Keyword Insights

Keyword Insights helps content teams decide what to write next: it groups search keywords into topics and plans the content around them. When I joined the founding team in 2022, the product was a tool only its developers could really drive. The logic worked, but people used it through spreadsheets and exports, and there was almost no interface to speak of.

Started with the system, not with screens

With about ten features waiting for an interface, designing them one by one would have given us ten small products. So I built the design system first, then pulled each feature onto it. From keyword research to clustering and content planning, the features had little in common. Each new one brought patterns the system didn’t have yet, so the library grew to hundreds of components.

Kept a growing library under control

A system that big only helps if people can find the right piece. A lot of the work was maintenance: deciding when a new need was a variant of an existing component and when it earned a new one, and keeping names and states consistent so the team could build from it without asking me.

Onboarding: three rounds before people knew what to do

Our biggest problem wasn’t a feature. New users opened the app and didn’t know what to do first. We ran several onboarding experiments on how people entered the product. The first two didn’t fix it. The third did two things: a step-by-step tour that walked new users through every feature and showed what each one was for, and, inside each feature, highlights on the components people found confusing, with short instructions right where they were needed.

Beyond the app

The same role included client work: I designed and redesigned client websites and advised clients on how to improve the ones they had.