Yext
Established a user experience practice for a pioneering search and knowledge management company, innovating new products and influencing product strategy.
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Helping consumers find answers about their favorite brands
Yext is one of New York's largest local start-ups and a market leader in AI and NLP (natural language processing)-powered search experiences. I joined Yext in 2017, just after they went public, at a transformational moment for the company.
Yext's success at the time was centered around its location data services. These allowed large retail, healthcare and finanical brands such as Sunglasses Hut, Denny's or Allstate to update data about their locations in the cloud and automatically push it out to hundreds of listing partners. Our clients could then provide their customers with accurate information however they chose to engage with the brand — via Google Maps, Facebook, Alexa, etc.
Given our access to this highly structured, authoritative data about a brand, we recognized an opportunity to expand from location-focused data to a general purpose knowledge graph. I led a design effort to rethink how the company could pivot our offering to include natural language and AI-powered search on a brand's site. Expanding the team's focus from enterprise-focused interfaces to include consumer search experiences was a particularly fun challenge, and an opportunity to fundamentally shift the company's focus.
During my time at Yext I provided strategic product vision and input to the CEO, CTO and CSO as part of our product council, established a design system strategy, and led a cross-functional design organization.
TITLE
Vice President of User Experience
SCOPE
Product Strategy, Product Design, User Research, Innovation with Partners
2→12
500% Team Growth
TARGET
Consumers, B2B Clients, Developers
100m+
Users Reached
4
years (2017-2021)
Yext Search
Next-generation site search with AI and natural language processing (previously called Yext Answers)
Over the last decade, search engines have evolved and improved dramatically, and along with them, so have consumer's expectations. Gone are the days of only inputting a few keywords and digging through page after page of blue links. Questions can be posed in natural language, and relevant answers are presented immediately on the first result page. But brand websites have not evolved. Consumers have grown to mistrust site search options on a brand's site, and go back to Google or Bing and search from there.
Yext Search is a modern, federated website search solution that allows consumers to quickly find relevant information about a brand directly from their homepage. It is powered by Yext's Knowledge Graph where a brand's facts are centrally stored in the cloud. I was involved from the ground floor on this project, asked to lead design on a small so-called 'pirate team' while also continuing to lead my design organization. The design challenge was a stimulating one: what should the out-of-box end-user experience for a modern search solution on a brand's website feel like, and how to allow for enough flexibility for it to feel like a natural extension of a variety of website design styles.
In addition to providing an intuitive end-user experience, Yext Search also provided our clients with a lot of great insights into what consumers on their website were wanting to know about or understand. Using this data, we designed an analytics portal for surfacing actionable insights as well as recommendations as to what content or FAQs they may want to consider adding to their site to reduce support or sales calls.
Many of Yext's clients were interested in an intuitive search solution for their sites, and the company quickly shifted all of its resources on accelarating development and adapting to different sales modes to sieze the opportunity. Samsung, Slack, Cox, Campbell's, Subway and Verizon are among the brands who have now adopted Yext Search to power their website's search and it is now Yext's flagship product, impacting millions of end users each day.
The analytics dashboard for Yext Search allows clients to easily see how much traffic their search is getting, and what kinds of questions people are asking.
Many of Yext's clients were interested in an intuitive search solution for their sites, and the company quickly shifted all of its resources on accelarating development and adapting to different sales modes to sieze the opportunity. Samsung, Slack, Cox, Campbell's, Subway and Verizon are among the brands who have now adopted Yext Search to power their website's search and it is now Yext's flagship product, impacting millions of end users each day.
Tokyo 2020 Olympic Mobile App
An intuitive wayfinding mobile app prototype created for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Committee
The Chief Technology & Innovation Officer of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Committee sought Yext's help in painting a vision for an official mobile application that athletes, press, employees and spectators could use to access all public information about the Tokyo 2020 games, in all supported languages. Given Yext's capabilities to centeralize such data in the cloud and dissemenate it to various listing partners around the world, the fact that Yext had just recently opened an office in Tokyo, and the desire on the part of the CEO of Yext to expand the platform from location data to any data type such as events and people, it was the perfect storm for an innovative design challenge.
The app would include data for venues, event schedules, live scores and results, metal counts, athlete bios, as well as information about local hotels, restaurants, and vendors. Additional features included tourist tips for top destinations to visit while traveling in Japan and a chatbot. Yext's Knowledge Graph would power all of these data points in multiple languages and syndicate data to and from business listing networks.
Leveraging my bilingual skills and deep understanding of Japan, I was able to bridge cultural gaps and effectively represent Yext's technology to the Japanese market. I took on ownership of the initiative, working across two time zones in close partnership with our new Japanese employees. This included product vision, hands-on design, prototyping, and multiple presentations to Olympic Committee and Japanese business partners.
Read more about this project in my detailed case study.
