Designing for Multiple Layers in Search

A gesture toward and summary of my article on ThoughtSpot’s (my previous employer’s) product blog

Hello! It’s been a bit. I’ve been busy designing products and interfaces at ThoughtSpot: a Search-driven business intelligence platform, a.k.a., a Search engine for your company’s data. It’s been a privilege and a challenge.

One of those challenges is improving ThoughtSpot’s search engine. We’re embracing the super-prevalent search convention in hopes that our users find it an intuitive and speedy experience, but in some ways ThoughtSpot’s search bar must behave differently than your standard online search. Namely, we’re taking a user’s search query and trying to return a multivariate result (rather than just, say, a single matching web page).

We just completed a round of Search improvements and experiments, so it was high time I posted something about it on ThoughtSpot’s company blog. Take a look at the piece, Designing for Multiple Layers in Search, to see how we visualized all of the layers of information we needed to reflect back to the user.

This is an energizing challenge that I’ll continue to grind on for the coming months… but it’s nice to come up for a breath of fresh air once in a while! Let me know what you think, and make sure you check out ThoughtSpot.