Bringing our writers to the forefront of our search experience


This was the challenge proposed to me in August 2022 by our Executive Director of Product Carson Trobich. A few months earlier we had launched a custom-built search feature on The Atlantic website and app, and our Data Science team had found two interesting trends: of the top 100 search terms on our site, 30% were Atlantic writers; of the top 20 search terms, half of those were Atlantic writers. We had introduced search to help readers browse our site, but many of them were also using it to quickly find content from specific authors. At the time, there wasn’t an optimal way to find all articles by a particular writer on the site. Profile pages exist for our writers and contributors, but those pages were only accessible by clicking an author byline on an article page or headline.

Our data suggested that readers, unable to locate this information with ease, resorted to search. With this insight, we knew that it was time to bring our writers to the forefront of our search experience.Should we highlight them in the main navigation or more prominently on our homepage? Instead of creating a new path that readers would have to learn to navigate, we decided to place writers where readers naturally gravitated–the existing search experience.In a competitive landscape analysis of how other publishers presented writers in search tools, a common approach was to combine multiple media and content types—such as videos, photos, articles, and authors—into a unified experience. Some of the most common design patterns leveraged filters to distinguish between content types and to refine results.