Hive

Have you ever lost a file? Did you have to Ctrl + F through said file to find that bit of info you were looking for? We have. All the time. We found out that many others face this problem too. In January 2023, my team, consisting of a PM, designer (that’s me!), and two developers, set out to make workplace search integrated, efficient, and intuitive.

SKILLS

User research, Product design, Prototyping, UX/UI design, Branding

TIMELINE

Jan 2023 - Apr 2023

ROLE

Founding Product Designer

What did we build?

Hive is a cross-platform semantic search tool that integrates with different softwares, allowing teams to search for important information in seconds. What does this really mean? Teams will never have to look tirelessly or Ctrl+F through documents again.

Hive aims to surface relevant data in a natural language interface. Don’t know the exact word you’re looking for? No problem. Search across everything for anything with Hive.

[01] Hive is friendly, familiar, and here to help you be more productive.

Discovering a golden thread

We talked to over 60 people across several industries. We learned about their work, their frustrations, their wishes, and more. Here are just a few highlights of what they had in common.

  • “The industry is solving the problem of storing information, but not the problem of storing and using it… There hasn’t been anything built for enterprise. We need a place to help with knowledge management.”

  • “I hate searching for lost information. There are definitely times where I’m like “I don’t remember where I put that document”.

  • “Our stakeholders often ask us something like, “Do we have any research on setup?” and we have it, just not close at hand or it’s buried in the middle of something else. We need a way to make it categorizable, shareable, and searchable.”

The Problem

Finding insights across separate platforms is painful and results in lost data.

[02] On average, teams use over 10 different softwares.

The Solution

A semantic search platform that connects the multiple softwares that teams use.

[03] Welcome your files home

[04] Retaining a familiar mental model

The Process

A semantic search platform that connects the multiple softwares that teams use.

[05] Early explorations

[06] I’m a sucker for serifs. But alas, Satoshi won for cleanliness. We didn’t want Hive to be in your face.

[07] Integrations: how the real magic happens

[08] I entertained the idea of a text-dominant interface. However, user feedback showed difficulty in quickly scanning the text and visual elements together.

[09] Imagining a future version of Hive where users have visibility into their team activity

Learnings

Hive is one of my favorite projects. It taught me how to boil a design down to its essence. Search seems simple in theory, but in practice, the tiny nuances and nudges are infinite. How do we communicate information effectively? And how do we do so when there are multiple modalities; when a user might not know exactly what they’re looking for? How do we surface information in a relevant and non-invasive way?

Thank you to my lovely team: Dyanna Boone, Kevin Gerges, and Isaac Gerstmann. I learned the most with you guys. We did it!