On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 2:10 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
Relatedly, a proposal!
Search box, two buttons. One, "search" or "go", acts as the old mixed-search "go" button - it is a direct leap to that title, else falling back on the search. The second button is "advanced"; it takes the content of the search box and puts it directly into special:search, and then presents that along with links to Commons, wikisource, etc, and - prominently - the various advanced-search options (search project space, etc).
Thoughts?
I like that better than some other possibilities.
If we're in a proposal mood: Why not make it go, but if it go-es rather than takes you to special search put a small box of other search results above the article. (along with your advanced button, and an obvious close X to get rid of it if you're planning on printing or saving the article)
So you still get the one step GO behaviour, but you also get a one step search behaviour... and finding more advanced search controls is never hard.
One weakness of this is that care must be taken to avoid the case where the go works but the user misses the fact that the article they want is on the screen. One possibility would be to preserve the go result in the search list. Wastes a line, but if the user misses that the result is already there it only wastes a click for them.