UCD Surf
Search the design intelligence archive.
Overview
The searchable archive behind Coach — hundreds of briefings, full-text search, topic and date navigation.
The problem
Coach solves "what happened today." It creates a second problem: hundreds of briefings with real reference value and no way in except scrolling backwards through time. Two different jobs — daily habit and retrieval — wanted two different interfaces, so I split them into two products.
0→1
- 01
Built Surf as the retrieval half of the pair, on its own domain and its own search footprint.
- 02
Three ways in, deliberately: full-text search, seven topic taxonomies, and a reverse-chronological last-30-days strip.
- 03
No account, because a search box that asks who you are is a search box people leave.
Under the hood
Shares Coach's dated URL structure so archives resolve identically across both domains — the same content, two navigation models, no duplicate-content penalty because the canonical points home.
Features & interaction design
- 01
Split the product, don't overload it
Daily reading and archive retrieval are separate jobs. Two focused surfaces beat one with a mode switch.
- 02
Search over titles and descriptions only
Narrower index, sharper results, and no relevance tuning problem to babysit. The right scope beats the bigger scope.
- 03
Three doors, one archive
Search for known-item, topics for exploration, dates for recency. Every archive needs all three; most ship one.
- 04
Explicit cross-links
Surf points to Coach for the daily habit, Coach points to Surf for depth. Two products, one loop, and the internal link equity flows both ways.
Outcomes
- —A no-account full-text search over hundreds of briefings, seven topic landing pages, a 30-day recency strip, a complete dated archive and RSS. Live.
- —Turned ephemeral daily content into a reference product
- —Shared taxonomy with UCD Coach for consistent mental models