Thanks for all your feedback, it is really useful. Some comments below:
Regarding the progress indicator:
- The idea is to represent the whole flow discussion and where the matches are, regardless of when the content of those topics is loaded. That means that if there is a match at the very last part of the whole conversation, that will be represented at the end of the bar and the content for it can get dynamically loaded as the user scrolls towards it (or goes directly there using the ToC). That allows the user to (a) identify quickly when there is a big density of matches (to distinguish those as a block to pay attention or ignore) and (b) avoid missing some matches when exploring big flow boards.
- I think that with a rough estimation of the length of the topics a fluent experience could be achieved even without a 100% precision. For example (just a possibility): Given a topic A (with 1 message) and topic B (with 3 messages) the bar's first 25% would represent topic A (and matches found in that topic) while the remaining 75% could correspond to topic B. But we need more exploration in that area.
- Doing the mapping vertically with the scrollbar would be hard since the scrollbar position would depend on the loaded topics, which would make the position to jump as topics are loaded.
- This is the most experimental feature related to search. We may find out that the text indication of the total of matches may be enough, or that there is not an easy and reliable way to provide an overview on where the matches are in the whole conversation. In any case, I think it is worth testing and see how useful/distracting it seems to our users.
Regarding search behaviour:
- The idea is to avoid hidding content when searching but highlight matches over the current content instead. This approach has advantages (there is no context switch and matches are seen in their real context) and disadvantages (on a long conversation text that is not related to the search terms is still there). To compensate the disadvantages some navigation aids are provided: scrolling automatically to the first match, an overview of the highlighted areas, options to move to previous and next matches and a filtered ToC to view just those topics with results. I think that making search to hide content would be problematic (we may be creating the need to go back and forth between modes), but is worth trying if we see that users found it strange that topics without matches remain there.
- For the filtered ToC I was planning to add an explicit mention that there are X other topics that don't match the search. That could help to avoid the confusion of not getting a complete ToC when searching.
- I agree that the default browser in-page search won't work on infinite scroll and accessing it may be confusing, but we need to be especially careful when overriding default browser behaviour. So I would consider it when once we've identified it is an issue (e.g., by instrumenting how often ctrl+g/f happens on flow boards when flow-search is active and when it is not).
Regarding the ToC:
- I think it makes sense to highlight the topics I'm connected with (those I starred, or participated) as well as those with relevant content (content with new activity). I think that search is a good opportunity to learn about those usecases but if those are useful we want to add them on both since the user is looking for topics in both cases so there is no reason to break consistency.
- Regarding the use of space and showing ToC and content both at the same time, I think those are two separate issues. I think that we'll have many opportunities to make better use of space with relevant information (if not when supporting ToC, with other feature).
I'm especially interested in which scenarios it would be useful to have both visible at the same time, and how would affect users the consequences of having less space for the ToC (showing topic titles cropped, or less of them).
In the current status of talk pages the ToC just appears at the beginning showing the full-titles, which takes most of the real state in long conversations and there is not an easy way to go back to it once you get immersed into the conversations. Do we have info on bugs/requests/comments from our users that illustrate more details about the navigation between topics and content?
Pau