[kde-guidelines] HIG for search needed (?)

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 11.03.2014 16:43, Heiko Tietze wrote:
> On Thursday 06 March 2014, 15:23:06 Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
>> Do you guys agree that such an HIG is necessary? If so, I think we
>> should first decide whether KDE should stick to always visible search
>> fields or switch to hidden ones, then I can start writing the guideline
>> (unless Heiko would like to step up to do it ;) ).
>
> Let's start: http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Usability/HIG/SearchPattern

Thank you for getting things started!
Here are a few points that I'd like to discuss:

- "Start the search process via button or when the user pressed enter." 
This would exclude all "search as you type" functionality (which the 
currently many of search features in KDE offer). Suggestion:
"If the search can be performed quickly and with low resource usage, 
start searching as the user types. If the search requires more resources 
(such as computationally intensive search, reading lots of data from 
disk or transferring lots of data over the network), start searching 
only when the user presses enter or clicks the search button"
I think it may make sense to show in the UI whether it will sesarch 
instantly or only after pressing enter or a button. Not sure yet how to 
show it, though.

- Do we really need the icon next to the line input? It seems that the 
majority of applications/websites/OSes just a line input which is 
"pre-filled" (I don't know the correct term for this) with "Search" or 
"Filter" with an icon to start the search, and I think that looks much 
leaner while remaining recognizeable.

- On the "Appearance" section, do you mean that all these things would 
be "allowed"? If so: I'm not sure if we should allow both "always show" 
and "show only when users start to search" or recommend only one for the 
sake of consistency. I fear that a small icon may not be enough to make 
it clear to users that there is a hidden search function if the search 
control is always visible in other places.

What do you think?