Unified Search
Connecting products, services, and content to help customers complete their tasks through an intelligent search
Team
Dell Unified Search
Responsibilities
Product Designer
Timeline
6 months
Device
Web
Imagining what search could look like once Dell unified it’s four legacy websites
With the directive to converge four separate legacy websites into a unified Dell.com, it became imperative that the new site have a new search experience that could scale to support the vastly different customers.
Current experience was fragmented and in need for unified style, navigation and structure
Each of the four domains was created by separate business units and built on different platforms. For customers, this meant slower discovery, higher cognitive load, and difficulty completing tasks that spanned multiple parts of the business.
Customers wanted search should interpret meaning, not keywords
Dell’s existing search logic was limited. It lacked intent recognition and couldn’t differentiate between contexts like commerce, product support, or enterprise solutions.
Broad customer segments require adaptive search experiences
Research shows that understanding who is searching is as important as what they search for, especially when terms span consumer and enterprise contexts.
Relevance isn’t static—it’s situational.
By grounding our approach in customers’ mental models, we shifted personalization from a product‑guessing exercise to a journey‑aware system. Using the same signals that reveal intent, we adapt results, content structure, and UI to match the task at hand—whether or not the customer is authenticated. The more context we can read, the “warmer” and more seamless the experience becomes, helping customers pick up their task with clarity and momentum.
A flexible and scalable content architecture and strategy
We figured the best way to serve up the most relevant content to every user was through a flexible content architecture, in which we can segment experiences around customer task or intent.
The Next-Gen Experience
A modular micro-front end driven experience which could be mixed and matched to create a tailored context aware experience.
Unified Search UX strategy was well received and served as a blueprint for future search projects
This approach to the UI was hugely impactful to actual human users in our concept testing, who struggled with homogenous lists of text links, with many saying that being able to identify the kind of asset each link corresponds to was a huge timesaver and allowed them to zero in on exactly what content would best serve their task at hand, and quickly and efficiently move on to the next step in their journey through Dell’s online ecosystem.
The next phase of this journey is ramping up both our internal and external teams to begin engineering feasibility assessments as well as building Proofs of concept with various vendors who may be able to bring to life some of this immense functionality, and we can’t wait to share more with you in the coming months.
Design highlights
