Solink Event Search interface

CONTEXT

Redesigned event search to give users greater freedom in searching their data, resulting in 11 percent increased engagement and improved self-service reporting.

My Role

Lead UI/UX Designer

Company

Solink

Timeline

2020 — 4 Months

Industry

Video Surveillance, SaaS

Platforms

Web

Tools

Figma, Wireframing, Prototyping

OVERVIEW

Unifying Video and PoS Data for Better Business Insight

Solink pairs Point of Sale data with real-time video to create a cloud-based dashboard of searchable moments. Users can quickly review movement in a room, verify purchases, or identify unusual behavior. This approach has reshaped the surveillance space and positioned Solink as a central platform for operations, security, and loss prevention across restaurant, retail, and financial sectors.

Each customer in the Solink ecosystem captures different types of video and PoS data. These variations create a significant challenge when searching and reporting at scale. For example, one customer may want to track staff discount abuse, another may want to measure the success of a product promotion, and another may want to count secure-room access events using motion data.

THE PROBLEM

Making Event Search More Flexible and Insightful

Customer feedback made it clear that the search tools were too simple and rigid. Users could only filter predefined reports with one or two search terms, which limited their ability to find meaningful events. They wanted more freedom to explore their data and uncover insights.

Mapping a layout that users will understand for the events search

GOALS

Strengthening Search and Expanding Self-Service Reportin

Our primary goal was to create a stronger, more flexible search experience. A secondary goal was to help users save their searches as custom reports so they could manage reporting on their own.

Improve engagement on the events page

Increase how often users interact with and rely on the events page.

Provide more powerful search tools

Give users the flexibility to find the specific events and patterns they care about.

Researching patterns for the events search

SOLUTION

A Flexible, Powerful Search Experience

The final design appeared straightforward, but the system required significant engineering effort. We worked through the complexity over multiple sprints and met regularly with engineering to plan, review, and ensure the design was implemented as intended.

1 — Advanced Search Builder

Users can now build complex searches by combining multiple search terms with AND/OR logic.

Advanced Search Builder

2 — Saved Searches and Reports

Custom searches can be saved as reports and shared across teams, reducing dependency on support.

Saved Searches and Reports

IMPACT

Improved Engagement and Self-Service

Customer success reported positive experiences as they used the Events page in their daily work, and sales shared encouraging feedback from customers who found the improved search much easier to use.

Increased engagement on the Events page

Users spent more time exploring events and using the enhanced search tools.

Report creation

Users created more custom reports from their searches, reducing reliance on support.

Weekly digest creation increase

Users added custom search results to their automated weekly digests more frequently.

REFLECTIONS

Key Learnings from the Project

Listen to Customer Success and Sales

These teams had far more day-to-day contact with customers than product did, and their insights were essential to shaping and landing the feature. Their feedback helped us refine the experience and ensure it resonated with users.

Step Into Complexity Over Many Sprints

Implementing a complex feature in a single push is rarely effective. Breaking the work into multiple sprints helped derisk the effort, gave engineering room to solve technical challenges, and allowed us to deliver value steadily while working toward the full vision.

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