projectblacklight
facet suggest/limit/search results UX idiosyncracies for partial and no results
These seem to me some UX rough edges that may confuse users and ideally would be polished, in the facet suggest/limit/search results.
Partial results
Only the first (by default, configurable) 20 matching facet results are shown. But there is no indication this the case. In the Blacklight example CI app, for the widely matching query of a, these results are actually only showing about half the total facet topic values available... but you might easily not realize "Why is the thing I'm looking for not there"?!? (Unless you realize it looks like it's stopping at J, but this hint isnt' always there in real use cases and is a bit subtle!)
Shoudl it have some italisized i18n label "more results not shown" or something at the end?
No results
In the case you enter something with no results, it's probably not too confusing, but to me looks a bit messy. Better if it said "no results" or something like that?
but it's kind of hard to implement
I thought these might be easy wins, but the Blacklight code around displaying these has a lot of legacy history, and has gotten pretty baroque, lots of indirection, lots of legacy conditionals. So I thought this would be an easy improvement, but it wasn't, I keep getting stymied trying to implement it.
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Do we actually care about this, is it just fine how it is? Curious for those who have already implemented this feature in production if there's been any feedback/notice at all of above things. Maybe they are unnecessary and it's just fine?
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Anyone have any tips for what might be reasonable/feasible ways to implement this?
@sandbergja or anyone else that is aware of this feature being used in front of real users in production, I'm curious if either of these things has come up at all -- or maybe they are just fine how they are?
Another option for "more results" is that we could probably make next/previous pagination work for suggest/filter results... not sure if that would be more or less confusing.
Regarding partial results, we have not had any feedback that I know of on that. I was originally thinking of paginating the results, and the UI ended up extremely confusing (needing to differentiate the state clearly to users whether it is unfiltered page 1 vs unfiltered page 3 vs filtered page 1 vs filtered page 3...). Somebody with more UX skills than I could maybe make it clearer, but I am skeptical it would be that valuable. The main use case for us was: "I want to limit my results to Tagalog language results, but Tagalog is on page 40 of the facets, so I just need to keep clicking "Next"). So adding pagination seems much less convenient to the user than they just type another letter in the box (ta instead of just t). That is also more consistent with other types of autosuggest interfaces: they don't typically say "...and 43759593639 other possible items starting with the letter a", they just let the user keep typing until they see the item they want.
