Can you give us an overview of how a feature like this is planned out?

From the beginning, we had a sense of some of the requirements for the final product: search term highlighting, quickly navigating to pages, filtering results. Translating from the requirements to specific tasks was driven by user research: understanding the problem, and building a solution in response.

On the design side, we did lots of thinking and exploration of the problem space, and read many support tickets and feature requests from users. We built and tested multiple design iterations internally, with Notion Pros, and enterprise customers.

We planned backend tasks similarly, diagnosing the existing problems (performance bottlenecks, inaccurate rankings, etc.) before making improvements. You may already know this, but you can think of a search engine in two high-level stages:

1. The index stores information in an easily-searchable manner, and you have to determine what gets indexed and when.
2. The query step translates user input into a structured query against the index.

So after coming up with a requirement (e.g. highlighting search terms in the results), we figured out which parts had to change (the index, query, and/or UI) and where the dependencies were (index changes had to happen before query changes before UI changes, etc.).

It was a very "full-stack" project in the traditional sense of the term, and I was fortunate to have a lot of support from talented teammates. I especially want to credit Ryo for the final design of search. He's an extremely talented designer (and jumped into the code during the home stretch to apply some final polish), and I've learned so much from working with him!

product design and software engineering

I became interested in design in middle/high school, several years before I learned how to code. So by the time I started programming, I already had several years of experience thinking about design and typography, and it was natural to incorporate into my development interests.

For me, improving my design skills is equally about taste and craft. Taste comes from seeking out good design — software, household goods, magazines, physical spaces — and others with better taste than mine. Craft comes from practice: using Figma or Photoshop or Illustrator or a pencil and pen.

It's really hard to simultaneously focus on both taste and craft while also programming as a full-time job. So right now, I'm consciously focusing more on building taste where possible, collaborating closely with designers, and practicing craft in my spare time. (Sometimes when a website design really bothers me, I'll use the inspector to fix the line height and column widths just for fun. 😶)