Search at Frontify

Designing a unified search experience for a brand management platform serving 1 million monthly active users.

The goal was to create a powerful, unified search feature that enables users to quickly and easily find any content across the platform.

Background

Research revealed that nearly half of users rely on search when they don’t know where content is located, while the other half use it for faster navigation.

Search before redesign

Challenges

When I began working on the search, user feedback highlighted significant pain points:

Low usability: 57% of users couldn’t find what they expected, and only 15% opened at least one result.
Fragmented experience: two separate contextual searches confused users searching across asset and text-based content.
Limited functionality: content indexing was incomplete, and exact match searches failed to return relevant results.

Approach

To solve these issues, we focused on three main areas.

Unified search design
I introduced a command search pattern accessible via keyboard shortcuts or menu buttons from anywhere in the platform. This streamlined navigation and improved efficiency.

Expanded content indexing
We ensured all types of content—assets, guidelines, and text—were indexed for searchability.

Accessibility enhancements
Search was designed to support keyboard navigation fully, meeting accessibility standards confirmed by external testing. Collaboration with engineers ensured technical feasibility while researchers provided insights into user needs. Together, we iterated on prototypes to refine usability.

Impact

The redesigned search delivered measurable improvements:

A 10% increase in user engagement through better content discovery.
Enhanced accessibility for all users.
A seamless experience that reduced confusion between asset and text searches.

Advancing Search Intelligence

To further enhance usability we implemented synonym-based matching to improve search relevance across different languages or terminology.

We know from the research that most of our users are not aware of new content being added to the platform for them by their editors. Search became a discovery tool for new content by surfacing updates added by editors. This increased user engagement and positioned search as an integral part of users’ workflows.

Key Takeaways

This project had a significant impact on the product by:

Transforming search into a powerful tool that improved user satisfaction and engagement.
Enhancing the platform’s value by enabling faster navigation and seamless discovery of assets and guidelines, making it an essential part of users’ workflows.
Driving accessibility improvements, ensuring the product is inclusive and usable for all users.
Elevating search to be a standout feature, reinforcing the company’s mission to deliver an exceptional brand management experience.