Product on Harlan D. Harris

Search Describes Solutions -- But What About Problems?

harlan.harris@gmail.com (Harlan Harris) — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In a previous post I said that Search User Interfaces (UI) have two jobs -- helping people find things and educating them about the catalog's structure. (I'll use "catalog" here under the assumption that I'm describing an e-commerce search system, but much of this post is relevant for other search domains.) The search results, facets, and other elements describe the catalog: the solutions and products available.

But there's a third job that's often not addressed and not always well defined: helping users understand their problem, before they're ready to evaluate solutions. Standard search UI patterns assume the user is already in the right mental state to evaluate what's on offer. The design challenge that I want to discuss, then, is to figure out how best to support problem education in search interfaces.

Design Decisions for a New Search Results Page

harlan.harris@gmail.com (Harlan Harris) — Fri, 08 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

One of my specialties as a freelance consultant is discovery systems for e-commerce -- web pages and backend systems for helping users search for and find what they want or need. For the last year and a half, I've been working as a consultant for DesignShop, a company that sells materials samples for home renovations. Want to find a countertop, cabinet, paint, and tile combo for your kitchen reno that looks great, with samples shipped overnight? Check 'em out.

You Don't Need a Search Engineer; You Need a Search Scientist

harlan.harris@gmail.com (Harlan Harris) — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Say you're an Engineering Manager or a Product Manager, responsible for a business-critical search system on a website. Maybe e-commerce, maybe a marketplace, maybe something else. Search is sort of working, it doesn't crash, and it's fast, but there's a feeling that "search isn't great", and you've been tasked with finding someone to help. Your first instinct, or that of your VP, might be some version of: “we need to hire a search engineer.”

A Collaborative Template for A/B Tests

harlan.harris@gmail.com (Harlan Harris) — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

As I've written about before, as a data scientist supporting a product or marketing team with A/B testing, the job is communication -- helping to translate between business requirements and what we can learn from statistics. I (and many, many others) have found that there is a lot of value in having a document, shared among the team that is running the test. Some A/B testing tools include some limited workflow for collaboration on testing (e.g., Amplitude Experiments has pre-test, monitoring, and results tabs with useful graphs and summary statistics), but I think the most important thing is to have a tool that helps the team get aligned by forcing them to write things down.

Are LLMs a simple solution? And if so, for what problems?

harlan.harris@gmail.com (Harlan Harris) — Thu, 14 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

The other day, I was reading a post by Venkatash Rao (thousands of words of under-edited brilliance, as usual), and was struck by this note about the complexity of climate solutions:

I tend to take as an article of faith the systems science rule of thumb that the complexity of solutions generally matches the complexity of the problems. If it doesn’t, then you either got lucky, or there are negative externalities you’re ignoring.