515908 - [faceted search]: Empty results page needs some love

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Thunderbird :: Search, enhancement)

Description

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

Attachment: Screenshot of empty results page

When the search doesn't give any results it could be more useful.

Comment 1

[David Ascher (:davida)]

hoping bryan has some ideas.

Comment 2

[David Ascher (:davida)]

We won't block TB3 on this, in part because of the string impact.

Comment 3

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

I can't imagine I'm going to be able to get anything on this without new strings.  Unless we could license some kind of video game "game over" wav file to play when no results are available.

Also the screenshot makes me think we should have a bug filed for spellchecking the search terms  and offering a "maybe you meant this:" correction option.  Did someone already beat to that punch?

Comment 4

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

(In reply to comment #3)
> I can't imagine I'm going to be able to get anything on this without new
> strings.  Unless we could license some kind of video game "game over" wav file
> to play when no results are available.
> 
> Also the screenshot makes me think we should have a bug filed for spellchecking
> the search terms  and offering a "maybe you meant this:" correction option. 
> Did someone already beat to that punch?

I did see bug 515909

Comment 5

[David Ascher (:davida)]

This happens too often, and is too painful.  As we are actually allowing some strings in between b4 and RC1, I think we should do something here.

Comment 6

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

I think this is going to take a combination of solutions to achieve correctly.

1. We need some normalized layout when no search results appear and some "empty text" explaining that fact.

2. We need to offer suggestions for incorrect typing, i.e. bug 515909

3. For general use and to use a bit more space in filling out the empty search result I think we should include a "footer" in the results page.  This would be a place that extensions could add alternate search suggestions like "recently deleted messages", "recently archived messages", "recent search: $x, $y, $zed".  The footer would always be at the bottom of search results but would be more visible when no results are found.  I need to file a bug on this.

Comment 7

[David Ascher (:davida)]

In my mind, just 1. above is a true TB3 blocker. Agreed?

Comment 8

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

Right, I think the rest are solutions we can require for the 3.1 time frame but 1. has to block 3.0

Comment 9

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

I'm going to assign this to Andreas to look into

Comment 10

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

cc'ing asuth.  Andrew, what would be the best way to implement an empty results string.  in the HTML page and have it shown (display:none -> display:block) when no results are found or in the bindings to be appended as needed?

Comment 11

[Andrew Sutherland [:asuth] (he/him)]

I think the answer depends on how you are visually displaying things and what that means in terms of the DOM hierarchy.  Since we're punting on the "did you mean..." options, you should be able to do this with straight CSS, but that assumes that you're not trying to do a lightbox-style div occluding the whole page or something.

Comment 12

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

Attachment: something like this perhaps?

I've been toying with the idea to put something funnier in here, like a bird who is unable to find something or so, something with the same feeling as the twitter fail-whale kind of. Any ideas for what it could do?

Comment 13

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

(In reply to comment #12)
> Created an attachment (id=402575) [details]
> something like this perhaps?
> 
> I've been toying with the idea to put something funnier in here, like a bird
> who is unable to find something or so, something with the same feeling as the
> twitter fail-whale kind of. Any ideas for what it could do?

Can we add a search field on that result page ?

Comment 14

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

That would give us two search fields, so I'm skeptic to that. Perhaps we could highlight the search box in some way though.

Comment 15

[David Ascher (:davida)]

I like both the idea in #12, and in #13.  We have a more generic problem where it would be nice to narrow searches with full-text queries (e.g. search for "messages tagged important, get too many results, find a way to narrow the search).  So we may end up with a search field in the results page in some contexts at least.  I agree w/ andreas that it's problematic to have two search fields, but browsers+search engines manage that somehow.

Comment 16

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

Attachment: mockup with search box

Comment 17

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

Attachment: bird sketches

hm, didn't I add these to this bug report last night? I wonder where those ended up exactly.
Here is a bunch of variants for a bird we can use instead of the looking glass that would make people feel a bit better about the failed search. I like the bird holding the looking glass best, but I thought it would be fun to show all of them here. :)

Comment 18

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

Attachment: search not found looking glass

here is the looking glass. After some discussion with david on irc, we're not going with a bird for now.

Comment 19

[Simon Paquet [:sipaq]]

What is the status here? We need to get to this ASAP because of the upcoming string freeze for TB3 tomorrow night.

Comment 20

[Andreas Nilsson (:andreasn)]

Need some help with the javascript part of this. It's a bit above my knowledge.

Comment 21

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

I've got a fix in the works for this that I'll be including in my patch for bug 518694

Comment 22

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

Attachment: empty search results screenshot

here's a screenshot of what I have so far.  This doesn't look very polished as the search icon is rather huge and I didn't want to grab the query parameter text to display again.

At least this is working and we could finalize the string we want to use followed by updating the image and layout afterward.

Comment 23

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

Attachment #403436 [details] [diff]  has a near final version of the patch in bug 518694

Comment 24

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

This has been fixed by attachment 403535 [details] [diff] [review] in bug 518694.