Comment by matthewmacleod
6 months ago
Actually I think it's pretty similar to your example. The "intended semantics" of the search action in that sort of field are to search for the text you enter – not to search for the the side-effects of in-progress partial completion.
Yes, it's not an exact comparison (hence analogy) – but it's not anything worth getting into a fight about.
Yeah, I don't get how this thread is at the top.
You debounce a physical switch because it makes contact multiple times before settling in the contacted position, e.g. you might wait until it's settled before acting, or you act upon the first signal and ignore the ones that quickly follow.
And that closely resembles the goal and even implementation of UI debouncing.
It also makes sense in a search box because there you have the distinction between intermediate vs. settled state. Do you act on what might be intermediate states, or do you try to assume settled state?
Just because it might have a more varied or more abstract meaning in another industry doesn't mean it's a bad analogy, even though Javascript is involved, sheesh.
The user intent is usually to get to what they are looking for as quickly as possible. If you intentionally introduce delays by forcing them to enter the complete query or pause to receive intermediate results then you are slowing that down.
> The user intent is usually to get to what they are looking for as quickly as possible.
Yes, and returning 30,000 results matching the "a" they just typed is not going to do that. "Getting the desired result fastest" probably requires somewhere between 2 and 10 characters, context-dependent.