PipelineDeals Search Redesign
PipelineDeals needs a major search redesign. The goal of the redesign is a faster more intuitive search flow that allows users to spend time closing sales instead of searching through their content.
Date: November 2019 - March 2020
My Role: Lead Product Design
Design: User Research, Requirement Building, Interaction Design, Information Architecture, Product Design
Overview
Problem to solve: How can we enable sales teams with hundreds to thousands of records to find a more streamlined way to search for their content?
Design Process
Research for deeper understanding
Customer Painpoints
Diving into this project we were tasked with organizing the feedback that the customer teams have received from customers over the last several years on the current state of search. PipelineDeals prides itself on having customer service teams that work directly with the product team, and we wanted to take all identified pain points and make them a part of our solution. Some pain points included:
Old data that clogged up searches by never going away even if it is not needed
No ability to search by the field desired (such as phone number)
Searching is slow when trying to find data quickly
Key takeaways:
Need for search to show the context and relevance of the content displayed. This is a challenge for the information architecture in the content cards to display the content the user needs and for the technology stack on the backend server to pull the correct data.
Mockups
The designs for the card layouts started with a breakdown of all of the types of content that our users could create within the application, organized by priority and what metadata was associated with that content type.
We identified three major types and four minor types of content that the system allowed and were widely used. The major types were able to be searchable in the current implementation, but the minor elements were not searchable. Within the new search, we wanted to allow these elements to be searchable for a more well-rounded experience.
In the mockups I designed many different options that were vetted within the product and customer teams internally to iterate on the information architecture and the needed context for our users.
User Surveys
After the mockups were vetted and iterated on to a point that all internal stakeholders were happy with the direction we sent out a survey to customers we knew would want to be involved in the redesign process. This survey allowed us to continue to integrate the direction we needed to go to hit all of the user goals we needed for the redesign.
Major takeaways:
Users liked long horizontal cards to allow them to scan down the page for the content
Users wanted to quickly filter their search results
High-Fi Designs & Specs
Version 1 Launch
When version 1 of the new search launched many users did not like that the search took over their entire screen. Users wanted to have a similar experience to have a 'peek’ of the search before committing to a full takeover. Users enjoyed the additional context of the takeover search, but working in fast-moving environments they wanted to get to their information faster.
Retrospective
Users not being thrilled about a takeover search was a discovery in beta. Instead of allowing the uncertainty of the takeover search to launch the team should have gone back to discover the reasoning for the pushback.
The product design team was maturing at PipelineDeals and while research was done at the beginning of the project there was less done as the feature was finalized.
Beta releases are a great start, but research is still needed ahead of time.
Version 2 Launch
Version 2 of the search redesign launched two weeks later. As the designs for the concept of ‘peek search’ were completed as a part of version 1 work the team quickly pivoted and responded to feedback from users. Peek search allowed users to choose if they wanted to see the more advanced details or if they needed more information.
This launch was a large success. After the launch, the users loved the advanced search because they could quickly move through a large amount of data and could filter down if needed.
Key takeaways
Launching new features does not mean iteration stops. Have empathy for your users when introducing a feature that changes their workflow and update as needed.
