CDK Global Search
Now every bit of data a user has access to across all of their CDK apps can be found from one global search.
One search bar
Every CDK product a user can access, searchable from one place.
Research first
Earlier attempts skipped it and never shipped. This one led with it.
Built to scale
A simple intake lets new products join search on their own.
Live in Unify
Records, apps and workflows, all from one search.
Search across CDK had never worked
CDK's products were built in silos, each with its own data and its own search. A service advisor looking for a repair history had to know which app held it first. Earlier attempts at a global search had all been abandoned before production, for the same reasons each time:
No user research
to ground what people actually needed.
No work across product teams
to understand each product's data.
Too much scope,
trying to solve everything at once.
This time we started with research and shipped a smaller first version.
Turning research into the design
I worked alongside a UX researcher, another architect and an embedded developer. My part was turning the research into design direction, then owning the interaction design and UI all the way to production, while working with product teams across CDK so each product's data showed up in a way that made sense.
Sales rep
Needs customer records and inventory fast, mid-conversation with a lead, on desktop and mobile.
Service advisor
Looks up VINs, repair history and parts during a service appointment. Speed matters most.
Dealer principal
Wants a high-level view across the dealership.
What research confirmed: people didn't want to think about which app held their data. They wanted to type a name, a VIN or a repair order number and get the right result.
Results grouped by type
A service advisor and a sales rep might both search "ford" and want completely different things. Segmented results let each person jump to the category that matters to them, with the depth of an in-app search.
Mid-fidelity comps went straight into the developer's prototype environment, so design and build moved together and testing fed back sprint by sprint.
Letting new products onboard themselves
Every product that joins CDK's ecosystem needs to be searchable, and researching each one from scratch didn't scale. The team built a self-serve intake: product owners answer structured questions about their users, workflows, data and permissions, and the team validates and implements.
Live in Unify
Global Search shipped inside CDK Unify, where earlier attempts never reached production. Customer records, repair orders, inventory and workflows are all reachable from one search bar, whichever product holds the data.
Next on the roadmap: natural language queries, fuzzy matching, autocomplete and a mobile-optimized experience.