Improvements on the Search page

[tkrieck]

Hi @amilica thank you very much for your considerations!

@amilica

Facets

The Facets button just collapses or extends the Filters Panel, right? Why not have directly on the Filters Panel? If it does anything else, let me know, it’s possible that I miss something.

It hides and show it entirely. In this case I think it’s better to keep it hiding because when collapsing a significant interface element still is visible and takes a lot of horizontal space. This can lead to line breaking in small screens. But I agree that we could have the control directly on the panel, I would just use an X to close the panel, to get the panel back there would be a new control described below. What do you think?

@amilica

Sorting

I actually liked the way I switched between sorting types, it made the search just a tiny bit quicker; I could check what kind of results each type of sorting would give me and then commit to the most relevant one.

We could invert the logic and use the dropdown on secondary controls, like the visualization options (show filters and highlights). That way, we could have almost the entire line for sorting and a new “config” icon to choose what is available in the interface.

@amilica

Results spacing

I feel results are pretty close to each other and the info doesn’t breathe in the page (if that makes sense), both in the initial version and in your redesign.

This is to keep up with XWiki philosophy of giving user content priority in space. That’s why I inserted a divider line between results, it keeps search results separated but still condensed. We can tweak it, but it will be a balancing act between screen space and content separation.

@amilica

Filter panel coloring

I feel like this panel has too many shades of gray and it makes it feel old-ish, too detailed, making the page feel a bit overwhelming.

We can have a white background and make use of bold to highlight the collapsed filters’ headers.

It would all look cleaner this way.

We could go all in and remove all borders altogether, use bold text like you said and keep just one shade of gray on panel titles. It would make the panel feels lighters and I think it still keeps content separation nicely.

@amilica

Pagination

The current pagination looks like it could use a revamp. Maybe place the current page in the middle of the two arrows.

Agreed, but IMO it requires a proposal on itself because it would change the pagination layout on the whole system. I will keep this in mind for a roadmap item.

@amilica

Last editor picture

It’d be a nice detail to have the picture of the last editor/modifier in the result. Makes the knowledge feel more human and, also, makes it easier for people in big companies/organizations to identify knowledge by faces they know.

That’s a very good idea, and we already have a precedent on this on the notifications. However, placing the avatar in the middle of the sentence fells weird to me because it is breaking my reading flow. This can be completely personal but how about we place it at the end, so the user can read the line “last modified by User Name” in its entirety, then comes the avatar and then at the end comes the supplementary info of date and time.

Here is an updated mockup with everything discussed in context: