@Mooeypoo Hi Moriel, we're running into trouble with the placeholders in our advanced search extension. Could you give me some feedback on the ticket and let me know if this is something you've been thinking about changing? Thanks!

Why aren't we using the [i] icon to have that help message? Is there a different message there? The long help message in the input seems to not quite be the purpose of the placeholder?

@Charlie_WMDE @Mooeypoo From our current user-interface patterns, the information icon is meant for such extensive additional information.
Placeholder is meant to kept short by standard's definition. So the way out here, is to improve (shorten) the default placeholder English text and add the rest to the information icon popup.
We're aware about some possible shortcomings of the “i” icon, still it makes sense to stay with the default pattern as we can address this more easily on a general UI library level.

There's another UX issue, the right aligning of labels and putting inputs on one line are both patterns, researched and well-known to make orientation for users worse and increases users time to accomplish their form task. Hope to find time to file a task for it.

Hi @Mooeypoo and @Volker_E

The [i] icons all have information about the fields. This is indeed an info that could go there but we found that users only click the [i] after trying a few things and failing. We would like to avoid this by providing the correct way to conduct a search from the start.

You can also have a look at it yourself on mediawiki.org for example if you activate the advanced search beta feature.

Even better would be to have the field act in a way that it wouldn't need an instruction to be usable but so far we're struggling with a good solution. If you have any recommendations for that, I'd be happy to hear them.

Keep the placeholder text short: This is good advice but doesn't really address the problem we have with the placeholder. It should probably function regardless of the length, since a short text can also be forgotten.