Exploring the intersection of UX, UI, and AI-powered website search

A good website search is like a treasure map for the digital age. It guides your users to the desired destination, helping them avoid all the random, unrelated links and dead ends. It’s like having a trusty companion by their side, leading users to the goods and information they seek. So with a top-notch AI-powered search experience like the one, we implemented for the international leader in meditation, spirituality, and mindfulness content, Wisdom Publication, users will be sure to more easily and accurately find what they are looking for.

Wisdom Publications is the leading publisher of books and online courses on contemporary and classic Buddhism, mindfulness, and meditation. Wisdom’s website receives a large amount of traffic and has a significant number of products available for purchase. In 2019, we helped launch their premier subscription platform for Buddhists, which now provides hundreds of hours of video and thousands of pages of books for members to read online. With this vast amount of content, Wisdom needed an intelligent search engine that could intuitively adhere to the search preferences and intent of its community.

Objective:

To improve the content discovery experience for users and optimize conversions, we proposed to implement Algolia AI search on their website. Algolia is a search platform that uses artificial intelligence to understand the context and intent of a user’s search query, resulting in more relevant and accurate search results.

Implementation:

To implement the Algolia AI search engine on Wisdom’s website, our development team first had to create indexes and import hundreds of Wisdom products into the Algolia search platform. The custom index design we created enabled Wisdom’s product data to be efficiently searched by Algolia’s AI search algorithm.

Next, we integrated Algolia search functionality using their API and designed and developed a custom website search interface. On the front-end interface, we added functionalities such as autocomplete, trending terms, featured popular content, and filtering search results to improve the user experience.

One of the cool search features of Algolia is that it provides the ability to modify the order of search results and pin results for any keyword. Using Alogolia’s Rule builder, site administrators have full control over search results content.

“AI-Powered search tools like Algolia represent a significant step forward in the evolution of website search experience. Seeing the immediate results and impact we delivered for our client was a humbling reminder of the power of intelligently harnessing the newest technologies and AI.”

– Cary Briel, Sr. Developer, ERI

Results & Conclusion:

After implementing the Algolia AI search on the Wisdom website, Wisdom saw a significant improvement in the content discovery experience for their users and a corresponding increase in sales. Their AI ‘Recommend’ machine learning model understands the context and intent of search queries and provides relevant results, making it easier for members to discover the content they desire from the wide range of Buddhist content and books that Wisdom offers. With users able to more easily find the products they are seeking, higher conversion rates and an overall increase in revenue are projected this year.

Interested in applying AI-powered search on your website? Let us know, we’d love to get started