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](/c/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.
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):
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):
But yeah I just wanted to throw out ideas, I'm not sure about them myself. The search inside a community is nice addition!
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.
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.