DISCOVER PROJECT
FARM Rio Global
Farm Global Search
Improving product discovery through search
2022
Farm Global's search often returned irrelevant results, making it harder for customers to find products and increasing the risk of abandonment. The project focused on improving product discovery by making search more relevant, contextual and helpful.
SERVICES
Discovery, UX Design, UI Design, Information Architecture, Benchmarking, Handoff
Project Overview
Make search relevant to how customers actually think about the catalogue, so a query returns products instead of dead ends.
Users frequently encountered unrelated results, including blog articles, legal pages and content that did not match their intent. Relevance broke down especially when people searched using broad concepts, categories, fabrics, prints or misspelled terms.
The problem was not the interface. It was relevance: the search could not recognise the words customers were actually using.
Approach
I contributed throughout the entire project lifecycle, from discovery and search behaviour analysis to UX strategy, interface design, stakeholder alignment and developer handoff.
The search preview relied primarily on product titles, which limited discovery for anyone looking by fabric, print, category or a broader concept.
Process
Search analysis revealed recurring patterns in customer behaviour. People frequently searched for fabrics, prints and categories, and for subjective terms such as plus size and unisex. Misspellings and Portuguese keywords were common too, on a store serving customers in several languages.
Competitor benchmarking and industry research helped validate where relevance could be improved, and which of those gaps were worth solving first.
Search should meet people in the words they already use, not the ones the catalogue expects.
Final Design
The search preview evolved from a lookup field into a discovery tool, introducing trending searches and product recommendations so customers could explore the catalogue before typing a single term.
The full search experience was redesigned to guide customers throughout the journey. Empty states were replaced with trending searches and popular products, so a dead end became another way to keep exploring. By surfacing contextual recommendations and improving visibility, search came closer to how customers naturally browse and shop.
Achievements
