Designing search for
a generation of builders
The Background
For years, Minecraft.net served millions of fans, without ever having site-wide search. Working on a small, agile team of designers in partnership with developers at Minecraft, we designed and shipped a brand new search experience that surfaced the rich depth of content on their site.
The Team
Designers, Developers (client), Product Manager (client), Accessibility (client)
The Process & Artifacts
Taxonomy, Competitor Audit, Information Architecture, High-fidelity Mocks, Prototyping
The Challenge
No Search Infrastructure
The existing site had no tagging system and no content taxonomy. Before we stepped into design, the content architecture had to be built from scratch.
Cross-Generational Audience
Minecraft's audience spans ages 6 to 60. The search experience had to be simple enough for children while powerful enough for adult creators and developers.
Designing Every State
A search experience lives or dies by its edge cases: empty states, zero results, type-ahead suggestions, filter combinations. Every interaction and state had to be designed intentionally.
To start, we looked at similar search experiences that matched the feature set we wanted. We analyzed what worked and what we wanted to improve on before we landed on a final set of features.
In parallel, we also started organizing the content available on the site into buckets and started defining the information we would show and mapped them to our personas and user mindsets.
In parallel, we also started organizing the content available on the site into buckets and started defining the information we would show and mapped them to our personas and user mindsets.
Once we had the foundation of content taxonomy and structure built, we moved straight into design. We used the Minecraft design library as the base and crystallized new molecules and components that we had designed specifically for search.
(c) 2026 Diane Park • Email Me