As we've continued with our beta (http://bit.ly/w4E2zn) its becoming
abundantly clear from feedback and our own research that we need to
get better about search. Search is the primary way that people start
their interaction with Wikipedia and we currently do it poor at best
on mobile.
We've taken the first stabs at it
* Change the search input box to stretch to full width (horizontal & landscape)
* Lower the amount of search results and increase the font size of
what we do show
* Include spaces in between results to better segment each item
* Add a "+" to refine search term by term (our search data set will
need to get better to make this more awesome)
I find the purpose and function of the "+" icon to be totally non-obvious on first glance, but Bing and Google both seem to feature similar ones on their mobile search suggestions so this may be becoming popular. Probably just needs some visual & interaction cleanup. :)
I took a look at a lot of mobile sites and one stuck out to me as
really interesting for search.
bing.com (yes i know its microsoft .. lets pay attention to the design
rather then the ideology)
Go to their site on a mobile (on a mobile) and start typing in text.
Notice how its now stolen your whole screen for search? Its loud but
thats the point. People are searching and moving forward. Not
interacting with the content thats on the screen.
I am quite fond of this style; it's very appropriate for small-screen devices.
Very similar to this interface is Firefox Mobile's version of desktop Firefox's 'awesomebar' -- when you click into the title/URL bar it immediately pops up a list of bookmarks/frequent sites from history which starts getting filtered/showing up relevant items as you start typing terms or a URL.
Being able to also tap out of the on-screen keyboard and scroll this list can be very helpful as well!
-- brion