RE: Search fields

Thanks all for your input in this matter, it has definitely given us some food for thought.

I will start advising our teams to move away from “suggestions while you are typing” dropdowns.
I expect pushback from people who think these dropdowns are helpful, but I think they are more trouble than they are worth. Hopefully your experience that people don’t use them anyway may help open peoples minds to the other arguments like performance impact and wasted development effort on implementation and maintenance.

Until next time,
Joppe Kroon


From: Steve Green<mailto:steve.green@testpartners.co.uk>
Sent: Monday, September 23, 2019 12:07 PM
To: Joppe Kroon<mailto:J.Kroon@topdesk.com>
Subject: RE: Search fields

Indeed it does, which is interesting because I have not seen that design pattern used on any other UK government website, and we have tested quite a few. I agree with Alistair, that I cannot think of any situation where I would recommend this design pattern.

Steve

From: Joppe Kroon <J.Kroon@topdesk.com>
Sent: 23 September 2019 10:13
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: RE: Search fields

Actually the search field on the UK design system site (which is a gov.uk site) does exactly that…


From: Alastair Campbell<mailto:acampbell@nomensa.com>
Sent: Sunday, September 22, 2019 5:09 PM
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org<mailto:w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Subject: RE: Search fields

Steve Green wrote:
> I ask people why they didn’t use the dropdown results... They type and submit the form so fast that either the dropdown doesn’t have time to appear, or it appears but isn’t announced before they submit the form. I’m not sure there’s a way to fix this, but I am also not sure it even needs to be fixed.

Just to note that I agree with that conclusion for searches with drop-down/autocomplete that defaults to a standard search page if you submit what is typed in.

However, I’ve come across similar looking widgets that default to the first item if you just press enter, taking you to the item page rather than a listing page.  That can be confusing because you don’t know there are other results. The drop-down is far more important in that case.

A Gov.uk site probably wouldn’t even think about doing that, but I’ve come across that approach on some commercial sites.

Cheers,

-Alastair