Watobu

Overview

Watobu started with a simple premise: give product teams a place to explore how other products solve specific problems.

I joined Watobu at the MVP stage and worked across its evolution, from establishing the initial product experience and landing page to designing search and bookmarking, and later rethinking the homepage around discovery.

My work ranged from feature ownership and UX research to interaction design, developer collaboration, and implementation QA.

As the product developed, new UX questions emerged. How should users find relevant inspiration? What should they save? And what should happen when they arrive without a specific thing in mind?

I worked across these stages, with three areas becoming particularly important:

• Search: helping users find relevant inspiration
• Bookmark: helping users retain and organize what they find
• Homepage: helping users discover where to start

01. Search

Problem

Watobu's library uses its own structure and terminology, but users don't necessarily approach research using those same terms.

A user might know the problem they want to research without knowing the exact feature name used by the library. For example, someone researching device enrollment might search for a more specific term such as “MDM device enrollment” rather than simply “device enrollment.”

The search experience therefore couldn't rely entirely on users knowing what to type.

How might we help users find relevant inspiration even when their terminology or intent doesn't perfectly match the library?

Research

I explored how users might express the same research intent differently and looked at:

• Feature and flow terminology
• Different levels of search specificity
• Industry context
• Recognition versus recall
• Search suggestions and related concepts
• What happens when searches produce limited or irrelevant results

This led to a central principle:

Search should help users recognize a useful direction, rather than requiring them to recall the exact terminology first.

Design decisions

I focused on the behavior surrounding the search field rather than treating it as a simple input.

Search recommendations appear when users begin searching, giving them possible directions before they have to formulate a query from scratch.

Recent searches appear when the search field is activated, allowing returning users to quickly resume previous research.

I also worked closely with developers to define search behavior, discuss technical feasibility, and work through edge cases during implementation.

02. Bookmark

Problem

Finding useful inspiration creates another problem: how should users keep it?

Watobu contained multiple levels of content: apps, flows, and screens. We needed to determine what was actually valuable enough to save.

Saving everything would have increased complexity without necessarily improving the research workflow.

Research

I evaluated the role of each content type in the context of product research.

A standalone screen could provide visual inspiration, but without its surrounding flow it lacked important context.

An entire app was too broad to be a useful unit for most research tasks.

A flow, however, represented a meaningful product pattern while retaining its surrounding context.

This led to the decision to make flows the primary unit of saved research.

Design decisions

The core interaction was:

Bookmark → choose folder → save

Users could:

• Save directly to the default folder
• Choose an existing folder
• Create a new folder while saving

The default folder was important because users shouldn't have to stop and categorize an idea the moment they discover it.

I then designed the broader bookmark experience, including:

• Folder creation and editing
• Adding flows to folders
• Collections
• Searching and sorting saved content
• Saved-flow views and metadata
• Folder/content counts
• Continuing to browse for more inspiration
• Undoing a bookmark action

The overall model separated capture from organization: saving should be immediate, while organizing could happen when the user found it useful.

03. Homepage

Problem

The original homepage was largely a grid of content under a Feature Spotlight heading. It implicitly assumed that users would arrive with enough intent to search for something specific.

But product research doesn't always begin with a precise question.

A designer may know they need inspiration without knowing which feature, flow, or industry they want to explore.

How might the homepage give users a direction when they don't already have one?

Research

During the homepage exploration, I examined the experience from the perspective of the ICP and reviewed how the existing product supported discovery.

The biggest issue was a lack of structure.

Users could see content, but the homepage didn't provide enough guidance around:

• Where to start
• What was worth exploring
• How to search when they didn't know the exact term
• How different content related to their interests
• What had changed or was new

This shifted the role of the homepage from a content feed to an orientation layer.

Design decisions

I designed around two types of intent:

• Users with a clear direction should be able to act immediately.
• Users without a clear direction should be given useful starting points.

The proposed homepage included:

• Search recommendations below the search bar
• Continue Browsing to support ongoing exploration
• Featured Spotlight with intentionally selected content
• Industry-specific features with industry tabs
• Newly Released content
• Search guidance for users who don't find what they're looking for

Rather than presenting another undifferentiated collection of cards, the homepage provides multiple paths into the library.

Outcome

Working across Watobu changed the product from my perspective in stages.

The initial challenge was establishing the product itself. As it matured, the problems became more specific:

• Search addressed discovery for users who had an existing research direction.
• Bookmark established a meaningful way to retain and organize the research they found.
• Homepage extended that thinking to users who arrived without a defined direction.

Together, these projects helped shape how Watobu supports the broader research journey:

Find → Explore → Save → Return → Discover

My contribution spanned that journey, from defining interaction models and conducting UX research to collaborating with developers and validating implemented experiences through QA.

The homepage is still at the design stage, so its impact remains to be validated. The work instead represents the next step in the product's evolution: moving beyond being a library of product flows toward an experience that actively helps users navigate and explore that library.