ES|QL-first Discover

I'm leading the design of ES|QL-first Discover, rethinking how people search, query and explore data inside Kibana.

Context

Discover is where Kibana users go to look at their data before they know what they are looking for. It has to serve two audiences at once: engineers who already think in query syntax, and analysts who need to find something without learning one.

ES|QL is Elastic's piped query language. Making it the primary way to explore data, rather than one mode among several, changes the fundamental question the interface has to answer. Not "which filters do I apply?" but "what am I asking, and can I see myself asking it?"

My role

I'm the Senior Product Designer on this, owning it end to end: product strategy, UX architecture, interaction design, prototyping. I partner with Product Management and Engineering from discovery through delivery.

The problem

Powerful querying and approachable exploration usually pull against each other. Expose the full language and you lose everyone who doesn't already know it. Hide it behind a builder and you cap what experts can do, and you teach nobody anything.

Draft gap (Laura): the specific friction you found in research goes here. What were users actually doing when they got stuck? One concrete observation is worth more than any amount of framing.

Approach

I started with the data model rather than the screen. If you understand how the query language composes, what a pipe actually does to a result set, you can design an interface that reveals the system's logic instead of hiding it.

From there the work was about making the query the visible centre of the experience, so that running one teaches you how to write the next.

Draft gap (Laura): two or three of the real design decisions, and what you rejected. The rejected options are what make a case study read as thinking rather than a portfolio of screens.

What shipped

Draft gap (Laura): what is live today, and what changed for users as a result. If you have any usage or adoption signal you're permitted to share, this is where it lands. If you aren't permitted, say so plainly. That reads as professional, not evasive.

What I'd do next

Draft gap (Laura): where you'd take it. This section is optional but it's the one hiring managers read most closely, because it shows judgement rather than output.