One of the big things that we have to work on next is searching on a Flow board. It's important for people to be able to easily browse and find the relevant topics, and a busy board will sink older topics pretty quickly.
Because each Flow conversation is an individual, discrete unit, we actually have the opportunity to do interesting things, to filter and remix threads in a number of helpful ways.
ErikB and I were talking about how to represent Flow search results, and we came up with a model that's based on Gmail search results. It's a very similar use case -- you're searching for keywords in a large body of threaded conversations -- so I think the model is instructive. (See the attached screenshot of Gmail search results for an example.)
So I put together a few early concept wireframes, which are also attached. On these wireframes, the exact placement of the elements are entirely hypothetical -- I just wanted to put them somewhere on the page as a starting point for discussion.
The user flow is:
* A user clicks into the entry field, and types keywords to search for.
* This brings up a Gmail-style list of topics that contain that keyword set. This is simple flat keyword matching -- it doesn't weight a match in the topic title more heavily than a match in the posts.
* The list of topics is arranged in reverse chronological order, so the user can scan back through time to find the topic they're looking for. (This will be especially helpful for the use case of "Where's that discussion we had about X? It was about two months ago...")
* In the list, there's a limited amount of useful metadata. In this wireframe, I tried out showing the number of posts in the thread, and the watch star to indicate threads that you're subscribed to.
* The user clicks on a topic title, and navigates to that thread's Topic page, where the matching keywords are highlighted.
* On the Topic page, there's a clear way to get back to the list of search results.
So -- this is early stuff, just communicating the general direction that I think we should go. What do you guys think?
Danny
One thing to add here, I like Facebook's approach to searching conversations. Facebook says "search titles/names only", then gives you those results (if any) and gives you an option to search messages as well afterwards. So, I'd like an option here where we can search only topic titles.
--Shahyar
On Thu, Aug 28, 2014 at 10:17 AM, Danny Horn dhorn@wikimedia.org wrote:
One of the big things that we have to work on next is searching on a Flow board. It's important for people to be able to easily browse and find the relevant topics, and a busy board will sink older topics pretty quickly.
Because each Flow conversation is an individual, discrete unit, we actually have the opportunity to do interesting things, to filter and remix threads in a number of helpful ways.
ErikB and I were talking about how to represent Flow search results, and we came up with a model that's based on Gmail search results. It's a very similar use case -- you're searching for keywords in a large body of threaded conversations -- so I think the model is instructive. (See the attached screenshot of Gmail search results for an example.)
So I put together a few early concept wireframes, which are also attached. On these wireframes, the exact placement of the elements are entirely hypothetical -- I just wanted to put them somewhere on the page as a starting point for discussion.
The user flow is:
A user clicks into the entry field, and types keywords to search for.
This brings up a Gmail-style list of topics that contain that keyword
set. This is simple flat keyword matching -- it doesn't weight a match in the topic title more heavily than a match in the posts.
- The list of topics is arranged in reverse chronological order, so the
user can scan back through time to find the topic they're looking for. (This will be especially helpful for the use case of "Where's that discussion we had about X? It was about two months ago...")
- In the list, there's a limited amount of useful metadata. In this
wireframe, I tried out showing the number of posts in the thread, and the watch star to indicate threads that you're subscribed to.
- The user clicks on a topic title, and navigates to that thread's Topic
page, where the matching keywords are highlighted.
- On the Topic page, there's a clear way to get back to the list of search
results.
So -- this is early stuff, just communicating the general direction that I think we should go. What do you guys think?
Danny
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