As part of the new designs proposed for the Recent Changes page (T142785), users can highlight the results in the list of recent changes to better focus on specific aspects as they process the list. It sometimes happens, however, that users want to highlight a quality that they don't necessarily want to filter for (especially because, when filters in different groups are selected, the system returns only the intersection of both) To get around this limitation, an "ignore filtering" button was added. This is a helpful option, but in early testing users experienced a number of difficulties, some of which are described below. This task will explore solutions to these issues.
**Problem #1: Finding the Button**
Users make their filtering choices inside the filtering dropdown. Placing the"ignore filtering" button outside the dropdown enables users to more easily understand it's function because they can instantly see its effect (which they couldn't do inside the dropdown as currently designed). However, in the few tests performed so far, testers have not noticed the Ignore button—possibly because it's physically separated from the other filtering functions.
**Problem #2: Design of the Button**
The concept of "ignore filtering and just highlight" is an unusual one. Finding an icon to communicate this complex idea will be difficult or impossible. Even naming the button is not so easy ("Highlight only"? "Ignore filtering" "Ignore filter and only highlight"?). Moreover, the current, toggling design of the button suffers from the usual issues of such controls: users may find it hard to know whether the tooltip is describing the current state or the state that will be in place after they click.
**Problem #3: Unpredictable Results**
The interaction of filtering and highlighting can be complex, with numerous opportunities for users to get results that they weren't intending. Here are two scenarios.
**Scenario #1:** A Welcomer selects and highlights V. Likely Good Faith (yellow) and New Page Creation (green), while filtering but not highlighting Human and Content edits. He's unhappy when the system returns only yellow-green results (the intersection), so clicks "Ignore." But now, he sees no green at all. (Because New Page Creation is in the same group as Content; so when New Page is no longer being explicitly included, it is excluded by the Content filter.)
**Scenario #2:** A user searching for problems selects and highlights V. Likely Problems (yellow), Likely Problems (orange) and Likely bad faith (red). The system returns a small number of red-yellow-orange results and the user realizes it's not what she wants. So she selects the "Ignore" button. But now she sees a long list of edits that are completely unfiltered, though she does have her desired highlighting. (What she actually wanted was to reduce results to Likely Problems and highlight the others, which she could have done if she hadn't added a highlight to Likely Problems).