Comment by maxbond
6 months ago
No one wants to see results for the letter "a", no one wants their database processing that search, and updating the UI while you're typing can be really distracting.
6 months ago
No one wants to see results for the letter "a", no one wants their database processing that search, and updating the UI while you're typing can be really distracting.
>No one wants to see results for the letter "a"
Don't make assumptions about what the user may or may not want to search for.
E.g. in my music collection I have albums from both !!! [1] and Ø [2]. I've encountered software that "helpfully" prevented me from searching for these artists, because the developers thought that surely noone would search for such terms.
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[1] https://www.discogs.com/artist/207714-!!! ← See? The HN link highlighter also thinks that URLs cannot end with !!!.
[2] https://www.discogs.com/artist/31887-Ø
No, you should definitely exercise good judgement in delivering a good UI to the user that doesn't lock up if they happen to type very quickly. But it is context dependent, and sometimes you will want to show them results for "a", sure. "No one" was rhetorical.
In your example, the developers have exercised poor judgment by making a brittle assumption about the data. That's bad. But there is no UX without some model of the user. Making assumptions about user's rate of perception is much safer (in a web app context, it would be a different story in a competitive esports game).
Let's see if surrounding that URL in the URL-surrounding character pair helps the HN linkifier:
<https://www.discogs.com/artist/207714-!!!>
Edit: It does. So, this would be yet another of the squillion-ish examples to support the advice "Please, for the love of god, always enclose your URLs in '<>'.". (And if you're writing a general-purpose URL linkifier, PLEASE just assume that everything between those characters IS part of the URL, rather than assuming you know better than the user.)
URLs can contain > too.
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As a user, I often do want a list to start from a single letter. In a browser address bar, it could start showing items Amazon, Apple, etc.
That is fine. Do you want it to flicker between keystrokes when you're still typing?
Yes. Unless you are pecking at your keyboard your eyes are free to look at the results on the screen and stop typing once you get the result you want. The only thing that's needed is for the results to be stable, i.e. if the top result for "abc" also matches "abcd" then it should also be the top result for "abcd". Unfortunately many search/autocomplete implementations fail at this but that's still a problem even with "debouncing".
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"Flicker" can mean a lot of things, I generally don't have a problem with the list changing while I type.
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I don't care if there are results for the letter "a", if they are instant.
Don't become unresponsive after one key to search for results. If the search impacts responsiveness, you need to have a hold-off time before kicking it off so that a longer prefix/infix can be gathered which will reduce the search space and improve its relevance.