Santander
A fragmented, filter-poor SERP redesigned for 140M+ customers, delivered through a year of enterprise complexity.
What I Built
Complexities
The Outcome
Reflection
Santander's search experience was fragmented and underequipped. Users searching for products, support content, and account information were being served results with inadequate filtering, no concierge logic to speed up common queries, and a results page that didn't match the quality of the brand.
For a bank handling millions of daily interactions, a poor search experience isn't a minor UX issue it's a customer service failure at scale. People who can't find answers turn to phone support, lose trust, or leave.
I redesigned Santander's search results page with improved information architecture, filtering options properly tailored to the range of content types users were searching for, and a cleaner layout that made the most relevant answer faster to find.
I also designed toward a more intelligent search concierge, a system that could surface the most common queries before users had finished typing. The infrastructure existed within the platform; the opportunity was to push the UX significantly beyond what the original brief specified.
Enterprise design engagements at this scale come with constraints smaller projects don't. Santander's design system was built in Sketch and wasn't fully documented, which meant working within a system that was itself incomplete, while delivering work that looked and felt coherent.
Internal stakeholder navigation added another layer: large financial institutions move carefully, and every design decision required justification across multiple approval layers. The discipline this demands isn't just craft, it's knowing when to push for a better solution and when to work within the constraint.
The redesigned Santander SERP shipped. The new information architecture, filtering system, and results layout gave customers a significantly cleaner path to the answers they needed.
The search concierge work, while not fully realised in this engagement, established a clear design direction for the next phase of development.
Santander was an exercise in designing with constraint as a creative parameter. A tighter brief, a complex approval chain, an incomplete design system, none of these are excuses. They're the conditions under which most enterprise design work actually happens. Learning to deliver quality inside those conditions, rather than around them, is one of the more useful things I've learned.