U-NEXT is Japan's number one streaming service with 30,000+ pieces of content across drama, film, books, and more. The goal was to redesign the search experience by introducing smart autosuggest across Web, iOS, and Android simultaneously — improving content discoverability at scale for millions of users.

What looked like a simple search improvement turned out to be tangled in conflicting business expectations, engineering constraints, political friction between teams, and user frustrations all pointing in different directions. A full rebuild would take years — maybe five. I saw a different path: what if we worked within the existing tech stack and focused on high-impact improvements first? I was determined to turn a 5-year roadmap blocker into something we could actually ship — and I would prove that strategy through research, prototyping, and a successful A/B test.

Conducted desktop research benchmarking autosuggest vs. autocomplete patterns across streaming and e-commerce. Facilitated ideation workshops with core and extended teams. Designed cross-platform explorations for Mobile, Web, Responsive, and early TV concepts. Created paper sketches and Figma prototypes, and documented handoffs for all platforms. Ran a successful A/B test to validate the approach before full rollout. Also delegated and oversaw early TV autosuggest initiatives.

Compressed 5 years of roadmap inertia into 4 months of focused execution. The A/B test was a success, unlocking full implementation across Web, iOS, and Android. Also opened the door for autosuggest on the TV platform — a new initiative I helped design, delegate, and oversee. Immediate buy-in from business stakeholders, PO leads, and Dev leads.

Having empathy for business stakeholders and developers gave us insights that shaped the right strategy. Sometimes the best innovation is simply using what you already have — well. Due to complications with TV and other projects, we couldn't launch everywhere at once, but this became an opportunity for me to grow as a delegator and a design lead — learning to move things forward without being the sole executor.

I'd love to evolve the autosuggest into a full semantic search experience — one that understands user intent across languages (especially the Japanese/English overlap unique to U-NEXT) and surfaces personalized content discovery, not just query matching. There's a real opportunity there for ML-powered search that feels like it reads your mind.