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Suggestion: Search UX improvements

Open trm217 opened this issue 3 years ago • 2 comments

This issue proposes the following changes:

1. Auto focus when opening search.

If the search window is opened as an overlay, the search-input should be auto focused.

2. Add spinner while formats are being loaded.

When the search overlay is opened, it takes sometime to load all available format-categories. As of now this loading process is not visualised with a spinner. Thus a spinner should be added.

3. When opening the search page, the search-icon in the navigation-bar should not be shown

When opening a link that leads directly to the search page, the navigation bar shows the search-icon, which allows the search-overlay to be opened above the search-results page. This makes no sense and should therefore not be possible.

I see two possible solutions:

  1. The navigation bar should not show the search icon, while on the search-results page.
  2. Remove the search page all together and instead render the magazine front with the search overlay being opened, containing the search results.

trm217 avatar Dec 01 '21 12:12 trm217

Good ideas generally. one question regarding 2: Why do we even need a query for the format-categories? To me this seems like a pretty superfluous db query. Can't we render this statically or send the required data on pageload - it's just a dozen links, we save very little by only querying this data when the overlay is opened.

ovbm avatar Dec 01 '21 13:12 ovbm

Re 1: IMO that's just a draw back of the combo search & navi icon. How do we know if search or navi was touched on mobile? We could do it for mouse clicks I guess.

Re 2: There already is a spinner but the placeholder height is not well defined:

Screenshot 2021-12-01 at 14 02 49

Feel free to adapt. The laoder only shows after a delay:

The loader displays the Spinner component if loading takes longer than delay (default 500ms). You can optionally pass an message to be displayed along the Spinner. https://styleguide.republik.ch/components/loader

Re 3: Solution 1 would IMO be ok but quite a bit of effort considering nobody complained?

tpreusse avatar Dec 01 '21 13:12 tpreusse