🔍 I led the overhaul of Jostle Search – with a unified search component experience, expanding searchable entities by over 30% of the platform, and enabling users to quickly find what they need based on their access and role
role + timeline:
My role was executing the complete design vision strategy for our next version of search – ensuring scalability and addressing previous customer pain points. I helped to deliver the initial concept to the full customer release, working with dev and product teams – shipping these changes in 2024/2025.
Success Metrics:
10+
Redesigned Search resolved long-standing customer pain points and delivered high-impact feature updates
This is a partial look at the work, with full details kept private due to confidentiality agreements.
The Problem – “Old Search”
Jostle’s old search was slow, fragmented, and lacked context—making it hard for users to find what they needed. The goal was to unify the experience, improve result relevance, expand coverage, and boost performance.
Using Job Stories to Define Journeys
We used a job story framework to envision scenarios needed to deliver and guide the strategy. This helped us to focus search scenarios.
Working with the product team – I helped to develop the vision and strategy for our new search offering. We developed a framework that helped guide how we wanted data to be displayed.
List experience. Simplified experience.
The result was a single, consistent search experience that expanded coverage to more of Jostle’s content – complete with smarter metadata matches, faster performance, and clearer context on why results appear.
Search Entry + Autosuggestions
Users begin with a redesigned search bar that includes autosuggestions as they type, helping them start their queries with confidence. Upon sending a query, results are returned in a list view.
Tabbed Views
Customers can access different areas of a platform – and sometimes you need to find something in a specific area. A tabbed view switcher lets users easily switch between result categories. This made the experience feel more focused and helped people explore results without losing context.
But what about AI?
👀 stay tuned…
Reflection
Leading this project taught me how to design at scale – and build trust with a critical path that every user will likely interact with in the platform. In projects like this – it reinforced the importance of flexibility in design systems, and pushed me to think about how data needs to be structured, passed, and displayed to support a scalable, consistent experience.
Next Case Study
Plan Your Vote