887567 - Better UX to help those who want to search by title

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Webmaker Graveyard :: webmaker.org, defect)

Description

[Jacob [:Jacob]]

I see why Cassie made the default search page a tag search, but I've already seen people confused when they can't find the title of the make their looking for (not knowing they're on tag search and can switch the icon to be a title search)

My immediate suggestion to help remedy this is to make the zero results text suggest a title search if nothing comes up.

So right now it says "  No makes :(  "

But it could say "   No makes :( Did you mean to search by title instead of tag?

That will at least notify the user that they are searching by tag instead of title and hopefully they will think of changing the icon via drop down.

Comment 1

[Chris DeCairos (:cade)]

I'd love to see a verbal indication to the user what field they're searching on (next to the search box), because it's really not too clear for me what field is selected based on the icon.

Comment 2

[Jon Buckley [:jbuck]]

Cassie, what do you think? Should we add some text string saying what each icon represents? Or should we make title search the default search? Or both?

Comment 3

[Cassie McDaniel [:cassiemc]]

This was actually Kate's implementation, so I've cc'd her in case she has additional thoughts.

Can the initial search not just search all (so tags, title, description PLUS users), or is that too much for some reason? I imagine most people don't want to narrow their search by any of those categories initially – they are just looking for something with a key word.

Bare minimum change would be to do as Jacob suggested, and change the resulting copy on "No results" to "No makes :( Did you mean to search by title instead of tag?"

I wouldn't want to add descriptions to the icons next to the search field because those are already indicated pretty clearly in the dropdown. This is certainly something we can/should explore in user testing.

Comment 4

[Dale Karp (:daleee)]

Attachment: https://github.com/mozilla/webmaker.org/pull/235

https://github.com/mozilla/webmaker.org/pull/235

Unfortunately, it isn't possible (at the moment) to have the default search use all the search types in one query, so I changed the 'no results' text to what Cassie suggested.

Comment 5

[Cassie McDaniel [:cassiemc]]

(In reply to Dale Karp (:daleee) from comment #4)

> Unfortunately, it isn't possible (at the moment) to have the default search
> use all the search types in one query

Can you explain why not? That is really the ideal behavior in the long-term, to search all types, and I'd like to have a better understanding of what we need to do to get there...

Comment 6

[Dale Karp (:daleee)]

(In reply to Cassie McDaniel [:cassiemc] from comment #5)
> (In reply to Dale Karp (:daleee) from comment #4)
> 
> > Unfortunately, it isn't possible (at the moment) to have the default search
> > use all the search types in one query
> 
> Can you explain why not? That is really the ideal behavior in the long-term,
> to search all types, and I'd like to have a better understanding of what we
> need to do to get there...

From what I understood from Chris, that feature just hasn't been implemented into the MakeAPI. Flagging Chris to see if we can change that.

Comment 7

[[github robot]]

Commits pushed to master at https://github.com/mozilla/webmaker.org

https://github.com/mozilla/webmaker.org/commit/fa29300506b037f721f1cdba98643ff9db127f5c
[bug 887567] Search UX for title search

https://github.com/mozilla/webmaker.org/commit/7b1a4a59fb097db7d7db946f646b18231d62f9e3
Merge pull request #235 from daleee/887567-better-title-search-ux

[bug 887567] Search UX for title search

Comment 8

[Chris DeCairos (:cade)]

Filters for searches are run with AND, not OR logic.

If this is something you think is useful, file a bug and I will explore how easy it'd be to toggle the filters to run with OR logic.

Comment 9

[Cassie McDaniel [:cassiemc]]

Bug filed – bug 890326. This is important for the long-term usability of the site, particularly as content grows. We're even starting to see how this effects discoverability of all types of content right now, so let's get it right as soon as we can.

Comment 10

[Dale Karp (:daleee)]

Pretty sure this is no longer valid.