The Home Depot
Search Bar Experience
Timeline
2024 - 2025
My Role
Design Lead
Company
The Home Depot
Platform
Web & Mobile
Project Overview
As the founding designer of the newly established Search Bar Experience team, I led efforts to revitalize a domain that had stagnated for five years following the original team’s departure. Leading as the Senior Designer, I conducted extensive research and analysis, crafted a strategic product roadmap, and successfully designed and launched impactful features—ultimately surpassing leadership's ambitious goals.
What is Search Bar Experience?
Each year, customers conduct approximately 2 billion searches on The Home Depot, making the search bar experience a critical starting point in their search journey. With exposure to all customers who use search and an about 20% engagement, the search bar serves as a vital bridge between customers and the products or information they seek.
The Challenge
The search bar experience had not been updated for five years, leaving both the backend and frontend outdated. The existing functionality only offered basic text suggestions based on prefix matching, falling far behind competitors. The outdated experience failed to meet evolving user expectations for personalization and efficiency.
Short Term Goal
-
To catch up with the industry standards set by competitors like Amazon, Target, and Walmart
-
To achieve a 100bps increase in engagement setup by leadership.
Long Term Goal
-
To create a dynamic search bar experience tailored to various use cases, supported by a modular design and overall governance framework.
Research
After kicking off the project, I conducted extensive research, including audit of the current experience, competitive analysis, literature reviews of internal and external studies, and user interviews.
Current Experience Audit
The existing search bar only offers basic features, but still can be improved with quick wins like adding icons to distinguish suggestions, enabling individual history deletion, and dimming the background for visual focus.
Literature Review
I reviewed all relevant internal researches to understand customers' pain points and referred to studies from the Baymard Institute to identify key focus areas and best practices in the space. These findings helped shape the questions for our user interviews later.
Competitive Analysis
Through the analysis, I gained a understanding of industry standards in this space. I identified common visual patterns across platforms and potential features for the search bar experience, which guided our direction and informed discussions with stakeholders.
User Interview
I asked participants to share their screens and walk me through their shopping journey. I encouraged them to think aloud—verbalizing their thoughts as they acted. This approach allowed me to observe their behaviors and gain insights into the reasons behind them.
Customer spectrum & pain points
This researches above revealed that customers fall on a spectrum: one end comprises "users who don’t know what they want," while the other includes "users who know exactly what they want." From this, we identified three major pain points, each corresponding to different parts of the spectrum.
User does not know exactly what they are looking for
-
Needs a solution to a problem, but doesn’t know what tool, technique, or service could provide the solution
-
Knows what an item looks like, but doesn’t know its name
Type Ahead experience is not personalized
-
User's previously purchased or viewed do not reflected in TA
Too many interaction to complete (narrow) the search
-
need to filter down the products
-
need to rephase the search term
-
need to type specific detail of product
Strategy
We conducted a "How Might We" exercise after presenting research findings to the balanced team. This helped turn problems into opportunities. By grouping the notes by topics, we identified three main strategies:
%201.png)
Understand & Anticipate customer’s intent
Provided personalized suggestions to customers
%201.png)
Efficiently help Customers find what they needs
Ideation
After sharing the research insights and aligning on strategies with PM, engineers and data scientists, I facilitated a group brainstorming session using the ‘Crazy 8s’ technique to generate over 20+ potential features.
Promising Concepts
After a rapid evaluation round to identify the most promising concepts, I created high-fidelity mockups to facilitate clearer, more intuitive discussions later. I categorized the features into two groups—before typing and after typing—to reflect different user scenarios, and began considering a unified governance framework to manage each feature’s trigger rules.
Evaluation & Prioritization
When formulating our roadmap, the main challenge was determining which features to prioritize. We leveraged Impact/Effort matrix to ensure a balanced, strategic rollout.
Ultimately, we chose 4 MVP features—Quick fix for current UX bug, Recently Viewed, Your Frequent Search, and Buy It Again.
By focusing on quick wins first, we not only boosted team morale and stakeholder confidence but also created a positive feedback loop and built momentum for subsequent, higher-impact initiatives.
MVP Design
Thanks to extensive research and early alignment, the design phase progressed smoothly. I held design reviews with leadership to align on business goals, with engineers and data scientists to ensure feasibility, and with Design Ops to maintain consistency with the design system.
I also created guidelines for the search bar's visual patterns, expanding The Home Depot’s design system and addressing gaps. The modular structure I established supports future governance and scalability, enabling a dynamic and adaptable search bar experience.
I also created guidelines for the search bar's visual patterns, expanding The Home Depot’s design system and addressing gaps. The modular structure I established supports future governance and scalability, enabling a dynamic and adaptable search bar experience.
Outcome
Due to the limited engineering resources and delays in platform migration, we only got a chance to launch the UX bug quick fixes and Recently Viewed features. However, these efforts exceeded leadership's goal by 300%, achieving a 300bps increase in engagement compared to the original target of 100bps.
​
Exceeding the target solidified leadership’s trust in our newly formed team, granting us greater autonomy moving forward. This trust was pivotal—it allowed us to set our own objectives rather than being bound by predefined KPIs. With this freedom, we could allocate more time to in-depth research and iterative experimentation for bold & innovative solutions.
+300 BPs
Search bar experience engagement has been increased by
58.6 M
Net new product impressions were generated in 1 months
$649 M
Annualized gross demand has been driven by recently viewed feature.
Phase 2
In Phase 2, with greater autonomy, I led user research on THD’s pro customers, conducted A/B tests on two potential features, and performed user testing on four features to gather valuable qualitative insights. The qualitative and quantitative data collected serve as critical inputs for guiding the team’s future priorities and next steps.
Next Steps
As the search bar experience evolves with the addition of new features, the space risks becoming overcrowded. My next step is to establish an overarching governance framework to ensure we present the most relevant features to customers at the right time, maintaining a seamless and intuitive experience.
Learnings
My journey through this project provided several key insights.
Importance of engaging stakeholders early
By aligning on stakeholders' needs, technical constraints, business goals, and user pain points, we fostered effective collaboration. While this required extra time upfront, it streamlined later design phases, reduced last-minute changes, and resulted in smoother reviews and a more cohesive outcome.
Power of starting small
Another key lesson was the power of starting small. By addressing “low-hanging fruit” first, we delivered quick wins that boosted team morale and stakeholder confidence. This incremental approach created a positive feedback loop, building trust with leadership and securing greater autonomy for future, more ambitious innovations.
