☕️ Morning Brew
Role: Product Design Intern
Team: 4 Designers, 1 UX Researcher, 1 PM
Tools: Figma, Notion, Sprig, Heap, Jira
Timeline: Jun 2022 - Aug 2022 (2 months)
Team: 4 Designers, 1 UX Researcher, 1 PM
On the Morning Brew website, currently search is hidden in the footer and is not highlighted as a feature. Since it’s not visible in the nav bar, there’s not much data on what our users would search for and if they would search in the first place. My task was to redesign the search experience to make it easier for users to search the Morning Brew site.
I led efforts around the end-to-end process of redesigning this feature, including planning and conducting user research regarding search and its filters, ensuring smooth collaboration with stakeholders in PM and Engineering, and leading the design and critiquing process.
At the time, data around the search feature was very ambiguous - talking with engineers and looking at search queries, there wasn’t much to identify a pattern of what users would search for, or if users even use search at all. With the lack of knowledge and no solid business goals surrounding the feature, I defined the Whys and Goals for this redesign:
There’s some terms that might cause some confusion, so read this before you continue:
Morning Brew currently has 17 brands, each one composing a newsletter and/or podcast(s). These are all on separate websites with their own domain. Since the brands are isolated from one another, their search feature only searches within that brand, not within all brands.
Single-brand search refers to that scenario - searching only within ONE brand.
Multi-brand search refers to a search feature that acts as a global search; searching ALL brands.
Brand is Morning Brew’s current content structure. A brand is different from newsletter as they aim to contain broader content types, such as newsletters AND/OR podcasts.
Due to the lack of data, I wanted to learn more about what our users’ needs, goals, and frustrations are when searching for something within a website, and specifically Morning Brew. I worked with our UX Researcher to conduct interviews to better understand our users’ motivations and pain points, and a competitive analysis to find out patterns of what the search feature looks like on other media websites.
The key user problem is that without a search feature, it’s difficult to find anything on the website due to the amount of content Morning Brew produces. I wanted to look more into what makes an ideal search experience for the Morning Brew reader.
Search can vary by sites, and since Morning Brew didn’t have a solid search feature to start out with, I decided to look into 11 other media and non-media websites to see how they have designed their search experience and the different ways it could be done. It was interesting seeing how different websites prioritize different needs and goals in their search features!
I synthesized insights from those sites and looked at the different UX features and presented those results with PMs to get the “Go” on conducting further research and interviews.
In this study, I conducted seven 1:1, hour-long moderated contextual inquiry and task-based usability testing over zoom with Morning Brew’s current state and other competitor websites.
I reached out to people on Morning Brew's User Advisory Board and through a site survey to set up interviews. We didn’t have a target user demographic for this study as we wanted diverse perspectives on how users would use search, but our main focus was that they had to be familiar with our product.
The key findings we gathered from the study were about the motivations and pain points users have when searching, specifically on a media website.
Participants commented that having a lot of filters or other relevant articles on the page was “overwhelming” and favored clean and simple search features.
When testing Morning Brew's search most if not all were frustrated trying to find the search (even after I guided them right to it).
Morning Brew's content is aimed at those who are working and don’t have time to browse a website. If it’s difficult to find a relevant story in a short amount of time, users give up searching.
From this, users also favored a multi-brand search over a single-brand search, as it consolidates everything and there’s no need to manage different site searches.
From my research, the main goals users have when searching on a news site are either/or:
Most participants leaned towards #3.
Realizing there were two opposite types of users on the search persona spectrum (leisurely searching and busy searching), I did some empathy mapping on those users to better understand their needs and goals in their experiences.
Then, I solidified three main design goals to hone in on while created the first iterations.
Most participants favored a search bar that required less clicks and was efficient - no redirecting to another page. Most were frustrated and overwhelmed having unrelated items around the search results page. Overall, we want to gather more data on search and then identify what features we need or don’t need.
News in itself is very stressful, I wanna go to a page that doesn’t stress me out.
What? It's all the way down there?
Not having a visible search feature further deters anyone from trying to find content on the site. We want to pull it up the nav bar where users can easily see it. If it’s not easily visible, users will be frustrated, give up, and search somewhere else.
Either I’m searching or browsing… when I’m searching, I don’t want to waste time… I’m usually on a time crunch.
Participants in our study mentioned how they are usually In a time crunch when searching. This means utilizing filters and sorting functions to quickly narrow down their search.
We want to go with a multi-brand search route - this means utilizing newsletter or brand filters which were favored over section or author.
As we design the search results page for our site search tool, we weren’t sure if the filters we had made sense to users. Most favored a newsletter filter in the previous interviews, but since Morning Brew is pivoting to have “newsletters” be renamed as "brands" to become more broad in content, we wanted to see which term was more easily understandable.
To seek feedback, We decided to conduct an unmoderated testing to look at this as well as gather overall feedback on the page to gauge if anything is missing or confusing.
In a multi-brand (global) search, do users understand the term “brand” as a filter label?
A major pushback on this from PMs was due to the work in separating each brand’s website into single-brand searches to up brand awareness, a core business goal.
Referencing data from the previous study on a multi-brand search, I advocated for users in that it’s still good to uncover confusion users might face in the website, whether that’s from the filter labels or from the site architecture. And feedback is always good.
We had six Morning Brew readers look at the search results pages. We showed two wireframes with different labels on their filter bars and asked users to to communicate the goals of the features along with the filter bars side-by-side.
We had no target user similar to last time save for being familiar with Morning Brew to get a diverse range of perspectives and opinions.
This study reinforced my first design goal on keeping a simple, clean search and added a new recommendation pertaining to multi-brand search:
All participants communicated the goals of the search filters, sorting functions, and layout well. Aspects popular with participants were the sorting functions and the highlighted search terms.
Participants remarked that they liked the newsletter/podcast separation vs combining all in brands, as “they come to us as newsletters” and are more familiar with that term.
After creating the Hi-Fis for search in nav, I worked with engineering to figure out feasibility of the different features and functions that search would have. It was great to get an engineer perspective on my work and discuss some of my design choices with him.
The changes I implemented in my designs include:
Unfortunately I won’t be there to see search to nav ship, but am glad I was able to contribute to the process and get the ball rolling.
Can users see the search bar? Is it visible?
Are people engaging with the search results? Does it drive engagement / discoverability and if so, can we leverage that to up engagement and ultimately subscribers?
What are people searching? Why? How can we optimize their experience based on frequent queries?
We can learn more about what users search, whether it’s for a topic, a brand, specific story, etc, and continue iterating on the search experience from that data.
From my research, I recommend a multi-brand search over single-brand. This is definitely a heavy lift for Engineering and I acknowledge that, but it may be worth thinking about as we continue to grow our brands.
Going through Engineering feedback & questions from the SPIKE and making sure we’re all on the same page.
Thank you in advance to Engineering for all the help!
✔️ Got to work more closely with engineers.
✔️ Learned how to work more independently & trust my design / research decisions.
✔️ Experienced how UX processes work in a larger company, especially in an agile environment.
✔️ Learning how to advocate for the user even if there’s pushback.
Josh Filan, Jake Zuke, Erin Allen, Amber Mohammad-Castańeda, Kishan Antala - you all were amazing mentors and teammates and I’ll miss everyone dearly!