Rebuilding Campuswire Search From the Ground Up
Classes using Campuswire generate a lot of content.
In our first year alone, professors, students and TAs sent ~600,000 messages, across tens of thousands of conversations, and students asked more than 70,000 questions.
User content generation is accelerating, and the longer a course uses Campuswire, the more important its content archive becomes.
So, we decided we needed to rebuild search on Campuswire from the ground up.
The search redesign project had two guiding principles:
- Search should be wicked fast
- Search should be super intuitive
Speed: Searching for posts or messages within a class is now 7x faster — most queries completed in under 400ms 🙏
One of the main challenges users reported re: searching in Campuswire was that often, when searching for some content, users didn’t remember which “type” of content that thing was.
On Campuswire, users can ask questions, answer questions, reply to answers, comment on posts and send messages in chatrooms. When you’re trying to recall something from weeks or even months prior, it can be hard to keep track of what specifically the thing you’re looking for is.
So, we decided to make searching comprehensive — where as previously users had to 1) know what type of content they were after and 2) search specifically for that type, now users can simply enter a single search query and we’ll return results from _all_ content types 🔥.
We’ve got a packed road-map and a lot more is on the way — take Search 2.0 for a spin and, as always, ping us with your feedback!
— The Campuswire Team
