Modernize the Search Experience for a Leading Enterprise Software Company

A global leader in IT workflow management had surprisingly limited site search capabilities. As a contractor supporting their AEM platform I added type-ahead, filtering (facets) and search tuning.

With no budget for user testing so we decided on adding the search refinements in a left rail for desktop and in a drop-down for mobile. This is a common experience that is familiar with many users. Since the content was tagged with a structured taxonomy our information architecture led is to design an expandable parent category with multi-select checkboxes. Additionally we included "pills" to reflect the user's selected facets.

For type-ahead/suggested search we decided to present a minimum of three and a maximum of seven hits. The user's selection from a drop-down would navigate directly to the search results page with the selected string as the search query. This is another common and familiar interaction.

We did not design a specific user experience for search tuning.

The front end was managed in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). The search platform was Solr.

• Information architecture on the search index to include type-ahead strings and facets.
• Documented search tuning features in the Solr backoffice.