competitionline
Redesigned the tender search of a 20-year-old platform for architects without breaking the habits of its users
What I was handed
competitionline is a German platform for architects and planners: competition results, a job market, office profiles and public tenders. It has been online for about 20 years. Its tender search was a page of grey fields, the search box inside the filter column. The UI kit behind it, kept in Adobe XD, had stopped growing with the product.
What I was brought in for
To build a design system the new pages could stand on, and then to give the tender search a modern interface without changing how it works.
Users had searched for tenders the same way for years, so the new search works as the old one did. What changed is how it looks and what it is built from: a design system I made out of the platform’s old UI kit.
The work was written down. In nearly 700 comments in the files I set out options with their reasons, asked before anything was built and marked a guess as a guess. Kai, the platform’s strategic product designer, matched my work to what the platform’s clients needed.
The new tender search went live in 2025. Two more features I designed launched on it: the team labels and the search profiles with email updates. I also designed notes on a tender.
The same search, before and after.
The search as a visitor saw it in 2023, rebuilt into my design part by part. The search field left the filter column and now stands across the top of the page. The filters kept their names and their order, and the doubled pagination above the list went.
A search first, then the filters narrow it.
Each filter opens in place and scrolls inside itself, so a long list such as the 50-odd types of service never pushes the results away. Every tender is the same card: title, deadline, location and services, in the same order.
Search profiles got new screens, not new mechanics.
A search profile saves a set of filters, and marketing wanted email updates for each one. I drew the feature in every state, not only the main path: signed out, without profiles, with them, editing and deleting, on three screen sizes. My first version changed how profiles worked, and after Kai pointed out the risk to settled habits, the final one keeps the old mechanics.
A team sees who marked a tender, without opening it.
On a team subscription every tender carries three labels: relevant, maybe and not relevant. A label shows the avatars of the colleagues who chose it, and a tooltip names them all, so their view is clear before anyone opens the tender. The list filters by label too.
Two ways for a team to talk, shown before anyone chose.
Notes on a tender could be threads, as on a forum, or one stream where a colleague is called by name. I drew both on the same tender so the team could compare them. They chose the stream, and I designed the rest around it: adding, attaching, editing and reacting, and three ways it could behave on a phone.
“During our collaboration, Oleksii was responsible for the UI Design and the development and maintenance of the Design System for the company. Based on the user requirements I analyzed from my research, he quickly created state-of-the-art UI designs independently, using his creativity and constructive questioning. … This resulted in UIs that were always very well received by end customers.”
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