https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=33561
--- Comment #5 from Daniel Friesen <mediawiki-b...@nadir-seen-fire.com> 2012-09-29 23:06:28 UTC --- (In reply to comment #4) > Ok let's nail it to the basics: > > Old search: > Fail #1: 2 buttons, a "Go" and a "Search" button Fail #1.1: The two buttons do not match practices used in other places on the internet. This leaves the user with no prior knowledge to reference in their confusion. > New search: > Fail #1: No submit button at all > Fail #2: Submit function is a tiny icon The magnifying glass is the submit button. It carries proper alt text, title, and pointer functionality as well. This practice isn't a quirk of our system, it's a practice used by other websites as well, so it isn't completely unexpected. However you're welcome to request user testing to see if users are having a hard time submitting their search queries. Or we could add the equivalent of click tracking. Watch for users entering text into the search box and see how many times they leave without continuing with their search (Though we'll have to be careful about power-users like me that use the Auto-complete to find a template name we need). Perhaps also track how long the time between last character and submission was. > Fail #3: Submit function is a forced redirect function This isn't a fail. Unlike other websites wikis have articles with simple names for the mass majority of searches the user is looking for the page with the same name. Hence we send the user there. > Fail #4: Simple full text search is a text link > Fail #5: Simple text search link is hidden as last entry of a suggestions list Fulltext search rather than the go functionality is not usually what the user intends most of the time. Frankly if you think about it the user doesn't even know what the site structure is so having separate fulltext search functionality is almost useless. The only situation that a user actually explicitly wants fulltext search is generally when they have already made a search and the first result didn't have anything they want. And that's a special situation, not one indicating that Actually... quite frankly in the old system I doubt the user ever understood that they could re-search with a separate fulltext search. For those kinds of situations a feature that adds something like "Not what you're looking for? You can search for <pages containing "..."> instead." (where <...> is a link to the search page) is the correct way to handle the user. > "From a usability point of view, irritated users use the search function as a > last option when looking for specific information on a website." > Wikis are not a standard website. Search is fundamental. Exactly why unlike other websites we have the go functionality. The problem is we need a few more tweaks to perfect it's usability. The old functionality was one of the worst. -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are the assignee for the bug. You are on the CC list for the bug. _______________________________________________ Wikibugs-l mailing list Wikibugs-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikibugs-l
