Plan

A cost-benefit analysis determined that Smartsheet's minimal usage of Coveo’s advanced features was disproportionate to the contract cost. The engineering team conducted research and recommended a search API migration to Open Search.

Meanwhile, the design team conducted user research on the existing search UI, which concluded that the excessive amount of exposed filters and an unclear tab design created a confusing and overwhelming experience.

The front-end goal for the project was to improve the search UI/UX and resolve a long-standing issue of disorganized, redundant search styles that had accumulated over time and had made maintanence a challenge.

Process

My role on this project was to lead the front-end rebuild to support the updated search functionality. The engineering team implemented migrations concurrently on two multilingual Drupal websites:

Smartsheet Help Center Site

Working with back-end engineers and UI/UX designers, the front-end engineers implemented a total design overhaul of the Help Center search experience as part of the migration. Taking into account the insights from the user research, we collaborated with the design team to build out improved facets, sorts, tabs, and results in Drupal using Twig, JavaScript, PHP, and CSS.

Old Help Center search UI
Before: Help Center search used Coveo and had too many filters exposed and was designed with confusing tab placement.
New Help Center search UI
After: Help Center uses OpenSearch and has an improved UI with collapsed filters, clearer tabs, and a more organized layout.

Primary Smartsheet Marketing Site

Simultaneously, I worked with closely with back-end engineers to figure out an approach to centralize our search styles and themes on the primary Smartsheet site, as this site contains over 65 search experiences across different pages. I focused on consolidating numerous repetitive Coveo templates into a centralized Drupal View template, while ensuring that there was no regression visually in the search experiences sitewide.

This centralization made it easy to rapidly spin up new search Views with standardized filters and visual components. By integrating the search components with our global component system (e.g., using our existing tile/card molecule), I ensured visual consistency sitewide while drastically improving the efficiency of the front-end code base.

Visual of Content Center with filtered results
Smartsheet's Content Center is one area of the site that could be simplified into a re-usable View template.

Impact

The successful migration to Open Search’s Search API provided an immediate, quantifiable return on investment: Smartsheet was able to substantially scale back its contract with Coveo, resulting in $150k in annual savings for the business.

We completed our migration on both sites without any downtime or disruption to the user experience. For both sites, we now have a simplified front-end architecture that is far easier to maintain and expand upon in the future.