I keep reading "Polish" as in the language...

Rephrased so it doesn't drive me nuts in that exact way ;)

Phil, can you clarify what polish is needed exactly?

philinje wrote:

If I recall correctly, and looking at the current beta, the issues were the back arrow (way too large and ugly) and the skimpy look of the + signs.

I am not sure why the back arrow was added. It was something about cancelling the search and going back to the article. But our Android app doesn't have anything like that, and it also doesn't use the + feature. (I believe Tomasz wanted to mimic the way Bing allows you to append search terms.)

I am not sure if appending search terms works the same way in our article search, because the article titles are fairly unique.

So are these elements needed at all?

hwalls wrote:

I can't tell if the + feature is useful. Currently all it does is change the search term completely (I think).

There are a few other things to consider, Brandon and I are working on them. I think most of the elements could use some refinement.

hwalls wrote:

MediaWiki write-up

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mobile_Full_Screen_Search_Results

I too have concerns about the + feature. When I first saw it I expected clicking + would save the page or save the result, however what it actually does is an autocomplete.

What might be better is to have a list of search results with links inside them to the pages. If the link is clicked the user gets taken to the page, if the user pushes outside the link but within the result it copies across to the search input box.

hwalls wrote:

Luckily for all of us the + feature has been removed! More notes from a recent meeting follow:

1. '+' Does not serve a reasonable function and these icons will be removed.

2. The icon on the left side of the search rows (currently a mag. glass) serves to visually balance the rows to the search box back arrow so it doesn't look like there is an empty space vertically. This icon will be replaced by an article icon from Brandon's new designs. In the future we may be able to indicate the file type of the search this way (image, user, category, etc).

3. The 'Done' button and its row at the top of the keyboard will be put back.

The MediaWiki write-up will be updated shortly.

(In reply to comment #7)

Luckily for all of us the + feature has been removed! More notes from a recent
meeting follow:

1. '+' Does not serve a reasonable function and these icons will be removed.

I completely disagree. Term by term addition was well received by our community and allows any user to type less on their software keyboard. Typing sucks on a software keyboard and the less you do it the better. Not having term by term addition reverts us to a poor user experience and is worse for our users.

Why would we remove this? If the issue is that the '+' is a poor icon. Then change the icon. Don't rip out a feature just because it doesn't have the proper final icon.

Take a look at google & bing and you'll see it working very well.

I agree with tomasz. I don't think this should be thrown away I just don't think the plus symbol is appropriate...

(In reply to comment #9)

I agree with tomasz. I don't think this should be thrown away I just don't
think the plus symbol is appropriate...

The (+) not getting thrown away because of the symbol.

Term by term addition is nice if a) there are terms to add (i.e., if our typical search includes more than say 2-3 words) and b) our existing type-ahead doesn't add add these terms.

In my opinion, this is an area where we can rat-hole around both the design and the implementation of the feature and it's not clear to me that doing so _at this point in time_ is worth the effort. Granted, if there is a user need and we can execute on it in the right way, it could be valuable to have the feature. But we have plenty of other interesting problems to work on.

re:
a) Do we know what our average search length (by number of terms entered before a type-ahead selection is selected) on the English Wikipedia is? If, say, 80% of our searches are between 1-3 words that's one thing. If 80% of our searches are 4+ words, that's something else.

b) In many cases, the existing type-ahead seems to suggest the right amount of words to get the user to the article. For example, typing "barack" surfaces "barack obama". There's no need for the (+) here. If I were looking for barack obama's 2008 presidental campaign, this article also shows up in type ahead.

Let's take a look at the core interaction here. (+) is useful for searches with multiple terms where the type-ahead is not deterministic and the (+) can help narrow down the field of results.

Anyway, that's my $0.02. I just feel we have much bigger fish to fry right now, but feel free to disagree.

Tabling this for now.

[Closing as "WONTFIX"to get rid of the deprecated "LATER" resolution]