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

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Monday 17 March 2014 11:14:17 Heiko Tietze wrote:
> I'd suggest to move usability or rather HIG related discussions into the
> guidelines ML. I'll cross post for now.
> 
> On Thursday 13 March 2014, 14:17:48 Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> >- "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"
> 
> Search vs. filter makes a big difference like Ctrl+I/F in Dolphin (as franku
> pointed out). My attempt for discrimination: A search takes all items and
> increases the result list based the query pattern; a filter reduces the
> result list based of the (limited) input list. That might be the user's
> picture because technically both do very similar operations.
>
> "Search as you type" would be still a core functionality for filters. I
> understand it in terms of the auto-complete feature of
> [url=http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/Usability/HIG/DropDown]drop down
> lists[/url]. A guideline based on technical limitation (quickly,
> resources..) would be okay as well but less descriptive.

I see filter vs. search and instant vs. on enter/button as orthogonal. Okay, 
filtering should usually be fast enough to work as you type, but search as you 
type with an actual search is well possible, too. See Dolphin's search feature 
or KRunner, for example. They both perform actual searches, but still works 
instantly. And from all I've heard, it will work even better with baloo.
Why would we have users click a button first if we can effortlessly search as 
they type as well?

> >-Do we really need the icon next to the line input?
> 
> Well, actually we do have an icon there (in most cases). And I like the idea
> of easy identification.

Hm, it seems like we're talking about different thins. I thought the icon in 
"Search input consists of an icon, a line input to enter the search pattern,  
and a button to start the search." was referring to the binoculars next to the 
inout in Kickoff, for example. And I've not seen that combination anywhere 
else. Neither in Dolphin nor in KMail nor anywhere else I looked. If you did 
mean that icon: Where else did you see it? If not: Which one did you mean?

> >- On the "Appearance" section, do you mean that all these things would be
> 
> "allowed"?
> The sub items are exclusive. If we define a more or less new guideline we
> should ask what users want.

Ah okay, so these are meant as proposals on which we ask for feedback from the 
HIG users? Makes sense to me!

> |Sogatori at the forum: Most OSes and webpages seems to favour a magnifying
> 
> glass
> I agree. The magnifier is IMHO less obtrusive compared to the actual spy
> glass.

The advantage of the spyglass is certainly that it cannot be confused with 
zoom, but magnifying glasses are so more common for search as well that I'd go 
with that one, too.