Preparing Your Project
Creating a quality, valuable search solution involves some upfront planning and design work, along with a balance of business and technical expertise. Careful planning enables you to implement Algolia’s best practices.
But don’t worry—Algolia has built its technology to simplify this process.
Check out the following video to show how a mid-size company organizes itself to deliver a first-rate search experience. You’ll follow them from contract signing, to going live, to iterating on future versions.
Roles and responsibilities
Even though the video shows a team effort, a single person could do it depending on the project’s scope and size of your organization. What’s important is to understand the purpose of each role and phase.
- Project leader: leads the project. Can be technical person or not.
- Business professionals: sets business goals.
- Graphic designer: designs the front-end solution.
- Engineers: handle data indexing and code the solution.
- Business users: perform business-related tasks before, during, and after the implementation (such as merchandisers, SEO experts, and product managers)
Tasks, phases, and timeline
Once you’ve scoped how Algolia can meet your technical and functional specifications, it’s time to plan and set up a timeline of tasks and roles.
Planning the project
The project manager creates a roadmap of what lies ahead so that each team member knows what they need to do—on time and within budget.
Defining and aligning goals and expectations
Business professionals align the strategy of the search project with the company’s wider goals. They define use cases and specify expectations.
We recommend that you don’t try to do everything on your first version. The key is to design a reasonable first version and plan for multiple iterations to refine the experience and take feedback into account.
Designing the solution
The UI/UX designer creates the graphical interface and imagines the experience based on defined goals and expectations.
Coding the solution
Front-end and back-end engineers develop the solution based on planning and design. Algolia gives you the technology and tools, along with learning resources and a clear implementation roadmap with best practices to help you build your search solution.
Quality assurance and testing
Test before going live to validate that you’ve met the original objectives and design. Business users need to test that their most important searches bring back the best results, or that high-ranked products show up first in the results. Make sure to test all on-screen functionality, and that your data is up to date.
Going live and iterating
Once tested and in production, everyone involved can iterate by fine-tuning relevance and using analytics and A/B testing features to determine which features to add next. Next steps include advanced merchandising, Personalization, Query Suggestions, and other solutions to match your future needs.
