Question

Improving search experience

6

Hi all, This is a feedback thread on search. Last year we have implemented the search for Documentation, Forum, Academy and AppStore. The same search was implemented for our corporate website. We implemented this to improve the developer experience and has ties with for example the unified community header that we implemented a couple of weeks ago. As the one responsible within the Community Team for the client-side search I would like to know from our Community if there is any way we could improve the search experience for you? Anything that has come up for you, ideas you have, things that might be annoying, things that are missing etcetera. I will personally be monitoring this thread to see if we can gather feedback from the community. In the future I will be collecting these ideas in the Idea forum, for now it suffices to answer here. (I will lock the question once we do that)

asked 2018-07-30

Jelte Lagendijk

7 answers

Rapido · Answer 1 · 2018-07-30

Hi Jelte,

Awesome that you are asking for feedback!

Personally my "search journey" would be improved if i could select the search item just by clicking on the list-item body

instead of just the title of the question.

Jan de Vries · Answer 2 · 2018-07-31

Having a filter for time would be great. For example, when I search the App Store I want to see the most recent content, so I don't get widgets that are for older versions of Mendix. This is useful for blogs and the Forum as well.

Items from the last:

- Always

- 24 hours

- 7 days

- month

- year

- Specify: [Select a time span]

Jason Teunissen · Answer 3 · 2018-07-30

Yo Jelte,

I often hear ppl saying it "feels" wierd.
I think there is a bit of a wierd UX leap when typing in field A and then the menu jumping out.

maybe wait for the jump after they've finished typing in the field?

cheers,
Jason

Desiree de Ridder · Answer 4 · 2018-07-30

Hi Jelte,

I often use the search bar in the upper right of the screen, however when the menu jumps out it doesn't catch all letters you were typing into the search bar. This can be quite irritating. I'd rather finish typing in the search bar and press Enter or such before the menu jumps out with the results, just like Jason above suggests.

In addition, sometimes when you search for a term in the forum you get very old results as well and there could be situations where you'd want to only see more recent items. It would be nice if you could filter out based on creation data. For example: do not display all older than 2 years or such.

The search engine in the appstore is quite strange sometimes. I'd like it to be a bit more flexible. For example:
Mx modelreflection does show me the Mx Model Reflection module
Mxmodel reflection does not show me the mx model reflection module, but only this because it has reflection as a tag:

Nice to see you're asking for feedback :D

Tim Misker · Answer 5 · 2018-07-31

For me, it feels a bit uncomfortable that the results jump around because of the expand/collapse on hover. When I'm scanning through the results from top to bottom, I get interrupted when items expand and collapse.

Also, beforehand I cannot see what item will expand.

I like the fact that I can see more text before clicking an item, that's a good feature!

Marnix Puijker · Answer 6 · 2018-08-01

Created this idea post about the Appstore search functionality a while back, I still think it applies.

https://forum.mendix.com/link/ideas/765

Hans Lenting · Answer 7 · 2018-08-01

i would like to have an option to sort the search results. F.i. sort on last updated, sort on source. Sometimes you want the most actual on top, but sometimes i'd like to have the result from the docs above the results from the forum.