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Improving SetSeed's Search Functionality
Today from the SetSeed developer notes! I’ve been working on some tweaks to our advanced search system after a productive brainstorming session with co-founder Chris Parnell.
We jest that we don’t go through a day without making a breakthrough. Today’s breakthrough involves coming up with a new approach to advanced search that allows for a quick, intuitive search or a complex, rule-based search.
We currently have the basic functionality in place in several areas of the system, but the reality is it’s a bit hard to understand what you’re actually searching for. This is because many areas in the system have custom fields that can be used as part of a custom search. For example, searching for an item where a custom field is greater than something or does not equal something, etc. This can lead to the interface we use for presenting the search being confused with a toggle filter system rather than a ‘search by’ system.
The issue is compounded by the potential to search a field for an empty string - this, of course, can be useful but it brings all kinds of issues around a subset being returned when the user thought they were just clearing a search, for example.
So the direction we’re taking will resolve all these issues through the design of the system. We’ll allow for a fast single-phrase search first and foremost that will perform a ‘contains’ search on common values for items in the list. But if that’s not enough, the user can switch to an advanced search mode that allows the full rule-based approach.
It's a tricky little problem to solve from both a UX and technical perspective, but I’m getting stuck in.