Background
Cricut is a tech company that helps people bring their creative ideas to life with smart cutting machines and a companion app called Design Space. With it, users can design custom projects to cut or print-and-cut right from their machines. At Cricut, I focus on improving the user experience within the Search & Subscriptions pod—making it easier for users to find what they need quickly, reduce friction, and stay in their creative flow without getting stuck in the search process.
Core Problem
One of the big challenges with Search was that it just wasn’t built with our users in mind. It was pretty bare-bones—it took whatever you typed in and gave you results, but that was about it. There was no smart guidance or support to help people find what they were actually looking for. Because of that, it often took users way too long to get to the right content. And the more time they spent searching, the less time they had to create—which meant fewer finished projects and a more frustrating experience overall.
The Approach
To solve this, we refined the search experience by adding helpful features to both the search bar and results page—making it easier for users to find what they need quickly and with less effort.
Steps Taken
Conducted user and competitive research to identify key pain points and uncover opportunities for improvement in the current design.
Created early UX concepts and mockups to explore solutions that aligned with both the product vision and development feasibility.
Delivered final UX and UI designs to ensure each feature supported intuitive user behavior and enhanced the overall experience.
Led final UX reviews and coordinated gradual rollouts to validate impact—ensuring design changes positively influenced key metrics.
Key Features
Recently searched queries (desktop, iOS, android).
Last viewed projects & images (iOS & android).
Search query assist (desktop, iOS, android).
New universal search layout (desktop only).
Hero search bar on home (desktop only).
Search spell correction (desktop, iOS, android).
Pagination of universal search (desktop only)
Results and Impact
Over the course of this year-long process—even with a few features that didn’t make it past testing—we were able to boost conversion rates across the board. By reducing decision-making time, we helped users find what they needed faster, which meant they could spend more time actually creating and cutting content.