Usability proposals for 1.1.10

[misog]

Brief Description: Usability is not good in OpenBazaar.

Operating System (OS and version): Windows 10 OpenBazaar version (shown on About OpenBazaar page in menu): 1.1.10

1. Show "Personalized" and "Random" when searchbar is focused or contains text - now, user is confused when he/she types a tag (ex. "game") in default "Personalized mode" and nothing shows up. There should be at least visible the switch to the "Random mode". Listen to the internet: https://goo.gl/xYbMI9
2. Rename "Personalized" and "Random" tabs. User does not know what "Personalized listing" is. But he/she knows what Followed or Liked listing is. Or listings from followed stores. Similarly, users do not want "Random" listings, but "All" listings or "New" listings. But this is more functional thing.

[morebrownies]

1. There should be at least visible the switch to the "Random mode". Listen to the internet: https://goo.gl/xYbMI9

This may be a bug. I believe this is how it worked a few months back. @jjeffryes any insight on this? If so, it could be worth fixing.

2. Similarly, users do not want "Random" listings, but "All" listings or "New" listings. But this is more functional thing.

I agree. The p2p Discover/search experience is very flawed from a functional point of view. Listings are randomly pulled in when your node connects to other nodes on the network, which makes it difficult to add any type of Sort By features (sort by newest, sort by price, etc). It's not even guaranteed you'll see All of the listings on the network since your node has limitations on how many connections it can maintain. I'd love to find a way to clean up these issues, but it seems p2p Discover/search is the bottle neck and 3rd parties will need to step it to improve the experience.

OpenBazaar 2.0 will have 3rd party search engines and curators built into the client, which should greatly improve the product discovery experience.

[jjeffryes]

I think the random/personalized buttons have always been hidden when the search field is active.

[morebrownies]

Now that I think about it, when a search is performed, it always attempts to crawl the network instead of crawling the stores you follow. In @misog case, no results were found. This could be because s/he wasn't connected to any nodes with listings tagged with #game.

I just attempted to search and I found some listings with the #game tag. So I believe this is more of a networking issue.

[morebrownies]

Actually, there are a few bugs here. When I search from the Address bar, I see the following. @jjeffryes notice the tabs do display in this scenario (also the X is covering one of them).

However, when I search from the lower search bar (underneath the Listings / Pages tabs) the Personalized / Random tabs do not display.

It's very unclear form a user perspective what is going on here.

[jjeffryes]

Looks like there are some cases were the state gets weird. Normally whenever you're typing in that field, the tabs should be hidden. But when you click off of it, they usually are shown.

In the latest master, the X button isn't being unhidden, so it never appears, which is a bug. I'll log it.

Re: search results, the DHT search is mostly terrible, which is a big factor. I thought it did still apply the personal/random filter, I'd have to check.