Savvy Search: A Unified Asset Discovery Platform

Role: Senior Product Designer
Scope: Concept → UX strategy → prototyping
Outcome: Hackathon-winning concept now being developed as a company-wide, cross-discipline tool for all teams.

Overview

Savvy Search is a cross-vendor asset discovery tool designed to streamline how teams find and evaluate visual content across fragmented systems.

Originally developed during an internal design hackathon, the concept gained traction with platform leadership and is now being considered as a core enhancement to existing asset selection tools.

Problem

Asset discovery was slow, fragmented, and overly dependent on trial-and-error.

The existing experience required users to search across multiple vendor platforms, each with inconsistent interfaces, layouts, and metadata. Within the tool itself, assets were presented in small, uniform thumbnails that did not accurately reflect their composition or intended use.

As a result, users could not quickly evaluate assets at a glance.

They were forced into a repetitive workflow:
search → click → evaluate → go back → repeat

This created several compounding issues:

  • Visual scanning was ineffective due to rigid, low-fidelity thumbnails

  • Users had to open multiple assets before determining usability

  • Switching between vendors disrupted focus and added friction

  • Important differences between assets were not visible upfront

Even when relevant assets existed, they were difficult to identify quickly.

Core Insight

Asset selection is not a retrieval problem — it is a visual decision-making process.

Users do not want more results.
They want to quickly determine which result is worth using.

The existing experience forced a click-first workflow, when users naturally operate in a scan-first mode, making decisions in seconds based on visual cues like composition, orientation, and clarity.

Opportunity

Design a system that:

  • Aggregates assets across vendors into a single interface

  • Enables rapid visual scanning without unnecessary clicks

  • Surfaces meaningful differences between assets upfront

  • Reduces time spent searching and comparing

Final Solution

Unified Search Interface

  • Single search bar querying across all vendors simultaneously

  • Eliminates the need to search each source individually

Dynamic Visual Grid

  • Mixed aspect ratios (vertical, horizontal, square)

  • Immediate understanding of asset composition and usability

  • More natural browsing experience vs rigid grids

Cross-Vendor Aggregation

  • Assets from multiple sources displayed in one continuous experience

  • Removes platform boundaries from the user’s workflow

Impact

  • Eliminates multi-platform search workflows

  • Reduces time to find usable assets

  • Improves confidence in asset selection

  • Introduces a scalable foundation for future search enhancements

Organizational impact:

  • Won internal design hackathon

  • Generated interest from the platform team

  • Being developed as a system-level enhancement tool for the entire company

  • Working with our research team to expand the tool to an image-research selection tool