Banner image for the case study on Investigative Search Design.

Accelerating time-to-value through search design

Summary

Tadaweb’s Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) platform allows research teams to collect, enrich, and analyze publicly available information.
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OSINT analysts run online searches frequently, of varying scope and complexity. Tadaweb wanted to create a valuable, easy-to-use investigative search experience, to strengthen its presence in existing markets and become accessible to new ones.
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Alongside Micah Clark (Tadaweb’s OSINT Product Director), I drove the design for this new experience.

What I did

Between December 2022 and January 2023, I researched, designed, prototyped, tested, and refined the initial MVP. Between March and April 2023, we further improved the MVP with a multifunctional landing page where users could run searches precise and narrow, wide and exploratory, or anything in between.

Who I worked with

Business leadership to understand business development goals that this experience would facilitate.
Product leadership to integrate this initiative into Quarterly Planning cycles.
Product Managers & Technical leads to understand inter-team dependencies and the cost of implementation.

Outcomes

Users now had new ways to use the platform, performing tasks in Tadaweb that they had traditionally used other tools for.

Enabled cross-team collaboration and inspired more user-centricity in our Product and Sales strategies.

Discovery & Planning

An NDA protects all my work with Tadaweb.

The case study below is intended primarily to explain my process. All confidential content in my designs has been blurred out or replaced with abstract labels. Reach out if you’d like more details.

Discovery & Planning

Rather than a single big feature, we planned a collection of small to medium features that would supercharge the way searches were conducted. We focused on the users’ entire search journey:

Kickoff searches easily

Users should be able to conduct quick, low-stakes searches, focused on exploration, without needing to commit to one search approach too quickly.

Pivot precisely and repeatedly

Users should then be able to prioritize and pursue specific search avenues, by accessing credible, precision data sources.

Save findings quickly

Users should be able to save findings as soon as they find them, without interrupting their search, and access them later for analysis.

Experimentation

For each phase of the journey, I referenced other OSINT and popular search solutions on the market and experimented with UX patterns. What resulted was a single prototype spanning our different search features, and additional aspirational designs that might pique user interest during testing.

Abstract illustration of the Investigative search designs. Top left - for users to kickoff searches. Top right - for users to pivot from search results. Bottom left - for users to save findings. Bottom right - how saved findings are displayed.

Testing

Given the high stakes and breadth of experimentation, we tested this experience rigorously – conducting moderated usability tests with participants from a variety of OSINT backgrounds and market regions.

They performed real-world use cases in the MVP prototype and we evaluated:

Did the interface encourage them to launch as many searches as they wanted?
Could they run follow-up searches, save findings, and also return easily to their primary search?
Did the design find the right balance of control vs. freedom?
How did the interface make users feel about their day-to-day work?

Solution

Through our tests, we were able to validate our value and usability hypotheses enough to proceed with implementation. The next step was to prove the MVP amongst our wider user base.

Takeaways

Balance aspirations with reality

We worked against strict deadlines and our developers weren’t involved in the MVP until testing was nearly complete. To ship on time, we made unavoidable cuts to certain designs. This meant the implemented interface did not replicate UX patterns as they were originally tested.

This was a reminder to be clear about our goals and ambitions, be tenacious about improving features beyond MVPs, and keep our developers close during product discovery and experimentation.

Accelerating time-to-value through search design

Discovery & Planning

Experimentation

Testing

Solution

Takeaways

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