Doing more with Search

Boosting engagement through Suggestions

Summer Internship
Mountain View, CA

TEAM

Product Manager
Content Designer
Engineering team of 6

IMPACT

104 % increase in Customer Engagement Score (CES), linked to feature engagement and retention

touching a user base of:

40M+ Weekly Search Queries
60% of Weekly Active Users (WAU)
on Quickbooks Online

TIMELINE

ROLE

3 Months

Product Design Intern
Reporting to: Staff Product Designer

Pushing Suggestions and Upsells in Search drives revenue but diminishes Search Experience.

My shipped design decisions:

  • Boosted ‘action’ and ‘upselling’ related suggestions the most

  • Described frameworks for # of suggestions and when they appear

  • thought through scale across languages and future offerings

With a phased rollout, we:

+104% customer engagement
~2X repeat weekly usage
of search

SKIP THE READING

CONTEXT

Intuit QuickBooks ( QuickBooks Logo ) is a financial management software that helps 6M+ businesses do accounting, payments, payrolls, timesheets etc.

It does a lot. It can get overwhelming.

Search ties it all together.

The Global Search allows busy customers to quickly look into their transactions, contacts, etc.

But new users (small business owners) repeatedly claimed “feeling lost”

11%

of total search queries fail using the Global Search

13M+

weekly search queries resulting into “no results”

The search was keyword-based

which made sense for when searching numbers, transactions, accounts, etc but not for more

180K

search queries containing words like "how to," "how do," "delete," "undo”, etc

till Intuit decided to fix it with Natural Language Search

Because search wasn’t just being used for “finding numbers”

“$ 402”
”Invoice

But also for Navigation

“where is that ..?”
”1099 form”
”take me to tax forms”

and seeking Help

“undo”
”expert help”
”how to …?”

this opened new opportunities to interpret with Machine Learning:

what users may be searching for —> making the right suggestions to them

THE ASK

Guide our new users through suggesting them more ‘actions’ in Search, and help them ‘discover’ more of Quickbooks

BUSINESS OUTCOME

boost engagement and upselling in Search

FREE-FORM RESEARCH

With new Semantic Search capabilities, how might we:

I went around San Jose markets and clicked pictures of “suggestive” experiences in-real-life

+20 other signboards

So I proceeded to think through:

But — What makes a good suggestion?

AHA !

It turns out,

A suggestion is only a “suggestion” if it’s relevant and not pushed too hard.

Much else is an “ad” (we hate ads — they’re annoying)

EMERGING FIRST PRINCIPLES

So with some push-back from PM,
I advocated for some key decisions:

  1. Suggest, but don’t be pushy

    More upsells doesn’t always mean more revenue.


  2. Never get in the way of results

    Accountants hate it when things come in between them and the numbers they’re looking for. Obstructing that will raise VOC (voice of customer) complaints.

    So when the PM pushed for recommendations to be on the top of the dropdown, we pushed back.

  3. Wait for the ML-models to catch up

    Relevancy of Suggestions is key.

    Till the ML model driving suggestions has learned and trained significantly,
    we limit the number of places where these suggestions appear

ALIGN, ALIGN, ALIGN

These “suggestions” boosted visibility for many SKUs.
So leading alignments involved many stakeholders

DESIGN

Form Explorations

“will this scale as our suggestion scope grows?”

“can this be developed in time for v1 release?

EARLY CONCEPT FOR ALIGNMENT

“does this form support enough text length across other languages?”

“will we need more buy-in from design systems for this?

We aligned on using cards as the visual element.

This made sense since:

  1. We wanted to limit # of suggestions shown

  2. Lend the suggestions enough visual cue for new (often overwhelmed) customers to notice and feel guided

  3. Unlike chips, they could easily take up space across various real-estates on the platform

ANATOMY OF A CARD

SHIPPED DESIGN

DESIGN HIGHLIGHTS

Intentional delay to save big $$

I implemented an intentional loading skeleton delay for the recommendations to:

  1. Save costs by not running the recommendation engine while the user is mid-typing

  2. Make recommendations feel personalized and ‘calculated’, not preloaded ads

Never more than 3 in the dropdown

People can’t process much beyond 3 options.



This ensures that each suggestions provide genuine and relevant value - and that’s key to these suggestions not being perceived as advertisement / annoying upsells.

People like to see faces

Users were more likely to click on ‘Expert Help’ if they saw an expert face

And Getting expert help in the first 30 days is highly correlated with platform retention.

We shipped it in phases:

Here’s the number of users this will be rollout out to:

30K customers

Nov 2024

increase in Customer Engagement Score (CES) for Search

Repeat Weekly Usage for Search

*

>

IMPACT SO FAR

104 %

~2X *

Also attributed to other major reforms in search: most notably, exposing the full search bar (previously just a button)

6.4M customers

Q2 2025

What is CES (Customer Engagement Score)?

CES is a measure of actions taken by the user in-product, linked with engagement and retention.

What is RWU (Repeat Weekly Usage)?

Repeat weekly usage indicates people who used Search once and then used it again in the next week. linked with retention.

Doubling it means double the people are using Search again (weekly) than before.

300K customers

Q1 2025

>

30M+ Weekly Search queries

a love letter to ‘Search’

Learnings from Dev walkthroughs

REFLECTIONS

Search is SO beautiful.

Working on this project had me think very deeply about Search interfaces.

We’re searching all the time. For a friend in a crowd, our car keys around, a budget meal nearby, or a photo lost to memory. Search interfaces are the ultimate capture of intent - almost like a wishbox.

With much of the future of the internet moving towards AI, it feels so fitting that people will get to express what they’re looking for in free form. Search makes our curiosities tangible. Im so glad I got to work on this, of all the things.

  • Save Devs HOURS by teaching them key Figma shortcuts

  • Once you have a design, Devs are your next customers

  • Be in their proximity. Sit with them.

FEEDBACK ACROSS PARTNERS

Jen, who I reported to (Principal Product Designer) and me 
@Figma Config 2024!