In a recent discussion it was mentioned that the search function in Lemmy is awkward to use and could be improved. As a result I already made two small changes:

  • Change community selector to use !community@example.com format (#3218)
  • Search field in community sidebar (#3217)

Are there any other UI or UX changes you can think of to improve searching in Lemmy? Im mainly looking for frontend changes, such as reorganizing the input positions, changing default values etc.

  • Lazycog@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    5·
    2 months ago

    I’m not a UI or UX expert, but I wonder if it would make the search page nicer if instead of the search target (form select) would be tabs instead of a dropdown since it is distinct selection from the other filters in the search?

    using bootstrap tabs (I didn’t put any effort into styling just added bootstrap tabs and removed the form select butto dropdown):

    Search but with tabs for form select instead of button dropdown

    Edit: now that I think about it, the tab might be kinda confusing unless also the other dropdowns are slightly altered to give more context in the current form selection tab, e.g. (text changes):

    In community... "Any", From creator ... "Any"

    But yeah I just wanted to throw out ideas, I’m not sure about them myself. The search inside a community is nice addition!

    • Nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      The tabs could make sense, but then they should be between the search bar and results, because each tab has the same buttons. You can make a pull request with what you have so far and then we can discuss it in detail.

      • Lazycog@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        2·
        2 months ago

        Ah good point!

        I’ll hopefully manage to set up lemmy-ui locally at home after work and make that pull request - I edited that in with webdev tools since didn’t want to lose that thought before I get home (sorry if this just pollutes the discussion).

        • Nutomic@lemmy.mlOPMEnglish
          2·
          2 months ago

          No worries. Make sure to follow the documentation on join-lemmy.org for development, and use the release/v0.19 branch for both lemmy and lemmy-ui as the main branch is currently broken due to 1.0 changes.

    • Die4Ever@retrolemmy.comEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      I think if you do this, then the tabs for communities, users, and URL would no longer have the drop down to choose community because it’s meaningless for them. They probably wouldn’t have the “Top All Time” filter either. There could probably be more differences for each tab, maybe this is the way to go.

      • Lazycog@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        3·
        2 months ago

        Yeah there’s a lot to consider here, good points. The language specific texts too to make it more search selection context based. This would need to be thought through to not make it more confusing.