right now this reasoning is based on paradigms that are not verbalized for the most part. It is the result of intuition and the discourse with customers. This strategy will avoid regressions and catastrophes like the loss of a customer for the most part. But it has its limits. There is no clear scale against which progress can be measured. So pragmatic KPIs like “How many users complained about / praised the change?” and “did it achieve secondary goals like improved performance etc?” will decide if a change was a success or not.
The issue is: potential users and potential customers cant complain.
A user interface is like a language. Our ability to understand this language is influenced by the culture we got socialized in. If we don’t verbalize the underlying paradigms we employ while creating these user interfaces we will embed our culture into these systems. This means that they are easy to use for people like us but not necessarily in general.
Benefits a design system might bring from an abstract perspective:
Consistent appearance and interaction, maintaining a familiarity to the user, can reduce the difficulty of learning, cognitive and operating costs, and improve work efficiency. source
By having clearly defined categories of user interface components this confusion between “data display” components and a user action (for which a button might be used for example) would not have happened. If there was a page like this where all the different UI components and their purpose was listed a rational discussion could be had. It would also be good if these discussions would be held in public and weren’t just communicated through git commit messages.
I just added a similar hint, but not in the placeholder. Given all the languages Discourse is translated in, a long string in the placeholder risks being cut off. Plus, as soon as you type, the placeholder is gone. Instead I went with a right-aligned hint in the search all topics/posts row:
My experience of the within-topic search experience on meta right now is that it seems weirdly broken.
When I want to search within a web page, I’n trained to press ctrl F, type, and press enter. I understand why Discourse needs to hijack /enhance that for long topics.
What happens now when I press ctrl F on meta and type ‘theme’ into the search box is:
it shows me a bunch of users (WTF) or tags (helpful)
if I press enter, it shows me a bunch of other topics (WTF, I’m trying to search within topic)
If I press “more” I lose the topic context altogether
My conclusion: you’re completely violating users trained expectations of how within page search works on the web.
Suggestions:
(1) if the user has triggered search with ctrl F, default to within-topic search; but keep all topics search as default when the search is triggered in the way that other global navigation is.
(2) don’t show users by default, as mostly people are searching for topics.
I’m honestly puzzled why you used a sledgehammer for this nut; I’d have thought the performance impact of per-character searching could be handled by a 500ms delay before triggering search.
I’ve been trying to get used to this new search, and I have to agree with the OP — it’s not a step forward. It’s more difficult to use, and it’s a confusing UI.
I feel the same, though I also want to be clear that I understand the points made by the team around the reasoning for it, and I recognize the change has other significant benefits. So it seems it is just a matter of getting it right, hopefully with further refinement on the new design. Unfortunately I don’t have any specific ideas for improvements at the moment, or I’d open a topic for the…
That said, I had this same thought:
While the team doesn’t necessarily have an obligation to answer, I hope they will nonetheless. Doesn’t seem seem to necessitate its own topic though.
Doesn’t seem seem to necessitate its own topic though.