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

[Philipp Stefan]

On 22.03.2014 20:38, Heiko Tietze wrote:
> On Saturday 22 March 2014, 16:40:04 Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
>> So far we've been able to reach consensus on all matters without needing a
>> vote (a vote doesn't make much sense with so few people, recently in fact
>> only Heiko and me have been active on this list unless I dragged David
>> Edmundson in to give some technical feedback).
> I planned to run a survey about the appearance questions. But if we decide
> that some of the alternatives aren't working at all we can prepare the
> guideline and present it to the community for an open discussion. My
> preferences: Placement: #1, Show: #3 (plus global short-cut), Results:
> depending on context #1 or #3.
> Anyway, it would be great to add mockups for the most important aspects.
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I have made some mockups concerning the placement of the search field. I 
used the very simple example application found in the Mockup Toolkit and 
modified it a bit. It is important to notice though that this mockup 
only explores the possibilities with the "new" sidebars as seen in the 
Mockup Toolkit. If the VDG descides to not use them then this mockup 
become irrelevant.

For this example I assumed that the search field is hidden by default, 
but a search button is displayed on the sidebar. For the sake of seeing 
the different states of the search field I made it so, that the search 
fields are not focused by default.

[1] The example application found in the Mockup Toolkit
[2/A] Here I tried to integrate the search field with the search button. 
The space is very limited, but then, the application is also rather small.
[3/B] Placement on the upper right.
[4/C] Top centred search field.
[5/D] Search field on the bottom. I adapted its width to the content 
view, because it looked pretty silly when it's only aligned to the 
bottom right. If you want it any ways I can make another mockup with a 
search field centred on the bottom right. :)

If you don't want to deal with all the images then have this one [6], it 
is an overview of all. The picture is huge though, so be warned!

I would find [2/A] to be the most elegant solution, but the limited 
space makes it also impractical when searching for longer search terms. 
This could be of course the solved by scaling down the font used, but it 
would also introduce some visual inconsistency.

[3/B] I find impractical as well. I observed that older people tend to 
drag their mouse to the search field and click it, even though it was 
already focused. The placement on the upper right introduces a longer 
way than necessary.

[4/C] is more acceptable than [3/B] in my opinion, as the path from the 
search button to the actual search field is a bit shorter than in [3/B].

[5/D] is as good as [4/C], if not better. The search button in the 
Mockup Toolkit can always be found as the last item of the side bar, so 
naturally the way from the search button to the search field will be 
shorter to [5/D] than to [4/C].

I hope this is not too confusing. Any way, I hope that this will maybe 
help a bit. If you have some input regarding the mockups, please share 
it! :)

Cheers,

Phil

[1]http://i.imgur.com/cXfQgvL.png
[2]http://i.imgur.com/CfESTL0.png
[3]http://i.imgur.com/eCMwq0L.png
[4]http://i.imgur.com/od08Pyb.png
[5]http://i.imgur.com/xpAMGVV.png
[6]http://i.imgur.com/eL7mi4K.png