Knowde Search and Discovery

Team: PM, Associate PM, SME | Title: Senior Product Designer | Duration: 11/20 - 6/22 | Location: Remote

About Knowde

Knowde is “the marketplace for ingredients, polymers and chemistry” with over 140k products, in more than 6,000 supplier storefronts. Their ambitious mission is to let buyers “search, sample, quote and purchase products from every supplier on earth — all in one place.”

Backstory

In November 2020 I joined Knowde as a Senior Product Designer. As a member of the talented, highly collaborative product design team I took design ownership of the search experience. As I onboarded, the Product org was racing to release a major overhaul of search and storefronts, the foundations of the product. Though an improvement, it soon became evident that many problems were unresolved, and mine to fix in a dedicated search pod with brilliant PMs and the Director of Knowledge as our subject matter expert.

Challenges

Knowde’s search is based on their taxonomy, purpose-built for the chemical and ingredient industry, encompassing thousands of nested categories and filters. Ingredient search is the starting point for R&D and procurement professionals to develop new products. Users can pivot a search from products to brands, suppliers, formulations, and documents—a unique feature that adds value but multiplies complexity. Our key challenges evolving search included:

Reducing complexity and leading users to deeper categories for better results
Providing a simple, more usable typeahead
Providing a great ‘All Filters’ experience, to go beyond basic filtering
Creating range filters to narrow products by attributes
Upgrading to a more intelligent back-end to handle complex queries

Outcomes

Over my 1-1/2 years of search design at Knowde, we solved the challenges above, and evolved the experience from confusing to intuitive, cluttered to clean. In the month after our release of “Search 3.0” in May, 2022, metrics showed:

Search results CTR to product page improved from 20.37% to 26.48%
Pagination decreased 60%, indicating users found satisfactory results on the first page
Category selection up 60% and filter use down 30%; indicating category provided small enough result set

I’ve also designed several major search-related NDA features to be released in the coming months that should move the needle further.

Visit Knowde Website

Screens from Knowde search

Hub Pages

Knowde’s megamenu links had always taken users directly to search results. To create a more polished experience, we wanted to create a landing, or “hub”, page for each one. With over 1200 links, most content would have to be generated programmatically, but custom content such as category images and descriptions were attainable goals. With my designs in hand, Knowde visual designers, writers, and outside contractors got to work to help create a high quality browse experience.

Searchbox Typeahead

The typeahead, enabled by our Grid Dynamics back end implementation, provides Google-grade intelligent search suggestions, recent searches, category nested suggestions and direct links to supplier, brand, and product pages.

Search with Category Tiles

A keyword search usually yields far too many results. We added category tiles to encourage users to drill into their category of interest, for better results and more specific filters. We implemented this pattern to replace the overwhelming navigation formerly on the left side, that was rarely used.

Browse Page

Browsing to the lowest level of the taxonomy, with or without a search keyword, removes the tiles, and give users the most category specific filters as further payoff.

Range Filters

In many categories, such as Plastics, users require the ability to filter product search results to specific property ranges. I designed these so that users could quickly drag handles to enable the filter, dial in precise values, and set the desired unit.

All Filters

Knowde surfaces the most relevant filters on the search page, but provides 1000s more in the “All Filters” panel. I redesigned this from a confusing child page to the information dense panel used today.