Desearch — AI Search You Can Verify

Founding design for a decentralized AI search platform — brand to product: sources beside every answer, and a dev platform you can adopt in one sitting.

Role: Founding designer — laid the design groundwork for the platform Scope: Branding · social media assets · developer console · playground

AI search gets distrusted for one structural reason: the answer hides where it came from. Desearch — a decentralized search platform spanning a consumer search experience and a developer API — had both halves of that problem, and as founding designer I was starting from zero: no brand, no design language, no product surfaces to inherit. The brief was really three jobs: give the platform an identity, earn trust in the answer itself, and make the API something a developer can pick up in one sitting.

There were cheaper ways to look trustworthy — polish the answer copy, add confidence disclaimers. The bet I made instead: trust doesn't come from a more fluent answer, it comes from being able to check it. Sources stopped being a footnote and became the second pane — a citations deck sitting beside every answer, with each paragraph tagged by the kind of source it came from.

The citations deck sits beside the answer — posts, articles, papers and threads as scannable cards.

Hovering a sentence highlights the exact source snippet it came from — one gesture from claim to evidence.

Trust signals (freshness, citation usefulness, source coverage) surface as scannable UI, not disclaimers.

The same principle carried into the developer platform: instead of describing the API, let developers run it — generated request code and a live playground on one screen, returning real responses.

Language tabs — Python, JavaScript, cURL — auto-update the request code.

Live responses return real JSON, with a UI toggle to read them as result cards.

The developer console answers "what is this costing me?" — requests, errors and spend share one clock.

After launch, repeat queries rose noticeably, developer onboarding dropped from about a week to days, and API-key activations multiplied. The durable outcome is the groundwork itself: one design language running from the brand and social presence through the search experience to the console and playground.

Full case study → https://www.ssicevs.com/work/desearch