Creative / product studio
North & Co.
A work index prospects can actually filter
North & Co.’s catalog of work outgrew simple categories. Prospects filtered by industry and left with empty screens, or found beautiful projects that weren’t relevant. The index needed honest metadata and resilient empty states—not more tags for their own sake.
Context
The studio’s reputation spans overlapping sectors; strict silos misrepresent the work. Filters had to combine logically (AND/OR) without confusing casual visitors.
Search was out of scope; browse had to carry the experience.
Constraints
Keep filters server-renderable for speed and shareable URLs—hash-only client filters were rejected.
Avoid filter UIs that require tutorials.
Research
We card-sorted project types with the team and validated against inbound inquiry language—often imprecise (‘brand refresh for fintech’) vs. internal labels.
We mapped zero-result queries from the beta index and adjusted synonym coverage.
Approach
Filters expose counts and disable impossible combinations instead of leading users to dead ends.
Each result tile prioritizes outcome language over internal codenames so scanning stays human.
Delivery
Migration scripts reconciled legacy tags; redirects preserved old deep links to the closest new case study.
Analytics events capture filter usage without PII so the team can retire unused dimensions.
Outcomes (directional)
Prospects reached relevant case studies faster; empty states became rare and instructive instead of blank.
Sales spent less time sending PDFs to replace confusing web paths.
Stack & integrations
- Taxonomy model
- URL-based filters
- Static generation where possible