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Help text before search typing starts
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Description

Author: philinje

Description:
Instead of "Type your search here," the text should say: "Start typing your search term above to see matching article titles below."


Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement

Details

Reference
bz36716

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Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to Medium.Nov 22 2014, 12:25 AM
bzimport set Reference to bz36716.
bzimport added a subscriber: Unknown Object (MLST).

This isn't clear enough to me. Were already showing "Type your search here" on the article view. Are you saying we should clear the text after someone taps on it? Also, this text implies that there is an above and below in full screen search making me think that the text never goes away. This would be bad as it would remove space for actual search results. This needs to be flushed out more before it can be ready for developers.

philinje wrote:

Sorry, the new text would sit below the search field, and would disappear (be overwritten) as soon as search results appear.

The text inside the search field, "Type your search here," would be as before (and hopefully soon will appear on Android too).

Personally I would prefer a mobile help button/page that explains this. The placeholder text should be enough to explain to the user what they should do.

philinje wrote:

The main point of this is to explain what the search results are - article titles. This is very different in concept to Google search. A new page is fine but why not coach the user a little bit right on this screen?

The suggested text is extremely long for a placeholder in the input box. If we want to coach the user into understanding search better they should discover as they type for search results.

Arguably bug 36715 helps with this...

philinje wrote:

Sorry, the original comment was not fully expressed. The proposed text would sit BELOW the input box, in the space just underneath, where the first couple of search results would appear. Then it would disappear as soon as the search results start appearing. Now does this make sense?

In my opinion the text "Start typing your search term above to see matching article titles below."
is not well thought out as:

  1. It should begin with a call to action that makes it clear from the start what the user needs to do next (which in this case is type)
  2. The matching titles will not appear below but in the place of the search results so here is probably more applicable.

I would suggest
"Type search term above and matching article titles will appear here." Thoughts?

Created attachment 10615
Screenshot of help text for search

Attached:

Screen_shot_2012-05-17_at_13.56.20.png (713×372 px, 147 KB)