From 2008 to 2017, I produced motion graphics, product designs, microsites, and general graphic designs for DuckDuckGo. Founded by my brother, I have been fortunate enough to witness the company's growth from 1 person seeking Series A funding to a fully distributed team of 38 employees around the world.

As a freelance member of the distributed design team, my projects ranged from product UX, microsite design/development/UX, and animation. This is a brief overview of a few of them.

Role

Freelance UX, design, and motion graphics.

Client

What started as a search engine (that doesn't track you) in 2008, has quickly evolved into a privacy company, taking on Google in search and branching out into other private tools.

Most Proud Of

Bringing Dax the Duck to life in animation. Working on an evolving and maturing DLS over the course of a decade.

Initiative 1 - Set DDG as your default



Homepage Prompt

We had a long-standing initiative to move the needle on DuckDuckGO being set as the default search engine. We felt that this was the crux of repeat usage. We tested many animations, UX flows, and copy on the homepage. Here are a few designs we A/B tested many of these for an ongoing period of time.

Version B

Version C

Version D

Version E

Initiative 2 - General Education About Privacy



A series of videos

We produced a ton of content over the course of the decade, all attempting to educate people about online privacy. Based on qualitative and quantitative research, we were constantly iterating our message and medium.



YouTube ads

These 15 second videos were YouTube ads. We also produced microsites and static ads.




Educational Videos

This was an in-house produced video leading up to the 2016 election.

Initiative 3 - Feature adoption



Bang Commands

DuckDuckGo's first persona, and first area of real traction was with developers. We found that these people a) cared about privacy, b) were educated enough to seek alternatives to Google, and c) were not having their needs met by Google. The !bang command was perfect for them. We created a series of microsites, on-site ads, and soacial media gifs to educate them about bangs.




Bang Commands Miscrosite

Explainer interactive experience. This is a video of a prototype.

In the decade of work I've been doing with DuckDuckGo, I've loved being able to watch a company grow, mature, and find and meet customer needs.

My initiatives were always highly collaborative with long time frames to iterate and test ideas to meet the OKRs, so it is hard to capture online, but I'm happy to chat more about this work with anyone!