One of our oft-overlooked power-user oriented features has always been the global search, but it was quite limited in the types of entities it could search for, limiting its usefulness. When the team had some time in between larger projects to work on small improvements – one of the first things that came up was bringing this in line with modern SaaS tools like Linear & Slack. Originally, the global search bar could only search for candidates. The new designs were an upgrade, both in terms of its interaction and the breadth of entities/pages it could search for inside Homerun. I led the visual & interaction design on this, working closely with George, one half of the front-end team at Homerun to build this.

This was shipped quite recently, so it’s too early to judge the impact it has had on our customers – but internal usage within the Homerun team has been very promising. It's become second nature for a bunch of us to use the global search to navigate Homerun and according to George – it's the best thing he's shipped in 2023. This work is also foundational in setting Homerun up for more advanced & context aware actions we’d like for this search bar to enable.

For this project, I worked closely with Adrian, the resident API expert & back-end engineer at Homerun. I built upon his early technical proof of concept and the pre-existing patterns for settings blocks to create an easy to parse API log along with a simple scope selection flow for creating new API keys. I was responsible for the UX, interaction & visual design of the flows & all graphic assets used in it.

From a business point of view, this update was well received, with positive feedback from the technical teams at our customers regarding its improved usability & security features. As of early December 2023, all existing public API users had migrated to the public API V2.

Homerun's brand identity and presence has been a big factor in the kind of customers it attracts and the ones it has retained for many years. Throughout my time at Homerun, I have had the pleasure to help uphold this by working with the marketing and web presence teams with their efforts by brainstorming and designing visuals for the blog, marketing site and Homerun's presence on various social media channels.