Asana: Powering the Search for a Faster and More Accurate Search Experience

From the start, Asana prided itself on high-quality customer service, but they wanted to find a way to scale without hiring a massive support team. To make this possible, Asana created an extremely detailed product guide and documentation center — but users were having a hard time searching through all of its content. Asana needed strong search, as well as in-depth analytics on customer behavior so they could see where search could be improved even further.

Not only did Asana need a powerful search engine for the front end of their documentation, they also needed something that provided a user-friendly analytics experience. They had been using Google Analytics, which could provide them analytics from their site, but it was not very accessible for all members of the team, limiting the number of people who could draw actionable insights from the data they were finding. Given their requirements, Asana turned to the Elastic Site Search Service.

After implementing Elastic Site Search, Asana users were able to find their answers faster. This change empowered users to more easily educate themselves about the product. According to Ryan Pittington, User Operations Lead, Site Search made it a "better experience to use the Guide (Asana’s internal documentation hub) than to contact support."

Additionally, Asana uses Elastic Site Search’s built-in analytics to make sure that users never run into dead ends when searching through their support documentation. By checking their dashboards, Asana’s internal team can easily see different search analytics, including the top queries that continue to return no results. This allows the team to create content for those questions or customize search results for those queries through the drag-and-drop results reordering interface — a feature Ryan describes as "magic".

Beyond just looking at the dashboards in order to ensure an optimal search journey, Asana’s use of the Elastic Site Search Service has given them unexpected intel on their users’ behavior by allowing them to look closely at top queries across their site, unearthing new ways that customers use their product.

In contrast to their experience with Google Analytics, Asana found Elastic Site Search dashboards highly accessible and user-friendly — so much so that many members of the operations team receive the weekly search analytics emails. These dashboard analytics and weekly emails serve as a constant reminder of the precise needs of Asana’s users, allowing the team to continually expand their support content and efficiently resolve user issues.