Search Strategy

UX Designer & Researcher · Shopify (custom theme)

Context

Taco Clout sold curated aftermarket parts to the Toyota off-road community: bumpers, lighting kits, and the rest of the digital garage for Tacoma, 4Runner, and Tundra owners. The whole premise was making customization simple for people who already know exactly what they want.

I ran research and design on the store. This project started as a suspicion about one word and ended as the only experiment I ran there that changed the navigation.

Problem

The site was organized by model year, the way a manufacturer’s catalog is. Nobody in this community talks that way. They say “3rd Gen Tacoma,” and they say it in forums, in Reddit threads, and to each other in parking lots.

That mismatch costs more than it sounds. Most parts are cross-compatible across several years inside a generation, so searching by year makes someone check four or five years one at a time to answer a question they already knew the answer to. The 2016 through 2023 Tacomas are near enough identical, and every owner knows it.

Approach

The hypothesis: people will find parts faster, and buy more often, when they can search by generation instead of by model year.

Worth testing rather than assuming, so I went at it five ways.

1. Talked to owners. Actual Tacoma owners, on how they think about their truck, how they shop, and what makes finding the right gear online miserable.
2. Read the behavior. Shopify analytics, heatmaps, and scroll depth for how people moved and where they gave up. Google Search Console for how they phrased it.
3. Checked the vocabulary. Top internal search terms against external Google queries. Generation language won by a distance: “2nd Gen Tacoma bumper,” not a year.
4. Built both versions. Two navigations, one filtered by model year and one by generation, served randomly for two weeks.
5. Measured two things. Conversion rate, meaning did they buy, and time on page, meaning were they cruising or stuck.

Solution

Search by generation, in the community’s own words. Not a compromise between the catalog and the customer, and not year-based search with generation labels bolted on, but the navigation reorganized around the unit of meaning people actually use.

It also opened a smaller question worth testing next: whether the label should read “Generation” or “Gen.” Forums and influencer content say Gen. The catalog says Generation. Getting that right is the same decision at a smaller scale.

Impact

In raw numbers, generation-based search converted at 0.44% against 0.36% for year-based. The time figure is the one that explains why. Microsoft Clarity recordings of the year-based version show what that extra minute and a half was: back-and-forth clicking, pogo-sticking between pages, people hunting rather than shopping. On the generation side they found the part and added it to the cart.

What I took from it

• The best UX decisions come from matching how people talk, not how catalogs are built. Designing around OEM structure is designing around a filing system nobody outside the company uses.
• There is real power in slang, and it pays twice. The words a community uses with each other are the same words they type into Google.
• Tribal knowledge is a design input. Knowing that 2016 through 2023 is one truck to an owner is worth more here than any amount of taste.
• One word can be an experiment. This started as an argument about a label and turned into the navigation.

What I'd do next

• Test “Gen” against “Generation” in the labels, to match how forums and influencers write it.
• Add education so people understand why generation search finds them more parts, not fewer.
• Keep watching search terms and behavior, since the vocabulary moves as new generations land.
• Look at predictive search and personalized recommendations once the language is settled.

The store has since closed. Everything above is the work as it shipped.