the project there was a great amount of research done, but after the design was more finalized there was very little done.
The beta was a great start, but there was not enough users in the beta to make it as worthwhile as I would have hoped.