Spaces · 2026
Search
Healthcare
Cross-platform
Project Context
Spaces is a HIPAA-compliant messaging app for organizations to communicate securely internally and externally with partners. Search needed to help users quickly find messages, files, and team members across their organization without compromising compliance or speed.
My Role
Title
Design Director
Problem
Search didn’t exist in the product yet. It was a table stakes feature for a messaging app at this scale, and its absence was a clear gap compared to tools users are already familiar with. We had an early partner who was using Spaces regularly, having migrated from Signal, and they expected search as a baseline capability.
Contstraints
The main constraint was that search results needed to respect space and channel membership. Users could only see results from spaces and channels they were actually a part of, so search couldn't surface messages or files from areas they didn’t have access to.
Sandbox exploration
Process
We designed for desktop and mobile in parallel to see how the experience could stay seamless across both, rather than starting with one and adapting it to the other.
On desktop, we iterated through a number of approaches before landing on a small entry point that expands into a full takeover of the main content area.
We rejected a blind search bar, the kind where you type into a small field and only see results after searching, because it offered no visibility into things that could cut down the need to search in the first place.
The takeover view gave space for an idea we came up with called “quick access” items. Before any query was typed, you could see files you’d shared, files shared with you, and mentions from the last 7 days. The idea was that what people search for is often something recent, so putting it here could cut down on the need for searches and become a place to find recent items.
On mobile, search was placed at the top of the initial view of the sidebar, keeping it one tap away. Tapping the search bar opened a full-screen takeover mirroring desktop's approach, surfacing the quick-access. This kept the experience consistent with desktop, so moving between phone and desktop meant nothing to relearn.
Solution
Both platforms used a dedicated view for search that doubled as both the search interface and a hub for quick access items. It's this pairing, something new in the quick access items, alongside a familiar search UX, that gave Spaces a search experience that felt both unique and instantly recognizable.