Searching
Toybox- Better Model Search
Designing for a more efficent Toybox search experience.
Designing for a more efficent Toybox search experience.
Product Designer
Figma, Asana
3 Months
Matthew K.
Zach O., Kyle M.
The existing Toybox search is limited to toy results only and can be overwhelming to process the results. To improve this experience, the team and I were determined to make the search process as easy and useful as possible for Toybox users to find and print a model.
"How might we improve the Toybox searching experience to reduce the time it takes for users to print a model?"
To get a better understanding of how other popular 3D printing websites use filters and sorting methods, I researched websites like Thingiverse, Cults3D, and Printables.
Too many categories to choose from that makes the user even more stressed out when trying to figure out what they want to print
The top navbar is overwhelming and hard to know what you should be looking at. There are many different deisgn categories and filters being shown, but really lacks order + organization.
After presenting my low fidelity designs to the team, I continued to iterate and explore different ways to sort/filter search results.
The first draft was very simple, but lacked organizational hiearachy. Additionally, we wanted to add a time duration filter that would help users find models that were within their desired print time.
However, while looking at this iteration, it had become very overwhelming + unnecessary for the print duration to take up so much space.
To better understand what time increments to use for the time duration slider, I analyzed our platform's print time data for ALL 3,800+ models.
This helped with the final version of the design as we were able to narrow down the print duration into 3 categories: quick (< 1 hour), medium (1-2 hours), and slow (2+ hours).
Additionally, to ease the process of modifying these cards, I created a card component that utilizes Figma’s auto layout and properties.
These features include handling username text-overflow, the ability to easily switch between mobile and desktop cards, and changing the user’s account status.
The biggest challenge of this project was trying to figure out the best way to display the search filters.
Initially, I had designed the filters to be a drop-down menu. However, due to the large amount of options that we allow users to select from, we faced a problem where the list could possibly become longer than the user’s device height. To solve this issue, we decided to use a modal with scrolling.
Once the design was approved, it was handed off to the development team for production.
