A New and Improved Search 🔎

One of the primary reasons customers choose to use Lingo is to help them and their team members find their assets quickly. We understand this need and realized our current search was falling short of our expectations, which is why we decided to completely re-design our search experience. Today we’re excited to announce this new and improved search functionality is available to all customers using Lingo’s web app. Read more below to understand what problems we decided to solve and how our new search functions.

The problems with our old search

When we analyzed our old search experience there were three primary problems we discovered.

1- Two different searches

In Lingo’s old search there were two places in the product where you could perform a search — each search behaved differently. The search in the Left Rail of the product performed a “global” search across all your kits. The search bar inside a kit performed a search contained to just that kit. This fragmentation created lots of confusion and lead to a poor user experience.

2- Lots of content wasn’t searchable

In Lingo’s old search, only assets such as files and colors were searchable. This was problematic because often times users need to quickly find information about their assets that could be stored inside a note or they may want to quickly navigate to a specific location in their asset library. All of this was not possible with our old search experience.

3- Search results lacked context

In Lingo’s old search, results were displayed in the gallery with very little context. This was problematic because often times knowing more about an asset, such as the name, file type or where the asset lives is important to help you find the asset you’re looking for.

How we fixed these problems

Making a holistic search experience

To start, we knew we wanted to have our new search be a single, holistic experience that you could access anywhere in the app without losing your current context. So, the new search is now contained within a modal that overlays the screen whenever you activate it.

We also wanted to make it easier to search within a single kit or your entire space, all from the same place. By default search will look across all of your kits but you can add filters to narrow down results to one kit, or even multiple kits. When you open search while viewing a kit we automatically add that kit as a filter but you can remove it to search globally.

Search for anything

Well, almost anything! One of the biggest problems with the old search was not everything was searchable. With our new search, anything that can be put in a Kit can show as a search result. This includes things like Headings, Notes, Guides and more! Additionally, you can search for Kits and Sections which is an important part of the new search that we call: Jump to.

“Jump to” refers to search suggestions and results that are locations in your asset library rather than actual assets. Kits, Sections and Headings all fall under the “Jump to” category. Just click on these suggestions or results to quickly navigate to that specific location in your asset library.

Note: We’re aware there’s plenty of questions regarding searching by tags. To clarify, the keywords you type will be searched against tags on your assets as well. So if you’re using tags, try typing them as keywords in your search!

Better search results

Not only was it hard to tell what kits and sections your search results were in, you also weren’t able to use filters with the old search. Our new search formats results in a list view that shows you which kit and section a result is in. You can also use filters to quickly narrow your results to specific kits, asset types, by time or orientation.

Additionally, you can take actions from the results. You can copy links to certain results like file assets, kits, sections or headings. You can also download file assets or copy color assets. To do this, hover over a search result and you’ll see these options appear in the upper right corner of the result.

We hope this new search experience helps you navigate your asset libraries and find your content quicker. As always, we’re open to feedback so send it our way if you have any!