Search the design intelligence archive.
The searchable archive behind Coach — hundreds of briefings, full-text search, topic and date navigation.
UCD Surf
Design · Vercel · Live
At a glance
Problem
A daily digest builds an archive nobody can navigate. Reverse-chronological stops working at about a hundred entries.
Role
Product, information architecture, search UX, front end.
Stack
Next.js App Router, full-text search over titles and descriptions, topic and date facets, RSS.
Status
Live, growing daily.
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.
Built Surf as the retrieval half of the pair, on its own domain and its own search footprint.
Three ways in, deliberately: full-text search, seven topic taxonomies, and a reverse-chronological last-30-days strip.
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.
Interaction.
Split the product, don't overload it
Daily reading and archive retrieval are separate jobs. Two focused surfaces beat one with a mode switch.
Search over titles and descriptions only
Narrower index, sharper results, and no relevance tuning problem to babysit. The right scope beats the bigger scope.
Three doors, one archive
Search for known-item, topics for exploration, dates for recency. Every archive needs all three; most ship one.
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.
What shipped.
- 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
- Search UX
- Information architecture