I created a prototype to illustrate some of the concepts for searching a flow board:
The basic ideas are:
- Show first result as soon as you type and avoid context changes (i.e., highlighting the matches on top of the current conversation instead of going through a specific "results page")
- Integrate search with table of contents. The table of contents can act as a de-facto search results summary you can open after searching to have an overview of the topics where your query was found (and information on whether some of these topics were in your watchlist or you participated in them).
Note that the prototype is intended to reflect the basic interaction elements so several aspects are missing or broken. It also simulates a limited workflow, so you may want to follow these instructions:
- This is a flow board about the Rapa Nui article. Please, access the list of all topics and go back to the flow board (the prototype won't let you jump to a specific topic).
- Search for "moai" to find out which conversations are related to those nice statues.
- You can go through the results by the next/previous controls or by scrolling.
- While you are searching, get an overview on which topics are related to your search.
Feel free to provide any feedback. At this moment we are specially interested in usecases for search where this model may not work, so examples to illustrate those would be really useful.
Thanks
Pau
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Pau Giner
Interaction Designer
Wikimedia Foundation