I have deployed the project to Vercel.
Please find questions / answers here.
- Choose a dataset
- Create an Algolia account
- Configure basic relevance settings
- Build out basic search
- Add code to public GitHub repo
- Give Algolia admins access
- Write up
Having decided that the selection of datasets (hopefully) wasn't a psychometric evaluation in its own right, I decided to build out a simple search based on the wine dataset.
Very recently I mentored a designer-friend through the interview process with a large wine retailer, so with that in mind I felt that a UX akin to their “wine selector”, with the ability to filter products would be a fun project.
Whilst this task was clearly a method for Algolia to gauge my ability to learn new tools, solve problems and adapt to a challenge, I also found this a great introduction to the product and really enjoyed reading through the documentation and getting a feel for the customer onboarding experience.
I particularly enjoyed the InstantSearch libraries and found they were a great way to very quickly get a great depth of functionality that without a tool like Algolia would have likely taken an order of magnitude longer to build.
During my first meeting with Michael and Matthew we spoke about next.js so I decided to give that a little more time. I ran in to some issues deploying to Vercel that seemed related to case-sensitivity, so I spent a little time working around that and getting the app deployed.
With more time I’d have refined the front-end, ensuring containers were more solid and building-in more responsiveness. Additionally I’d like to explore more of the refinementlist library. Grabbing the data from Algolia seemed trivial compared with the time required to implement price sliders etc. so I definitely had to focus my time to get something “robust enough” submitted!