Helping a search engine navigate growth, AI and identity
Helping a search engine navigate growth, AI and identity
When I joined Ecosia, the company had a radical founder, a strong mission, a global-tree planting operation, a loyal user base and a profitable business model. However, the culture was inherently conservative because any investment in product felt like it was taking money from tree planting. Teams were building in isolation, we lacked a shared view of where the product was headed and struggled to offer much to our users beyond tree counters.
Ecosians had a lot of competing views on what the brand meant to them, but there was little understanding of our audience’s motives or how we might address them. I ran multiple initiatives over three years to help Ecosia move forward, starting with the development of a unique selling proposition: a workshop for senior stakeholders to coalesce their divergent perspectives into a proposition that resonated with our core users. This design-centred approach to problem-solving and consensus-building would become fundamental to everything that followed.
Giving the design team a purpose
With Ecosia being heavily focused on business metrics for everything from OKR planning to performance reviews, the design team was struggling to create space for its own success when planning roadmaps or developing our careers. I introduced a series of leadership initiatives, starting with a design strategy and program to help us become more intentional in OKR planning, and new frameworks for designers to track their skills development beyond the usual performance criteria used in bi-annual reviews.
I believe this kind of work is important: we need to find purpose beyond our employer’s priorities and we can build resilience by helping our teams become intrinsically motivated in their roles.
Showing Ecosians where we’re going
To address the lack of transparency across product roadmaps, I led a small team to deliver Ecosia’s product vision. We gathered data, insights and priorities from across the product organisation, which were distilled into a single vision of a near-future Ecosia: a document containing user stories and interactive prototypes that highlighted each team’s initiatives and estimated horizons. We built it using Flora, Ecosia’s design system, to consolidate how we developed high-level concept work and turn the output into a repeatable process. The vision was presented to the entire company and became a shared reference point for decisions that had previously been made in isolation. It also became the catalyst for several key product initiatives, including user accounts.
User accounts had the potential to become the foundation for personalised features, engagement loops and measurable retention improvements, but required incentive for users to sign in. The vision work helped the accounts team identify value propositions that were eventually developed into the live account experience: impact tracking, gamification through seeds and levels and collectibles. The new account experience has significantly improved new user retention and engagement since its release.
Navigating the biggest shift in search since Google
By mid-2024, generative AI was reshaping search and Ecosia needed a clear position. I led the analysis phase, which included mapping the competitive landscape, synthesising six months of usage data and user attitudes, and helping to identify Ecosia’s four biggest pain points that predated AI but were being amplified by it. This fed into a strategy framework with three integration scenarios, each one with real resource implications. Leadership initially chose the conservative path, but returned to the framework and pivoted to full integration as the landscape continued to shift. Ecosia’s AI search experience now runs on smaller, greener models, which traces directly to the brand alignment analysis in that original framework.
The common thread through all of this was a company that initially struggled with ambiguity and risk becoming more comfortable with navigating through it, with the help of user data, design methodologies and artefacts that enabled them to see clearly and make informed decisions.
“Owen’s a true visionary, driving key initiatives that expanded Ecosia’s scope beyond search — work that now plays a pivotal role in the company’s user retention and growth strategy.”
Ina Arnaoudova, Design and UX Research Lead at Ecosia
