Mentions: Suggestions ordered by prefix instead of alphabetically.

[tiagomar]

Registering here @RenanLukas's feedback/suggestion while beta testing #18979 for feature enhancement.

I have a question and maybe a suggestion about how the suggested user list is sorted. I’m sure the team discussed this, but I was thinking if it would be better to have the suggestions list sorted by prefix first (like “hasPrefix”) instead of alphabetically. Out of curiosity, I was testing other products and it seems like Slack checks the prefix and GitHub does it the way it is right now (alphabetically). I was just thinking that if the name prefix is common, there will be some scrolling before the user can find whoever they’re looking.

e.g.

Let’s say I start typing “Ren” to search for myself. The results are sorted alphabetically and apparently we check if the result item contain the searched string, so I was the 35th on the list when I did this test. If we had it sorted by the starting string (and alphabetically after that), it would look like: 1 – Renan 2 – <another name starting with Ren> 3 – <another name starting with Ren> … (and when we’re out of names that have “Ren” prefix, we’d be back to sorting alphabetically names that contain “Ren”) 4 – AAAAAren 5 – BBBBrenBB