I built search by learner
Significant lift · in search to enroll
Outschool's search was a blank box. But parents never search in the abstract. They have one kid in mind, sometimes several. I made the child the starting point.
The problem
Search was a generic bar. Type anything, good luck. The trouble is that a parent is never searching for themselves. They are searching for one child: their age, their interests, when they are free.
We already collected all of that at onboarding. Search ignored it.
What I did
Made the learner explicit. You pick a child, and search preloads what we already know: age, interests, availability. From there you add only the part that is actually new.
Shipped and tested a few versions to find the one that landed.
What moved
Search-to-list click rate rose, and so did search-to-enroll. The result reached statistical significance.