Visual Typeahead Search Experience

Replaced a basic text based search results with a redesigned typeahead search with product images, category labels, and top results gave users immediate visual confirmation reducing friction and lifting revenue.

Company

Antylia Scientific / Cole-Parmer

My Role

UX Lead & Search Designer

Platform

Bloomreach AI Search

SKU scale

40,000+ products

+36%

Increase in search revenue metrics

+25%

Growth in average cart size

+10%

Increase in click-through rate

The Problem

Basic text based searches returned too broad results that didn’t help users navigate to their products quickly, increasing friction and slowing purchasing decisions across a catalog of thousands scientific SKUs with complex variants.

My Role

I redesigned the search typeahead to include product thumbnail images, category labels, and top item results giving users immediate visual confirmation before committing to a full results page. I directed engineering, junior designers, and Bloomreach AI from initiation through QA.

Redesigned visual typeahead — product thumbnails, category labels, and direct add-to-cart capability

Design Process

Research, analysis, and competitive benchmarking

All phases of this project were led and executed by me, in close collaboration with product managers, IT, marketing, customer service, and analytics teams.

Analyzed behavioral data in Google Analytics, Qlik, and Glassbox to map users’ behavior across the search to purchase funnel
Audited competitor and best in class B2B e-commerce sites to benchmark search experience expectations
Directed methods of surfacing child items in searches when product parent families are the sole entities the CMS recognizes
Worked within existing global header and search infrastructure, no rebuild required

Constraints

What this project had to work within

The solution had to integrate within the existing global header and search infrastructure, support 40,000+ SKUs with complex specifications and variants, and be delivered under limited development bandwidth requiring focused, high-impact design decisions.

Goals

What success looked like

Surface the most relevant and most-purchased products in typeahead results
Enable direct add to cart functionality from within search results
Increase conversion efficiency across the search experience
Improve clarity and reduce cognitive overload for high level scientific searches
Minimize unnecessary page transitions before a user reaches the right product

Results

All goals achieved

The visual search redesign achieved all target goals by surfacing relevant products with immediate visual context and enabling direct add to cart functionality within the typeahead dropdown. It minimized unnecessary page transitions and reduced cognitive overload for users searching across complex scientific product families.

+36%

Search revenue increase

+25%

Cart size growth

+10%

Click-through rate lift

The updated search experience contributed to a meaningful increase in search driven revenue, demonstrating the measurable impact of reducing friction in the product discovery funnel for a highly technical B2B audience.