As part of T342245 as well as T267842 we fixed the esp. for screenreader users confusing behavior of the Sort by relevance preview pill. It's the default sort order and can't be deleted. Every other non-default sort order can be deleted and resets back to Sort by relevance. This is already live.
The WMDE-TechWish dev team would love to get a few final questions answered to be able to finish this as part of the WMDE-TechWish-Maintenance-2023 sprint. This needs input from someone from the WMDE-Design team.
The way this default state is currently styled (gray, disabled, no mouse interaction) is OOUI standard, following https://doc.wikimedia.org/oojs-ui/master/demos/. However, we think this creates a series of issues in this particular context:
- It looks like a disabled feature, as if no sorting will happen and the user can't do anything about it. Both is wrong. The user can change it, and sorting will happen.
- A mouse click triggers the action for the entire section (that is to expand/collapse it). We find this confusing. Maybe mouse clicks should be consumed and do nothing? Or jump to the field where the sort order can be changed?
Possible options we collected so far:
- Hide the pill when it's the default. Patch-For-Review: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/955883
- Less clutter. The user can't interact with it anyway.
- It's the only element that makes the initial, empty state of the form not look clean.
- Probably follows best practices, i.e. what users are used to. While every search interface must have some implicit sort order ("ranking", "priority") it's pretty much never advertised so prominently, unless the user chooses a non-default.
- Possible problem: We change what users are currently used to.
- Possible problem: It will be much less obvious that the sort order is something the user can change. However, this is true for all fields in the form. Do we have a good reason to advertise the sort order so much more prominently than every other field?
- Make changes to the gray styling, e.g. make it brighter or the same color as all other preview pills.
- Note this alone doesn't solve the mouse interaction.
- Leave as is, following OOUI standards.
- …?